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Cover by: @PegasusGirl14
Throughout the previous chapters in this book of tutorials, it has hopefully been established that your story's cover is vital to its success. You want every element (base image, textures, color blends, fonts) to work in a complementary nature and create something eye-catching for your audience.
In the last installment, we discussed base images and where to find one. From there, however, a title must be added. This is actually not as easy as it may seem. For a start, there is a plethora of various font varieties from which to choose. Picking a font style that makes your title legible, while also capturing the mood of your story, is important for its reach... not just on Wattpad, but all over the book-reading world.
The Writer's Digest #1 tip for creating an effective book cover is a great one to live by: "The title should be big and easy to read."
But how big? And what makes a title easy to read? Size and style of font, of course!
Let's look at two examples (of simple book covers). These were made specifically for this exercise.
Example 1:
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Example 2:
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While book cover designs will often boil down to personal taste (and genre styles), there is still much value in discussing the impact of elements. While Example 1 may be going for a trendy, elegant or indie type of feel with the handwriting-like, cursive font, the cover space could be much better utilized. At full size, the author (and therefore her readers) could see and read the font, but what would happen if the overall book cover size was greatly reduced?
Let's see how the two books might look in passing, to a reader on Wattpad digging around for a new story to read.
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When scaled down to thumbnail size (how we must envision our covers, since that is how many potential readers will see them at first) Example 2 rises above. In terms of legibility, element incorporation and overall use of blank space, the second example wins (even though it uses a simpler style of font).
Remember that not everyone will see the image of your book cover on a large screen. In fact, most probably won't. We live in a world of grand technology, which is fantastic, but this also means that a significant chunk of your readership will be using mobile phones to read. Keep this in mind for font sizing, and try to design the title on your book cover accordingly.
It's good to pay attention to stories with covers that are doing well in your genre. Notice the covers that catch your eye, personally, and you might find an area of cover design where you could improve. First and foremost, though, make sure we can easily read the title of the story that you've worked so hard to create!
(While this isn't a hard and fast rule, I personally like to have my titles take up at least 20-25% of the available space on my book covers. This allows people to clearly read the title, even when the cover is scaled way down to an icon.)
