Faces and people on covers
Put a person on your cover and you are using the strongest element available. You are also using the one readers judge fastest, complain about longest, and see most often on other books.
Both halves are true at once, which is why the covers that use figures well almost never show a whole face.
Readers go to the eyes first
A face is the one thing on a page that does not have to be decoded. Before a reader has taken in your title, they have registered the expression, the direction of the gaze, the age, and roughly how much trouble the person is in. Nothing else on a cover works that fast.
Genre expectation is built on top of that. Contemporary romance is a category of figures — illustrated couples, two people at a distance. Thriller and crime lean on the lone figure in a landscape. Literary fiction uses people constantly, usually cropped to a fragment. A category page full of figures is telling you what its readers expect, and one full of objects and typography is telling you the opposite.
Three ways a figure ruins a cover
The model is not the character. This is the worst outcome, and it is worse than having no figure at all. If your protagonist is forty and the cover shows a twenty-year-old, or her hair is wrong, or he is described as heavyset and the model is not, readers say so — in reviews and reader groups, for as long as the book is on sale. A cover that promises a person the book does not deliver breaks trust on page one.
The face is on a hundred other books. Stock agencies shoot for genres. A handful of models are photographed repeatedly in exactly the clothes and lighting a romance or thriller cover wants, and those shots end up everywhere. Run a reverse image search before you buy. If the shot already carries three covers in your category, readers who browse it will recognize it.
A full face at thumbnail is a smudge. Expression lives in small features — the set of a mouth, the line of an eyebrow, the catchlight in an eye. Shrink the cover to a retail thumbnail and those features are a few pixels each. What survives is a pale oval. A face that is magnificent at full size can be the weakest element on the page at the size that actually sells the book.
Show less of the person
The answer is not to abandon the figure but to crop it partial, so the reader gets a human presence without a specific face to argue with.
- The back of a head, or a figure turned three-quarters away.
- A silhouette against sky, water, a window or a doorway.
- A figure walking away down a road, a hallway, a shoreline.
- Hands only — holding, reaching, gripping something that matters.
- A small figure in a large landscape, which carries both the person and the setting.
- A hard crop that keeps the jaw and mouth, or the eyes alone, and loses the rest.
Each says there is a person in this book while leaving the reader free to imagine your character. That is the trade the technique rests on.
In the Cover Maker. The tool shows your cover at retail thumbnail size while you work, which is where a face fails first — you see the smudge before your readers do, not after the proof arrives. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
Posture and clothing say more than a face
A slumped shoulder, a raised chin, a coat and boots against weather, period dress, a uniform, a weapon held low — these read at thumbnail size when a face does not, and they pin down mood, era and genre without pinning down a person. Stance is doing the work on more covers than you would guess.
Two permissions, not one
A photograph of a person carries two separate claims: the photographer's, which the license covers, and the subject's, which it may not. Permission from the person in the frame for commercial use is what a model release is.
- A stock license usually includes it. The image page states the release status. Stock images: what the license actually lets you do covers what to read and what to keep on file.
- A photograph you took yourself usually does not. Your own photo of a friend, a relative, or someone on a street solves the license and not the release.
- What to check is whether a release exists and whether it covers commercial use. This is not legal advice and the rules vary by country — go to the source's own terms, and to a professional if a real person is identifiable on a book you sell.
Generated faces
Image generators produce a plausible face and then fail on the details around it: hands, ears, teeth, jewelry, glasses, and any face in the background. At full size these are obvious. At thumbnail they are invisible, which is exactly why they reach print — the author never looked at the file at 100 percent.
The partial crops above fix most of it, because they remove the parts that break. Store policies on generated art and on disclosure differ, and they change, so check the current terms wherever you publish. AI cover art that does not look like AI cover art has the rest.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Illustration or photography? · More: The thumbnail test · Genre conventions: what your cover has to promise · The author photo, and where it belongs