Here are some good examples of covers for horror and mystery novels from three or four small publishers specializing in the genre…
The first are from Journalstone…
These are from Lethe Press…
And from Raw Dog…
From Undertow…
Two from Word Horde…
And one from Omnium…
One for Lois Bujold McMaster and another for G.W. Morgan…
I’d like to encourage people to think outside the box when it comes to the typography on their covers. There is an inclination to always have the title at the top and the author’s name at the bottom–or vice versa—or to always have the type centered. But playing outside these conventions can add a great deal to the overall effectiveness of the cover. One trick is to not think of the cover as art with type added. You need to think of the cover as gestalt: every thing on it adds to the total effect. (One caution: being creative with your typography does not mean going nuts with special effects such as embossing, sparkles, textures, etc. or in seeing how many curly serifs you can have intertwined with one another: readability is still the main focus. If a potential reader can’t make out the title at a glance—and at any size the cover might appear—the design has failed.)
One thing that I strongly recommend doing is allowing for the title from the very inception of the cover. Here, for instance, I roughed in the placement of the type when first sketching out the cover concept. This ensures that you will always have room for the title–that it is always considered a part of the entire composition and not something that is added in later.
Take a look at the following collection of rectangles. Does any one of them stand out? Is there one your eye went to directly?
They are all blue, of course, but one is not the same blue as the rest. And I suspect that you spotted that right off.
Far too many authors when commissioning a book cover—and far too many would-be designers for that matter—worry far too much about being “genre specific” or “on-market,” that is, making sure that their book cover looks as much as possible like other books in the same genre. The problem with this thinking is, of course, the danger of the book looking so much like every other book on the same page or shelf that there is no special reason for the potential reader to chose that book over any other one. There is nothing setting one book apart from another than the title. There is a not unreasonable fear, of course, of being too “different.” No one wants to be the one to introduce a new direction in cover design. Of course, every current style once had to have had a first cover. And the reason that style became the norm is because of that first cover’s success. Think of all the Star Wars clones that followed the original movie. Cozy mysteries, for instance, and romantic comedies didn’t always look the way they do now. But it’s not really necessary to be the vanguard of an entirely new style. All that’s necessary is to, first, inform the potential reader what sort of book you have then give them a reason to pick up your book instead of the one next to it. You can follow a trend without being so slavish that your cover is little more than a rubber stamp. It just needs to look that little bit more different, that little bit more intriguing than the cover next to it.
Think of all of the products sitting on the same shelf in a supermarket. That’s all that a book cover is: packaging. It’s really no different than the label on a can of peas. When you scan across all the different brands of peas in the grocery, there is a necessary sameness: the labels are all trying to sell a similar product. But at the same time they are also trying very hard to make you pick up one particular brand. There’s a good reason that all of the labels don’t just have the word “peas” on them and nothing else regardless of the brand.
All of the rectangles are blue—but one is a different blue. That’s the one your eye went to and that is exactly the point. It didn’t have to be red or green or plaid, just a little different.
My own novel, Velda, is going to be reprinted this year after being out of print for a couple of decades. I will be expecting to create a new cover for it eventually and, well, I started having too much fun coming up with ideas. Here are more than sixty of them!
Cover designer Ivan Zann includes some good advice for both designers and clients on the FAQ page of his BookCoversArt website:
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A good cover should hint, not say. It should be perfectly “on genre”, so that potential readers will be able to say what the book is about at a glance. When we browse a list of books we don’t really care what the main character is wearing or what the room looks like if the whole artwork meets our expectations for the genre. Remember the cover is the most important marketing tool for a book and its main purpose is selling the book, not telling the story. Shall it lie a little bit? Yes, if it serves the purpose, all advertising does, it’s just how advertising works. It obviously has to be consistent, so if in your fantasy book the only race is humans you shouldn’t have an elf on the cover. I can make some other examples but you got the point. Same for the situations: there’s no need to depict “that exact scene from the third chapter,” if that scene is overly complex and would make the cover cluttered. Simplicity is key: remember most of your potential readers will see your cover in thumbnail size so it has to be appealing and making they want to click on it to take a closer look. If you get that click you are closer to a sell, but if they don’t understand what they are seeing they will skip to the next one. Readers of K9 thrillers look for a dog. Epic Fantasy readers look for a warrior in armour. Military sci-fi enthusiasts love spaceships. Readers of action thrillers will stop by if they see a tough guy with a gun. What is a post-apocalyptic cover without a yellow sky? I could go on and I may have been a bit simplistic but, again, you got the point. I’m not saying all covers should look the same, I’m saying the OVERALL LOOK of your cover is by far more important than the scene itself.
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Here are few examples of Ivan’s work. Many more can be found on his site.
Weird House Press is a small publisher specializing in horror. I think their covers have received some of the best illustrations in the genre. Below are a few examples—
Here are three of the steps cover illustrator Tom Brown took in creating the cover for Tazmand, by Jack Murphy.
Some very nice covers. However, I would have wished the title of Hermione were a little larger, that the editor’s name on It Came From the Closet didn’t look like it had been tacked on as an afterthought (while the rainbow manages to look grim), the art in The Abuse of Narrative looks a little murky, lacking a little contrast and saturation, not 100% sure about Singularities while the designer of Heretic was either trying too hard to be clever and missed the mark or simply didn’t bother to try at all, either way it only vaguely suggests a possible genre but nothing more than that.