Navigating the Premade Book Covers Minefield

Book covers are about Marketing with a capital M. That means, it doesn’t matter if those premade book covers are the most gorgeous things you’ve ever seen. If they don’t fit your stories, they’re wrong for your books.

Now that may seem like common sense, but there is a surprising amount of nuance between subgenres that can be invisible to an author who isn’t as familiar with the market. For example, maybe the premade you’ve found has the hair color and the wings and the magic exactly the way you imagined your angel character. That means it matches, right?

Well, not necessarily.

If you’re writing a YA high fantasy story about an angel mage which has little to no romantic subplot and the premade book cover is designed to meet adult angel fantasy romance conventions, that’s the wrong cover for you. The readers most likely to pick it up will not only be looking for a major romantic plot, but likely a bit of sexual heat as well.

Which means that beautiful cover that could have done an amazing job for an adult fantasy angel romance has now set your book up to have a lot of disappointed readers, many of whom may unfortunately go on to say as much in your book reviews.

Ok, fine, so I should pay attention to how steamy the cover is. Easy. Can we get back to ogling the pretty covers now?

Not quite. 😉 Read on to see what else you should check before grabbing that premade cover, and what issues you can safely ignore.

Think twice before purchasing premade book covers if:

  1. The subgenre is wrong for your book.

I listed this first because if the premade’s subgenre is wrong for your book, nothing else matters. Don’t buy the premade. If you’re not sure how to tell if it’s the right subgenre for your book, study other books with similar stories to yours and start making lists of what their covers have in common.

What kind of title treatments are they using? What kinds of color schemes? What are some common main elements on the cover? How much of the cover do characters take up? The list goes on and on, but if you study these “lookalike” books, you will learn to spot the design trends that make up your subgenre. Until you can do that, you are much more likely to buy a premade that doesn’t fit your book.

For example, each of these covers signals angel, but none of them target the same subgenre.

Halo is targeting young adult (YA) fantasy readers. Archangel’s Legion is targeting urban fantasy (UF). A Deadly Sin is targeting Paranormal Romance (PNR). Angelfall is targeting Post-Apocalyptic (PA) Fantasy and How I Minister with Angels is targeting Religious/Spiritual.

You can see something similar with the fantasy and sci-fi premades I’ve created over the years. While each of these covers has dragons on it, each is targeted at a different audience. The Isle of Dragons has a younger audience than Dragon Found or Dragon War. And while both Dragon Found and Dragon found can be described as targeting epic fantasy, they each have different audiences in mind, with Dragon War showing a more traditional male-centered gritty epic fantasy, and Dragon found suggesting more female-centered YA epic fantasy.

dragon fantasy premade book covers
dragon premade book covers

So trust me. Just having the right symbol or having a character look “right” isn’t enough. If the designer’s done a good job, their premade book covers will be designed to target a specific subgenre and therefore a specific reader audience, and you need to make sure whichever cover you’re ogling is targeting the right reader audience for your book.

Now I don’t want to pretend that none of these subgenres have anything in common or may not seem somewhat similar at times. Urban Fantasy and Paranormal Romance both take place in our world and involve supernatural elements, for instance.

Not all UF readers like PNR and not all PNR readers like UF though. Market your UF as a PNR and you may get reader complaints about the romance not taking up a large enough role in the story. Market your PNR as UF and you may find people leaving annoyed reviews at the sheer amount of romance in the story.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Choose a premade cover that signals religion as your genre when you’re actually trying to sell YA fantasy, and the readers who love your book may never even see the cover.

So while I won’t pretend that there isn’t an element of arbitrariness to subgenre categories or that authors don’t mix and match and pull from several subgenres all the time, you still need to decide which subgenre is the main subgenre you want to market to, especially if you’re going the premade route. Designers typically create premades to match popular well-defined subgenres since these are the covers most likely to sell. While you might be able to get a cover targeting one main subgenre with a hint towards another as a custom, you won’t find something that specific that also matches your story with a premade.

Know the subgenre you want to target. Be able to recognize it. And don’t buy a premade that doesn’t match it.

  1. The setting is wrong for your book.

High fantasy is not the same as urban fantasy, even if the character matches all the right details or your book has a short period of time in the real world before the characters go zipping off to their fantasy world. If the clothing or the background suggests a modern day world and your book takes place predominantly in the past or on an alternate world, the premade is a no-go.

Perhaps even more important are the cases where the setting isn’t necessarily wrong… It’s just somewhat… vague or maybe even misleading. If your book is historical fantasy or takes place in a future high-tech society, there may still be places that are low-tech or show beautiful majestic nature in those worlds.

But the cover isn’t meant to technically be true. It’s meant to showcase the premise and the promise of your book. If the reader sees a beautiful natural landscape complete with a waterfall without a hint of high-tech or a specific historical time period, they’re going to make the assumption that this is what the book is about.

Why?

Because book covers showcase the most fundamental aspects of a book’s premise, and you don’t hide or leave out such an important aspect of the book as its main setting. If you do, you’re likely to not find the readers who would love your book.

Note: I know this can make things tricky for some books, especially if you’re writing tropes that don’t go together as often. Angels in your post-apocalyptic world? I want to read it. But you’re unlikely to find that as a premade because angels are less common in that setting. (Even the Angelfall example above doesn’t scream PA in current PA cover trend terms since it’s been out a while.) So most of the angel premades you see aren’t going to work, and you may not have a choice but to purchase a custom cover in those cases.

  1. The tone or mood of the cover is wrong for your book.

If your book is all about the wonder, don’t go for something that has a dark edginess to it. It’ll just tell all those readers looking for wonder, that your book isn’t right for them and bring all the readers looking for dark romance or dark creepiness to your book’s door.

Both of these are YA fantasy with angels, but even at the barest of glances, you feel like you’re getting a very different story with each.

4. The amount of romance or heat level is wrong for your book.

Is romance or sexuality not a big part of your books? Don’t purchase premades with scantily clad characters on it (male or female). It usually tells a reader to expect some heat. I’d also recommend being very careful with purchasing a cover that has just 2 characters on it in a pose that might suggest a relationship since this is another prominent way to showcase romance as an important element of a story.

You can see an example of this with a premade and a custom cover I created. At a glance, you can already tell that Bound by the Alien Water Lord has a notable heat level where Plant Bound does not.

5. A fundamentally important aspect of the character is wrong for your book.

This is true regardless of whether that aspect refers to the species of character, the type of magic being used, or even the character’s portrayal as a warrior when they’re a skittish academic. This is something of a no-brainer, but I see it happen quite frequently nonetheless. Don’t put a little girl on your cover if your story is focused on a middle-age guy who barely interacts with children (even if there’s this one super important moment in the book with a little girl). Don’t hint at a prominent disability if your character isn’t disabled. Don’t suggest your character’s doing stunning lightning magic if he’s as magicless as a muggle.

Note: I’m not referring to details that are often superficial like hair color or eye color. Just the important details that might suggest to the reader that they’re going to be reading about someone vastly different than who they will actually be reading about.

You can safely purchase the premade even if:

  1. The character doesn’t match perfectly in all the superficial details.

Maybe the character has a watch on in the premade, but your character doesn’t ever wear one. Maybe she’s got a pencil in her pocket when that never occurs in the book. Or perhaps she’s got her long hair down in the premade, while your character usually wears it up or has short hair.

Those details don’t really play a role in how well the cover will market your book, and you’re safe to ignore them and buy those beautiful premade book covers as long as they fit in all the other ways I just mentioned.

Even if the hair or the eye color don’t match.

I know, I know. This one is always controversial with authors when I talk to them because the hair and eye color do matter to the author. After all, this is who you’ve been imagining through the long hours you spent writing it. And as a writer myself, I totally get it.

But as a designer, unless hair color or eye color is a major plot point, it makes basically no difference as to whether the cover attracts new readers to your book. They pick up a book based on whether the premise and subgenre of the book intrigues them, not the hair color. So if you’re on a super tight cover budget and a premade works in every other way, this can be a way to get a great professional cover at a discount. Besides, you can often change eye color for free in a premade or get a new cover down the line after this cover gets enough readers to find your book.

And yes, I know sometimes you can also change hair color for free, but I always recommend authors think very carefully before doing this. Most authors don’t realize just how big of a role the color palate of a book cover plays in the overall mood of the cover. It’s easy to assume that changing hair from black to red won’t affect anything, but it can really change the feel of the cover in some cases. And if that weren’t a big enough issue, changing from a dark color to a light color (or vice versa) can make something that looks stunning and clear at thumbnail size (the way most readers see your cover), suddenly difficult to separate from the background, such as when you change black hair to white with the woman’s head being positioned in front of a big white moon.

  1. An unimportant detail in the background is wrong for your book.

Lots of premades have random minor details in the background (e.g. crows on tombstones in a cemetery, cats on fences). If the detail is minor and not the focus of the cover and the detail doesn’t suggest the wrong subgenre, you’re probably safe to ignore it. Readers aren’t likely to assume that the main character has an important crow sidekick just because there happens to be a crow flying in the cemetery any more than they’re likely to assume those random crates in the alley are pivotally important to the book.

Readers are good at telling the difference between random details that are there to set the mood or the scene and details that are unusual enough to always draw attention (like a zombie) or have had one or more design elements used to pull attention to them (e.g. the detail takes up a large amount of cover space, the detail is the only dark element on a light cover or vice versa, the character is looking at it). If that bird that was a minor detail on another cover is now placed prominently on this cover at a much larger size with the character staring at it while it’s a deep dark red against the white of a moon, the reader will assume that the bird may be important.

So most background details can be safely ignored, but if a detail takes up a chunk of the cover’s focus or is strange enough to draw attention, tread carefully. There’s a big difference between an average bird in a forest and a vampire rising from a grave. You can safely ignore the bird, but if there’s a vampire climbing out of a grave in the background of your cover, even if it’s not the main focus of the cover, your book had better have vampires play a role.

  1. The font/text treatment is wrong for your book.

Fonts and text treatment are incredibly important cues for marketing, so I’m going to explain this carefully. You can safely buy a premade with a text treatment that doesn’t work for your subgenre as long as everything else fits and you double check that the text treatment can be changed to match your subgenre. This is usually a free change for premades.

Important caveat: Given how fundamentally important fonts and text treatment are to subgenre and marketing, you’ll want to be sure that the designer can do the text treatment you’re looking for before you purchase. You can check this by scrolling through their website’s portfolio to find examples where they’ve done a title treatment that matches what’s being done in your subgenre (e.g. white, silver or gold metallic serif font text treatments for high fantasy).

If you see good versions of these types of title treatments, then you’re probably safe to purchase it. Just double check that you’re right about the premade cover art itself fitting your subgenre. A designer regularly using title treatments that don’t match the cover’s subgenre can be a sign that they may be missing other things as well, and the cover may not be as good a match as you think. Alternatively, if you’re not as well-versed in the market, you may discover that the whole premade itself is actually signaling a different subgenre than you thought and not just the title treatment.

Lastly, if you’re looking at a premade from one of the top designers in the business, it’s worth knowing that every now and then, those designers do sometimes purposely go against a title treatment trend. If everything about a cover screams urban fantasy (which is what happens with the best designers), then they can sometimes use a title treatment that goes against trend for a specific purposeful effect. These can be stunning covers, so it helps to keep in mind that if you’re buying a premade from one of the best designers in the industry, they probably had a reason for what they did. If the cover is in the right subgenre and fits your book, you’re probably just fine.

Want to learn more about sci-fi and fantasy book covers?

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