I used to create covers that weren't very good, either.
Learning book cover design was the hardest part of self-publishing for me. I read a lot about it, and analyzed thousands of covers to learn about underlying patterns and how to replicate them. Eventually, after years of study, I began to successfully repeat those patterns. That led me to sell over 25,000 books and eventually creating a system of layout templates for the front, back, and spine designs to help other people painlessly repeat those patterns, too.
So here’s the secret I discovered — it's about your text layout — Of course, it helps if you use proper contrast and a background that isn’t poorly photoshopped. But at the end of the day, you can make a book cover “look like a real book” if you focus on book cover typography layouts before anything else. This includes the back cover and spine too.
Feel free to reach out for any other questions. No question is too simple or too complicated when it comes to book cover design!
-Hannah
The Look of Your Book
