Book cover design-how to make a good book cover

What Makes a Good Book Cover

IF YOU FIND yourself in a bookstore, Peter Mendelsund can be hard to avoid. His dust jackets wrap big-name contemporary releases like The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

Of course, catching a potential book-buyer’s eye is only part of Mendelsund’s job. A truly great jacket is one that captures the book inside it in some fundamental and perhaps unforeseen way. As Mendelsund describes it, his job is “finding that unique textual detail that…can support the metaphoric weight of the entire book.” That, of course, requires actually reading a manuscript closely enough to A) determine the metaphoric weight of the book and B) find a handful of relevant details within it. In other words, making a great book cover isn’t just about making. It starts with understanding.

This comes up whenever authors who’ve worked with Mendelsund talk about his work. Each ends up explaining in their own way that his powers as a designer come in large part from his powers as a reader. As Ben Marcus recalls about working with Mendelsund on The Flame Alphabet, “I was struck by how carefully he’d read the book. He fucking seemed to have studied it.”

It takes a certain type of reading to make a great cover. One of the challenges of the job, Mendelsund says, is resisting the urge to simply pluck an image from the text itself. “It’s very tempting to read a book only for visual cues when you’re a jacket designer,” he says. “‘Oh, her hair is blond, and it’s a cold climate, and they live on a hill.’ That’s just really treacherous. Because if you read that way, you’ll miss the point of the book. And almost never are those kind of details the point of the book.”

-eyecatching

- “finding that unique textual detail that…can support the metaphoric weight of the entire book.” 

- resisting the urge to simply pluck an image from the text itself. 

-focus on the main story of the book 

-ensure that details gathered are not features of the protagonists etc.

The Many Styles of Peter Mendelsund

On one level, dust jackets are billboards. They’re meant to lure in potential readers. For a certain contingent of the publishing industry, this means playing it safe. “The path of least resistance when you’re designing a jacket is to give that particular demographic exactly what they want,” Mendelsund explains. “It’s a mystery novel, so you just splatter it in blood, and put the shadowy trench coat guy on it, and use the right typography.” Familiarity, the thinking goes, will always sell something.

Mendelsund does not subscribe to this view. He’s said that he prefers an ugly cover to a cliche one, and looking at his body of work, the thing that holds it together is that nearly all of his jackets have something weird going on, in one way or another.

His covers for Dostoyevsky’s novels are bold, for example, are sparse geometric abstractions. At the time of their release over a decade ago, they bucked the industry trend of covering backlist titles in realist paintings and photography. Today, as Mendelsund points out in Cover, abstraction is very much in vogue for these sorts of titles. His covers for the works of Michel Foucault are similarly unexpected. Each displays a bright photograph of a single object—a spring, a broken pair of eyeglasses, a megaphone—relating in some way to each text’s central theme.

-stay away from generic iconography

-ugly books are better than generic books

-diversity is key