How to design a book cover
Log Off’s cover reveal and the work leading up to it
Last week was the cover reveal of my novel Log Off, which will be released by Shabby Doll House on June 4th, 2024. If you haven’t seen it yet:
The cover illustration is by Jinhwa Jang and the cover design is by Tim Vienckowski. With the reveal, Shabby Doll House also launched a page for the book, where you’ll find a book description, blurbs, and more fun stuff, including a pre-order link.
The cover got a good response and I’m proud of it. It accomplishes what I believe to be the primary goals of a cover: be unique and eye-catching and visually hint at what the book is about—both its content and tone. Since one aspect of this Substack is insights into the indie publishing process, I want to share how this cover came together.
One of the things that excited me about publishing Log Off with Shabby Doll House was the amount of control I would have over my own cover. The authors of last year's books, Caroline Rayner and Sebastian Castillo, had worked with friends to create their covers (Emma Ensley for The Moan Wilds and Kit Schluter for Salmon).
I was excited, but also a little nervous. With great creative freedom comes great responsibility. Not just responsibility for the creative decisions, but also for making sure things got done on a timeline, as well as responsibility for my own happiness with how the cover turned out. There would be no corporate art department to blame if things went badly.
Luckily, I wasn’t in this alone, I had a great collaborator on board—Tim Vienckowski. Tim and I have a strong working relationship from doing the literary magazine The Bushwick Review together for many years and several issues. He is one of my best friends, he is an incredibly talented designer who has worked for major publications, and most importantly, I just enjoy working with him for hours. He and I have a Slack from our The Bushwick Review-days, where we would debate every page to the last detail, but we also chat endlessly about completely unrelated things, such as fiery opinions on recent movies and inspiring Jodie Foster gifs. Don’t question our creative process, lol.
Last fall, I casually discussed the possibility of Tim designing my book over a nice meal, but a month later I decided to make it official:
With my editor Lucy’s blessing, Tim was going to design Log Off’s cover and interior, including the typesetting. Another great reason to work with Tim? He is as obsessively perfectionist as I am, and I knew we’d hold each other to the highest standard when it came to making sure this book looked as great as possible.
To kick things off, I sent him the novel. He read it, liked it (lol thank god) and so, now that he knew the book’s story and characters and tone, what should the cover be? We discussed several general concepts, which Tim made mockups of, and while there was one predominately typographical treatment that Tim could have created himself, it was clear that we were going in a direction that would require us to hire an illustrator.
In addition to Slack, we also use Airtable, a spreadsheet-database hybrid that Tim introduced me to. When we first used this for The Bushwick Review, it took me a while to figure out how to navigate it, but now I’m kinda into it. It creates a good hub where everything can live. Airtable is where we store and keep track of everything related to the design of this book—from deadlines to moodboards to cover inspiration to where the actual files of the cover itself are stored in different file formats. Here are our tabs:
Airtable was where we also made a list of illustrators that could potentially illustrate the cover. The general concept that was forming was a central illustration of the protagonist, Ellora, on her early 2000s desktop computer, writing her LiveJournal, alongside some kind of secondary illustration, that would represent her offline life. We weren’t sure what those visuals would be yet or how they would be arranged.
I found Jinhwa Jang’s work on Instagram and Tim and I both loved it. She has a youthful, colorful style, two things that I wanted the book to have since many of the characters are teenagers, and Ellora has a vivid imagination. I also like that Jinhwa’s style feels unique and modern. Early on, Tim and I had discussed that while the time period of the book takes place in the early 2000s, and we did want the cover to have a few cheeky winks toward Y2K (as shown in the mood board), we didn’t want the primary aesthetic of the book to look like a retro relic from that era. For example, we weren’t going to make a cover that replicated a LiveJournal page. Jinhwa’s style felt contemporary, the perfect artist to do a 2024 treatment of the early internet. We’d seen work in her portfolio that aligned with our central illustration idea as well as a strong ability to weave smaller secondary illustrations within it. When we first reached out to Jinhwa, Tim cited those references in one of his first emails.
Tim handled most of the communications, since, due to his professional experience as an art director and designer, he knew way more than I did about usage, deliverable specs, competitive illustration rates, contracts, and can speak visual language better. (By the way, speaking of rates, even though he’s one of my besties, I paid Tim too. Money, of course, isn’t the only way to support artists, but if you have the funds, pay your friends for their work and pay them well.)
I also didn’t know much about the process of going from sketches to final illustration. Tim asked Jinhwa for three sketches of the illustration and sent our mood board of visual references. Here’s an excerpt from that email:
Jinhwa sent the three sketches, Tim and I picked our favorite, and then we asked for a full, detailed sketch of that option. That revised sketch looked amazing, so we told her to proceed to the full-color final version. As you can see, the main image of Ellora on her computer was precisely imagined from the start. The primary thing to work out in that sketches stage was what those secondary images were. We originally considered featuring other characters in the novel, but in what was already a busy cover, we decided to keep the focus on Ellora. She’s riding her bike in the suburbs, she’s at school, she’s holding a Discman.
On the final cover, Jinhwa’s treatment of the secondary illustrations is brilliant—she framed them to resemble browser windows and arranged them in a way that looks like they’re thought bubbles floating out of the computer screen. It communicates that these are the things Ellora is writing about on the Internet. Jinhwa also came up with the school idea.
Around this time, I met with Lucy and Oscar in Lisbon, and one of the many things we discussed was the progress on our covers. We had a nice moment where we brought up the covers on our phones, placed them side-by-side, and saw how well they complimented each other.
This photo gives you a little behind-the-scenes on how these covers evolved too, since these aren’t the final versions. For the Log Off cover, Jinhwa’s full-color illustration was finished, but Tim was still figuring out fonts and looks for the author name / title. We also needed to do a color conversion from RGB » CMYK. That’s another thing I learned. Printed colors are a different ball game than colors on a screen, and you may need to adjust the colors to ensure that the printed version looks like the digital file. I love the final fonts Tim selected, and the way he incorporated the text with Jinhwa’s illustration. He also continued this on his design for the spine and the back cover, which you’ll just have to wait and see when the book comes out!
Thank you Jinhwa, thank you Tim, for the best cover and being wonderful to work with. If you’re an author who will be designing your own cover, or working with designers and illustrators on it, I hope this article provides some ideas and insights. As always, I’m happy to answer more specific questions. Whether you’re an indie author, or publishing on a big 5, many aspects of this process are similar. Authors and designers are often sending each other mood boards, color preferences, and examples of other covers they like—all the same stuff Tim and I did.
We’re probably the only ones who send each other motivational Jodie Foster gifs though.
It's sooooo beautiful! I love the full insight into the process here too. Never seen airtable used for this!