How to Design a Poetry Book: Cover Design

Book design is tricky, especially when you’re dealing with a genre that is often quite complex and abstract. What type of design works for that? The good news is that readers of poetry expect chapbooks and other poetry collections to have somewhat abstract designs that may or may not be immediately understandable.

Still, there are good designs and not-good designs, designs that will attract readers and designs that won’t. In this post, we’ll delve into the good, bad, and ugly about cover design and define some important design no-nos to avoid, especially if you’re self-publishing.

Poetry Book Front Cover Design

Your front cover design needs to tick the following boxes to be effective:

• Representative of the content

• Representative of the genre (meaning it’s in line with the types of cover designs of other poetry books–especially successful ones–with similar content)

• Readable, meaning the fonts used are readable (overly fancy fonts that are hard to read are useless–don’t use them!), the title stands out, the subtitle and/or reading line is visible and readable, and your name (so important!) stands out. Plus, at the very least, the title and your name should be readable in the online thumbnail.

• Professional-looking graphics and layout, meaning that even if you design the cover yourself, it should look like a professional did it. So if you don’t know what you’re doing, please don’t do it! There are perfectly affordable professional design services out there. In my circle, we like to recommend 100 Covers because they do tons of research into effective designs, they’re professional, and they’re affordable.

Examples of Problematic Cover Designs

I don’t mean to pick on anyone, and these covers don’t necessarily represent the quality of the poetry inside the book. So no disrespect intended to the authors, but still…

This cover is clearly not a professional design. The title design, while readable, is a bit sloppy (bad font choice), and why is the P formatted completely differently from the rest of the word (and why so huge)? Plus, the photo is nice, but we’re mostly looking at a fence. If the focus is the lighthouse (I think it’s a lighthouse!), why is it so small? Unless Ms. Skinner has a large network and/or amazing marketing strategies, it’s unlikely this cover is going to help her attract serious poetry readers.

Have you noticed how many poetry collections are called Poetry in Motion? That’s a topic for another day, but what bothers me about this cover is that there’s absolutely no motion to this design. The title and the design are totally at odds.

This design may be intriguing, but it’s way too dark, making the features of the image and the supporting graphics in red very hard to see. Plus, the title is much too small and doesn’t stand out enough. My eye goes straight to the center line in the road, which is not the optimal focal point. It wouldn't take much to make this cover more effective. All the elements are there. They just aren't being used well.

The problem with this cover is mostly in the title design. Script fonts can be problematic right out of the gate, especially if you’re making up a word (“youniverse,” in case you can’t read it), putting the text in white, and then putting part of your white made-up word on top of a light-colored moon. Also, I don’t know about you, but I can’t read the author’s name at all.

This is a fun design and fairly successful book, but the smaller words in the title and subtitle are very hard to see, let alone read, in the thumbnail. A large image is fine, but once it gets smaller, those tiny words all but disappear. Relegating the text to the extremely limited space of the hand and arm causes issues, especially given how narrow the graphic is and how much text they had to fit on there.

This book is an NYT bestseller, proving that a large network, a publisher, and excellent marketing can make up for what is arguably an ineffective design. Graphically, it’s interesting, but the title and author name are almost impossible to read in the thumbnail. If you don’t have the reach of a large following, a kick-ass publisher, and/or a killer marketing strategy (with high quality content to back it all up), this is not a good design for you.

Here are a few other covers with major readability issues, especially as thumbnails:

A couple other issues to note: Poetry of Life says “Author Susan Berry,” which makes it look amateurish (obviously she's the author--that's how cover designs work) on top of the poor text formatting. Poems for the Lost (the blue one) has intriguing graphics, but the designer hasn’t made enough space for the words, hence why they’re so hard to read in the thumbnail. And obviously just running black text over graphics isn’t always sufficient for readability.

Tips for Creating Effective Cover Designs

Obviously you want your design to be unique and interesting, but readers expect what they expect. You’re in a better position than many authors because, as I mentioned, poetry readers are used to and even expect abstract, esoteric, and unusual designs. This is good and bad for you—good because it opens up the possibilities and bad because it gives you a LOT of rope to hang yourself with.

Research Effective Designs

Spend some time online researching cover designs, especially those used by bestsellers and collections that are similar to yours (if you write dark poetry, look at books of dark poetry; if you write poetry for women, look at books of poetry for women, etc.). The point here isn’t to copy anyone but to get an idea of the types of designs that seem to resonate best with readers. If most of the successful books in your poetry genre have very simple, minimalist designs, like Scatological Alchemist (the black one) above, then that gives you a starting point. Maybe you don’t want your cover to be that simple, but you probably don’t want to do a super busy design either.

Consider What Best Represents Your Content

I’m guessing that Anne Skinner’s poetry is Christian themed, based on the Bible verse on her front cover above, but does her cover design fit that theme? Without the Bible verse, there would be no indication at all of the content. Similarly, we can reasonably assume that Poetry Tour is filled with dark, mysterious, life’s-journey themed poetry, but what if it isn’t? With a cover design like that, it should be.

If you haven’t considered it before, ask yourself what the theme of your book is. If you don’t have one and your collection is filled with numerous different themes, then use that to influence your cover design. Just make sure that you can explain how your design aligns with the content of your book.

Select Fonts and Text Formatting Carefully

As we’ve seen, font selection and formatting (size, color, etc.) are very important in helping to attract potential readers. If your cover isn’t readable in its online thumbnail, many readers will scroll right by. And if your cover isn’t even readable at full size, you really have a problem.

Design is important, but readability is critical (again, unless you have a massively effective marketing strategy backing you up). It’s OK to use a script font as long as the letters are easy to discern. It’s OK to use different colors, as long as they stand out against the background. It’s OK to use small type, as long as it isn’t miniscule in the thumbnail.

One thing to be especially careful about is using all caps with a stylized font. First, many fonts that are perfectly easy to read in sentence case are a nightmare to read in all caps (see example). Also, all caps is just harder to read in general. We recognize letters by their unique shapes, which are much more obvious in lowercase letters than in uppercase letters. Consider o vs. q and O vs. Q or e vs. f and E vs. F. “Baroque” is much easier to read than “BAROQUE.” Just ask science. So if you want to use all caps, make sure you use a good font for it.

This font isn’t bad in sentence case,

but in all caps? Yikes!

Know What You’re Doing or Hire It Out

Do you know what resolution is? Do you know what good resolution is? How about bleed? Do you know how close your text can be to the edges? Do you understand the difference between RGB and CMYK and when to use each?

These are the types of details you need to know in order to create your own design. Tools like Canva can make up for a lot, but they can’t do everything. And even if they could, you should still know what they’re doing and why, just in case your design tool does something wrong.

So if you’re going to create your own cover design, spend some time learning about the different quality, layout, and spec requirements for your design and your design files. Create your cover from a place of knowledge, and you’ll have less confusion, less stress, and more fun.

And if you can’t be bothered to learn all those details or they just don’t make sense to you, then find a great designer with lots of book cover design experience. Don’t hire someone who’s never designed a book cover.

Back Cover Design

Your front cover is by far the more important cover when it comes to design and marketing, but your back cover plays a part as well since that’s where all the info is stored. Here are a few quick tips for back cover design:

• Keep it simple and leave plenty of space for your cover copy.

• Use a solid color or very slight texture behind your cover copy for max readability.

• Make sure the cover copy contrasts well with the background, again, for best readability.

• Make sure your cover copy fits the space without being too small. For a 6x9 book, you should be able to fit about 300 words, fewer for a smaller book. Don’t try to cram much more than that.

• Be sure to leave space for the barcode (yes, you need one!).

Conclusion

Cover design matters more than you might think. It’s actually one of your most important marketing tools. So if you’re self-publishing, make sure you have a clear understanding of what makes a good cover design and then make sure you do what it takes to get one. If you aren’t up to the challenge, then hire a designer with the appropriate experience. It doesn’t have to cost a lot, and if you hire well, it’s money well spent. If you think you can handle it, though, just be sure to educate yourself thoroughly so that you can create an amazing design and do it correctly.

For more about cover design, check out these resources from Amazon KDP and IngramSpark.

And since I know you’re wondering, here are a handful of book covers that work well. Can you tell why I chose them?