Secrets of the Designer: The Nuance of Creating the Perfect Book Cover

I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of cover reveals. As a literary agent, I’m typically copied on the email sent to the author with the much-awaited jpeg attached, and even after years of doing this job, I’m always nervous when I open it.

I know how important the jacket is to the author and to how the book is perceived by the media. The jacket is the face of your book, one you’ll carry around for the rest of its life (or, at least, its life in hardcover), and no one wants to be stuck with a face they don’t like. Getting your initial jacket design concepts is an uncanny moment of show and tell: someone has read your book (or at least a good chunk of it) and reflected back to you what they see in it.

A bad jacket concept is a bit like when a friend wants to post a terrible picture of you, but with even higher stakes. Is that who they think I am? And what do I need to do ASAP to make sure no one else sees that?

Luckily, most publishers do not want their authors to hate their jackets, and generally, you do have recourse if you dislike what you are initially shown. Many contracts include a clause granting the author “meaningful consultation” on the jacket, and in some cases, even approval. Practically speaking, publishers know that an author will be less inclined to vociferously promote a book whose cover they don’t want to share, so it’s in everyone’s best interest to come to some kind of consensus.

There are also things you can do as an author to be proactive in your jacket design without overstepping. As I say in the “Jacket Wars” section of Take It From Me: An Agent’s No-Nonsense Guide to Building a Nonfiction Career from Scratch, my hope is that my advice will help you avoid such skirmishes.

To be proactive about the process, make a list of covers of other books you find appealing, ideally ones in your category that sold well. Spend some time trying to articulate why these jackets appeal to you. What are their color palettes? How would you describe the typographic elements? Do they use any images, and if so, what kind? How do these images work with the type?

It’s helpful, too, to think about what you absolutely don’t want on your cover. Are there visual images so overly associated with your subject you’d rather die than see them on your jacket? It’s better to let your publisher know this in advance to help focus your jacket designer and prevent them from wasting time on something that won’t work for you.

If your publisher proposes a jacket you don’t like, try to respond with specifics rather than a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Having a design vocabulary and referents pulled from jackets you love will make this easier.

Keep in mind how you experience jackets in the wild as you evaluate proposed covers. No one will examine your book jacket as closely as you do, so think in terms of how you might react to the book in the wild: “If I saw this jacket at a bookstore, would I be drawn to it?”

Your jacket is so important to how you feel about your book, but the jacket war hurdle comes early in the publishing process and is often your first introduction to the larger team, so pick your battles over the particulars wisely. If your publisher has strong feelings about a font or a color or an image, hear them out as to why. Your goal in all of this should be to get a cover you like without completely alienating everyone working on your behalf in the event you don’t like what they present you.

Once the jacket is finalized, you will likely want to share it. Coordinate the cover reveal with your publisher to make the most of it. You’ll want to wait to do so until your book is available for preorder; your publisher can provide you with links and help you set this up.

For once in my life, I followed my own advice, and it worked! I love my jacket. Here it is, in a publisher-approved and coordinated cover reveal:

For a bit more context on the jacket design process in general and how I went about it in particular, I interviewed my very gifted jacket designer Emily Mahon, senior art director at Doubleday Books.

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Alia Hanna Habib: How did you become a jacket designer? Was “jacket designing” something you knew was a job when you were first starting out?

Emily Mahon: I went to Penn State University without any idea of what I wanted to concentrate in, but I knew I had an interest in art. My dad had started collecting some graphic design magazines around that time and shared them with me and encouraged me to look into design as a career.

There happened to be a renowned design program within the art school at Penn State that accepted only twenty-two people a year. You had to create a portfolio in your freshman and sophomore year with work from some introductory art and design classes, which you used to apply to the program. It was such a small major in such a huge university, which made it so special.

Once I got in, it was two years of intensive work. When I graduated, I headed straight for New York City and landed my first job in publishing as a junior designer at Picador. I moved around quite a bit in my early days in publishing, but I’ve been at Doubleday for eighteen years now.

AHH: Tell me a bit about the process. When do you get tapped in to do the cover? And where does that happen within the publication calendar of a book?

EM: Right now, I’m working on the Spring 2026 list. We have three lists a year and each list is introduced in a launch meeting months ahead of publication and then the jacket designers make a wish list.

When we start hearing about the book, there is usually a conversation with the editor in which they talk about the book or give us some kind of brief. In this case, Denise Oswald [the editor of Take it From Me] sent me your Pinterest page and said, “This is the vibe.” I read a few chapters of the manuscript too.

I try to get a feel for what the book is about, who the audience is, and then start researching and coming up with concepts. I typically come up with a bunch of cover options, present them in the weekly meeting, and then the editor and publisher whittle them down to a few that are shown to the author and agent.

AHH: In that initial moment when you hear about a book, what are you told that helps you figure out what kind of jacket you might create? What kind of information is it helpful for you to have?

EM: Obviously, it matters if it’s fiction or nonfiction, and I read the full or part of the manuscript to get a feel for the writing and tone of the book. In the case of your book, seeing your Pinterest board was helpful, because it gave me a sense of the look you might be after and perhaps the kinds of readers that would be attracted to your book.

We get a cover memo early on, which gives us information about the book. Sometimes there are comp titles—titles that excel in the same field. I look those up for reference to see what the covers looked like and what kind of books they were. And then I try to make my work different from that. I’m thinking about that market, but also considering how this particular book needs to stand out on its own.

AHH: Are there any covers you’ve done that have been particularly challenging? What makes a particularly challenging type of jacket to do?

EM: Fiction is tricky. We have a book coming out in a few months by Jemimah Wei. She’s a debut author for Doubleday. She has a huge following on social media, and there’s a lot of buzz behind this book. The editor for this novel liked where I was going with the covers but kept asking for more options, and wanted to see what else I could try, so we could say we explored all options.

Sometimes I just have to step back and think about what other directions I can go in, and how I can tap into a more unexpected solution and unique package. Every author is different.

The process with you was easy, but there are many times when we show something to the author or agent, and for whatever reason they’re not happy, or they don’t feel like it represents their book well, and then there  can be a lot of back and forth before we land on a final cover.

AHH: It’s often hard for authors to articulate why they don’t like a cover. Sometimes the feedback is as simple as, “I don’t like it. It’s ugly.” If you are an author and you are presented with a jacket that you don’t like it, what kind of feedback would be helpful to give your team to get to a better place?

EM: I often think it’s helpful to see other books in the genre that they do like. Just having some visual references are helpful for me to understand  what they find interesting and attractive.

Specifics are also helpful. I was just working with an author who’s from Nigeria and I tried using an ankara pattern on her cover. She had very specific feelings about that—she didn’t want to see any kind of African pattern. That kind of information is useful, and knowing it earlier on is better so we don’t go down a certain road and then have to start all over again.

AHH: How common is it for an author to give you a mood board or direction before you start designing?

EM: While I think it’s becoming more common than it used to be, I would still say only one out of ten authors has a mood board of some kind, so not that many. But I also do freelance work, and often with those clients now, they’ll send a cover memo which includes information about the book, a mood board, and things that the author would or wouldn’t like to see.

AHH: One of the things that I find sometimes frustrates authors about the cover design process is they have this fantasy that it’s going to be like a Mad Men pitch presentation. They’re going to go into a room, be shown fifteen jackets, and pick out their favorite. Often, what you get are two or three jackets to choose from, and if you don’t like any of them, the opportunity to provide feedback.

How many initial jacket ideas do you usually start with? And then how do you narrow it down to what you’ll present  to the author?

EM: Typically, I would show maybe five or six different options to the editor and the publisher—not just the same design with a different color type, but totally different approaches. From there, we narrow them down.

AHH: How did you approach designing my cover?

EM: For your cover, I wanted to focus on a typographic approach overall. I first thought about which fonts to use and how to organize them, tried out some unique color palettes, and then wanted to find one visual icon that felt conceptually appropriate—that was how I broke it down.

All the designs I worked on had a similar feeling—simple and authoritative, but friendly.

AHH: We initially saw a range of colors. How did you think about which colors to use? Is it just intuitive for you?

EM: It was intuitive, although at one point Denise mentioned that you like green, so that was definitely in the back of my mind!

AHH: I ended up not going with green! That was a good example of me realizing that I am not an expert and I should perhaps defer to the people who actually know what they’re doing. I liked the idea of green because it connotes money, and I’m an agent, but then the cream color was so much clearer and looks very elegant.

EM: Yes, I think in the end that worked better and let the type shine. Using that pen as a letter just gave it that extra something. I always try to simplify things. A phrase I would hear all the time from my mentor was that there can only be one hero. In other words, the type and image shouldn’t compete with one another.

AHH: As a closing question, do you have some favorite covers that you’ve worked on that you’d like me to share?

EM: One book that I feel so honored to have worked on is James by Percival Everett. The moment the book was launched it had the feeling of imminent success. This brilliant book was a runaway bestseller for good reason and won the National Book Award for fiction.

The design harkens back to iconic type-driven covers like James Joyce’s Ulysses (1961 Vintage Books). I leaned into a design which featured the title prominently with bold, stark colors, adding a small woodcut figure as a secondary element.

Being a part of this project was one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. I’m currently working on repackaging some of Everett’s earlier and lesser known novels, keeping the look of James in mind.

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Take It From Me: An Agent’s Guide to Building a Nonfiction Writing Career from Scratch by Alia Hanna Habib will be available via Pantheon Books.