What To Do Before Blaming the Algorithm
There’s a moment in every self-published author’s journey when the manuscript is finished, the last typo has been hunted down and forgiven, and a new terror emerges.
The cover.
Creating Self-Published Covers That Sell
Do people judge a book by the cover? Uh, you betcha.
And so, when it comes to cover design many otherwise rational writers, previously capable of complex, higher-level thought, open a design tool and decide that what their book really needs is a moody sunset, an obscure font, and symbolism so subtle it could qualify for witness protection.
Or worse, they resort to something cobbled together using PowerPoint. And arrive at something similar to what that gorilla in the Atlanta Zoo used to paint.
Covers matter more than writers care to admit. Not because readers are shallow, but because choice now happens at speed. A cover is a brief moment of triage. Most self-published books don’t lose readers in the writing. Because most never make it past the first glance.
Here’s how to stop that from happening.
1. Accept that the cover is not for you
This is the first grief stage, and it’s unavoidable.
Your cover isn’t an expression of your inner journey. It is not a mood board for the themes. It’s not a visual poem. It’s an advertisement that must be understood in under one second by someone who has never met you and who feels no particular obligation to start now.
Covers fail when authors design for themselves instead of readers. You like it? Doesn’t matter. At all. Your preference is meaningless here. The only relevant question is whether the right reader instantly recognizes the book as something meant for them. If the answer requires explanation, the cover has already failed.
2. Genre recognition beats originality every time
Originality is expensive. Recognition is profitable.
Readers use covers as shortcuts. They’re not looking for surprises at this stage. They’re asking, “Is this the kind of book I already know I like?” A romance novel that looks like a literary memoir is not being bold. It’s being confusing.
Many self-published covers fail because they either try too hard to stand out and end up standing nowhere. Or they look like they were done by a five-year-old niece with a Commodore 64. The goal isn’t to be wildly different. It’s to be legible. You need to be noticed. But for the right reasons. Leave the flat vector art with overly safe, very boring, centred sans serif type for academic papers. “Quantum Effects in Quasi-Zero-Dimensional Mesoscopic Electron Systems.” That kind of thing.
3. Typography is doing more work than you think
Speaking of fonts, they have opinions.
They signal era, tone, budget, and competence instantly. A poorly chosen font doesn’t just look bad. It undermines trust. Readers may not know why a cover feels off, but typography is usually the culprit, lurking quietly like bad posture.
Common mistakes include using novelty fonts, mixing too many typefaces, or choosing something elegant and unreadable because it felt “literary.” If readers can’t read the title at thumbnail size, they won’t heroically zoom in out of curiosity. They’ll scroll.
4. Subtlety dies at thumbnail size
Online retailers do not reward nuance.
Your carefully balanced composition, your gentle color gradients, your symbolic negative space all collapse into mush when reduced to a postage stamp. Covers must be able to work small first and large second. If the image, title, and author name don’t read instantly on a phone, the design is unfinished.
Many covers fail because they were designed at full size and never interrogated at the scale where most buying decisions actually happen. Zoom out early. Zoom out often. Be ruthless.
5. Symbolism is not clarity
Writers love symbols. Readers love knowing what they’re getting.
A cover featuring an empty chair, a cracked mirror, or an ambiguous bird may feel meaningful, but meaning isn’t the same as communication. You’re better to exorcise all your clever symbolism in an art class. Symbolic covers work when there’s already trust. For unknown authors, it mostly generates scratched heads.
If a potential reader can’t tell whether the book is a thriller, a memoir, or an experimental meditation on bird calls unique to the Marshall Islands, they’ll move on. Not because they’re unsophisticated, but because ambiguity is a tax they don’t need to pay.
6. Professional doesn’t mean expensive, but it does mean intentional
A professional cover doesn’t have to cost a fortune. It does have to look like someone knew what they were doing.
Many self-published covers fail because they look accidental. Stock images fighting each other. Lighting that doesn’t match. Text floating aimlessly as if hoping to be noticed.
Readers are remarkably forgiving of limited budgets. What they’re not is forgiving of carelessness. A simple, restrained cover with clear hierarchy will always outperform an elaborate mess trying to do too much at once.
7. Trends are useful servants and terrible masters
Cover trends exist for a reason. They work.
Ignoring them entirely is a choice, but not a neutral one. It’s choosing to swim upstream while insisting the current shouldn’t exist. At the same time, blindly copying the latest bestseller creates covers that feel instantly dated.
The sweet spot is understanding why a trend works and borrowing its grammar without plagiarizing its sentences. Readers don’t want déjà vu. They want familiarity with a pulse.
8. Your name is not the star yet
This one hurts.
Unknown authors often give their name as much visual weight as the title, sometimes more. This is aspirational and understandable and almost always a mistake.
Until readers know who you are, your name is metadata. The title and visual concept do the selling. A cover that treats the author as the main attraction assumes an audience that doesn’t exist yet. That assumption is visible, and readers notice.
9. DIY tools are not the enemy. Overconfidence is
Design software has become astonishingly powerful. This is both a gift and a trap.
The problem isn’t that authors design their own covers. It’s that they stop too soon. They confuse functionality with fluency. Knowing how to use a tool isn’t the same as knowing how to design.
If you’re doing it yourself, study successful covers in your genre obsessively. Not to copy, but to internalize patterns. Good design looks inevitable. Amateur design looks like a series of decisions made five minutes apart.
10. The cover is a promise, not a résumé
A great cover doesn’t try to communicate everything about the book. It makes a single, clear promise and keeps it.
Many self-published covers fail because they’re overloaded. Themes, tones, subplots, symbolism, vibes. The result is visual noise. Readers don’t need the whole story on the front. They need a reason to open the door.
The best covers understand restraint. They trust that once the right reader is inside, the book will do the rest.
A self-published cover doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be honest, legible, and competent enough to earn ten seconds of attention. Most covers don’t fail because they’re ugly. They fail because they’re unclear, insecure, or trying to solve the wrong problem.
A book’s cover doesn’t need to be loved. It needs to be understood. Preferably immediately. Preferably by the right person. Preferably before they scroll past and forget you ever existed.
No pressure.