A book cover does most of its work at about the size of a postage stamp. That is how big it is in a retail grid, on a phone screen, in a search result. Then the same file has to hold up printed at full size in a reader's hands, where every soft edge and every stretched pixel is visible.
Those two demands pull against each other, and resolving them is most of what cover design costs.
The published range, and what it buys
Cover design runs $800 to $2,500 with us. That figure sits in the public estimator on our connect page, alongside interior layout and the rest of our publishing ranges.
What the range buys is three jobs, done by different hands.
Graphic design. Adam Elliott Rush handles this part: the concept, the type, the composition, the decision about what the book is signaling to someone who has never heard of it. Type does more work on a cover than most authors expect. Title, author name, and any series marker have to be legible at thumbnail scale while still holding up under close inspection.
Photoshop composition. Robert Louis does this: assembling and retouching imagery into a single believable image at print resolution. Compositing is where a stock photo stops looking like a stock photo. It is also where covers get expensive, because the work scales with how many elements have to be blended and how much of the image has to be built rather than photographed.
Templating to printer spec. The approved design then becomes deliverables. That means a wrapped print file at the correct trim and bleed, with the spine width calculated from the final page count and paper stock, plus a flat digital edition sized for retailers.
That last step is why a cover cannot be finished before the interior is. Spine width comes from page count, and page count comes from the finished layout. A cover approved before the interior is set gets re-templated later, and re-templating is work someone pays for.
Where the market tiers sit
Cover pricing sorts into three tiers. Knowing which one you are shopping in explains most of the price differences you will see.
Premade. A finished design someone already made, sold with your title dropped into it. Least expensive and fastest. The same base image may appear on other books, which is a real tradeoff in a crowded category and no problem at all in a thin one.
Stock plus template. A licensed photo or illustration placed into an existing layout. The middle of the market. The result is specific to your book at the type level and generic at the image level, which is often the correct amount of custom work for a first title.
Fully custom. Concept and imagery built for one book. Highest cost. It is the only tier where the cover can show something the manuscript actually contains instead of the nearest available genre signal.
We work in the custom tier, with the compositing done in house. Prices inside each tier vary by designer and by region, so treat the tiers as a shape and get quotes for the numbers.
The two tests
The thumbnail test. Shrink the cover to the size it appears at in a store listing and look at it on a phone. If the title is unreadable or the image turns to mud, the design has failed, however good it looks at full size. Covers that pass have strong contrast and fewer elements than the designer wanted, with type set larger than feels comfortable in the design file.
The print test. The same file at full size, on paper. Print shows what screens hide. Gradients band. Color shifts on the way from screen to press. Dark covers are the ones most likely to surprise you, and a cover approved only as a screen preview is a cover nobody has actually checked.
A design that passes one test and fails the other is not finished. Most of the back-and-forth on a cover is moving between the two until neither one breaks.
Imagery and rights
Every image we place is licensed for the use it is put to. Curated imagery comes with proper usage rights, which matters more on a cover than anywhere else in a book, because the cover is the part that gets reproduced everywhere the book is advertised.
An unlicensed cover image tends to surface as a problem after the book is selling. That is the worst moment to redo a cover, since it means new artwork, a new template pass, and re-uploading every edition that carries it.
Covers are usually quoted alongside interior layout, and both sit under publishing services. Doing them together is cheaper than doing them apart, mostly because the page count is known once and used twice.
What to bring
- Your title and author name, plus any series information.
- Genre, and two or three comparable titles whose covers you respond to.
- Final page count if you have it, or the manuscript word count if you do not.
- The formats you are publishing: paperback, hardcover, ebook, audiobook.
Tell us the book and the date it has to be on sale; start a project and we will place your cover design inside the range above, with the reasons for where it lands.