Before readers flip through the pages of a book, they fix their eyes on its cover. A great book cover builds up the curiosity of the readers, making them want to pick up the book and purchase it. If you are an aspiring author working on your first book, you should make the best effort to market your books. Don’t worry! We’ll help you with that! Displayed on this page are 100% customizable, printable, easily editable, high-quality, and beautifully designed Book Cover Templates you can download for free. These files are available in all versions of Adobe Photoshop and several other file formats for your convenience. Plus, we don’t only offer book covers for a novel; we also have photo book covers and eBook cover page templates. Download now!
How to Create a Winning Book Cover in Photoshop
Fiction or non-fiction, romance or tragedy, horror or fantasy—we’ve seen books, we’ve read them. Books give us a unique kind of magic and feed us a whole new kind of knowledge. Some books are arranged on a shelf; some are just stacked on a table. Yet somehow, we recognize each one of them. We can tell which is which. How? Through their covers.
A business book’s cover helps us distinguish books from one another. On the part of the publishers, book covers help them market the book by creating interest among potential customers. Create a winning book cover design by following the steps provided below.
1. Know the Content
Both traditional and modern book covers help communicate to the reader what the book is all about without unfolding every single detail. It sparks curiosity enough to make the readers flip the pages and find out what’s going on. For this reason, you must anchor every element in your book cover design to its content. Therefore, before you let your creative minds do the hustle, you should know what the book is all about. If it is a novel, be sure to identify its genre, be it classic, romance, fantasy, modern fiction, etc. Moreover, it is also important to identify the book’s main audience or the target market. Doing so helps you come up with a book cover design that will appeal to their taste.
2. Launch Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program widely used by professionals and regular consumers. It features multiple tools enabling users to edit photos and manipulate images. For a winning book cover design, you should make use of this editing software. After launching the program, create a new file and set the size of the document. You should note that the dimensions of the book cover will depend on the actual size of the book.
3. Remember the Cover’s Key Components
Let’s say that you’re currently facing a blank canvas on your computer screen. Now, you have to think about what design style you would like to achieve. Creative book cover designs range from ones that are hand-drawn to those that are simple minimalist covers. Make sure that the book’s cover design will best suit the book’s message. Most importantly, remember that a book cover has three mandatory components, namely back cover, front cover, and spine. See to it that you pay equal attention to these parts when designing.
4. Use Photography
Although it is not necessary to include photos and other graphic design elements on the book’s cover, it helps create anticipation, mood, and expectations among the readers. In choosing photos for your design, be sure that it supports the content or central theme of the book. You have three options for the background: a photograph of where the narrative takes place, an art, or just a plain color.
5. Create Visual Hierarchy
Identify the most important information in your book cover and emphasize it. For growing authors, it is suggested that you highlight the book’s title given that you don’t have a fanbase yet. On the other hand, if your name is already known to many, direct the reader’s attention to it. For a visually aesthetic book cover design, make use of a visual art form called typography. Break through conventional typefaces and make use of fonts, which helps set the mood of the readers and is directly related to the book’s content at the same time. However, limit your font choices to two and avoid using fonts with exaggerated features. See our printable book cover templates for design ideas.