Hire a cover designer, or do it yourself?
This is usually framed as a money question. It isn't, or not mainly. A cover you design badly costs you readers who never clicked, and a cover you commission without knowing what you want costs you the fee and a second attempt. The real question is where the judgment comes from.
What you are actually buying
When you hire a cover designer, the software is the smallest part of what you pay for. What you are buying is judgment: someone who has seen a hundred covers in your genre, knows which conventions carry meaning and which are dead weight, and can tell at a glance that your title needs to be forty percent bigger.
Tools cannot supply that. A tool can hold the type still, get the spine right and stop you shipping something unprintable. It cannot tell you that your color palette says thriller when your book is a warm family saga.
So the question is simple: do you have the judgment this cover needs, or do you need to buy it?
When doing it yourself works
You have a clear visual idea. Not a vague mood — an actual picture in your head you could describe in two sentences. Authors who can do that tend to produce good covers, because the hard part is already done.
Your genre's covers are type-led. Thrillers, most literary fiction, a large share of nonfiction: a strong typeface, a restrained palette, often one simple image or none. That is design you can execute, because the design is the decisions — size, weight, spacing, contrast — not an illustration you would have to draw.
You can leave it alone once it works. The most common self-design failure is not incompetence, it is fiddling. A cover that tested well at thumbnail size, then gained a texture, a glow, a second typeface and a subtitle, is now worse and you cannot see it.
You are willing to test at thumbnail size and take the answer. Shrink it, put it in a grid with the bestsellers in your category, and look honestly. Do that and act on it, and you have the feedback loop a designer would give you. See The thumbnail test.
In the Cover Maker. If you are doing it yourself, the mechanical half is handled: live trim, bleed and safe-area guides, a spine computed from your real page count and printer, and title and author kept as live vector text you can resize without ever re-exporting artwork. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
When hiring is the better spend
Your genre is illustrated. Fantasy with character art, romance with a couple on the front, children's picture books. These covers are carried by an image that has to be made, and no arrangement of stock photos and type substitutes for one. If your category's top titles are all illustrated, an unillustrated cover reads as an outsider however well it is set.
You are writing a series. A series needs an identity that survives across many books: the same grid, the same type treatment, the same palette logic, varying only where variation is meaningful. Designing book one is achievable. Designing a system that still looks deliberate at book seven is a different skill, and getting it wrong means redoing every cover later.
You have no idea what it should look like. If you have stared at your category for an hour and still cannot say what your cover is of, that is not a gap a tool fills. It is exactly the gap a designer fills.
You do not want to do it. A perfectly good reason. Some authors want to write books, not lay out covers.
What to look for if you hire
A portfolio in your genre. Not a good portfolio — a good portfolio in your category. A designer with beautiful literary covers may not know the visual grammar of paranormal romance, and neither of you will spot the mismatch until the reviews are quiet.
The print wrap, not just a front image. Plenty of cover work is quoted as an ebook front. A print book needs the full wrap: back cover, spine, bleed, safe area, barcode space, at your trim size. Agree on this in writing before you start.
Source files, or at least the fonts and a rebuildable spine. Your page count will change — a round of edits, a different paper stock, a large print edition — and every change moves the spine and shifts the front artwork with it. If you cannot rebuild the wrap yourself, every small change is another invoice.
Clarity on rights. What are you allowed to do with the artwork? Ads, merchandise, a boxed set, the audiobook square? Ask now, and ask what any stock the designer licensed on your behalf covers. See Stock images and licensing.
The hybrid most authors land on
In practice the common answer is neither of the two you started with: buy or generate the art, set the type yourself.
Someone else supplies the image — a stock license, a commissioned illustration, an AI render you have the rights to use. You supply the title, the author name, the hierarchy and the wrap. That puts your money where judgment is genuinely needed, and keeps the part that changes most often under your own control.
If you would rather hand the whole book over, that exists too: Concierge is our done-for-you service, where we make the cover, interior and marketing files from your manuscript.
Either way, it is not finished when it looks good
A cover is done when three things are true:
- It works at thumbnail size, because that is where readers meet it.
- It prints inside the safe area, with nothing you care about near a trimmed edge.
- The spine matches the real page count, because a spine that is off by a tenth of an inch slides the whole front cover sideways.
That checklist applies to a cover you designed and a cover you commissioned. If you hired someone, it is what you check before you approve. If you did it yourself, it is what you check before you upload.
Nobody wins an argument with a trimmed title.
In the Cover Maker. However the artwork arrived — commissioned, licensed or your own — one design gets re-cut for every printer and binding you need, with the spine recalculated each time from the real page count. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
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: What makes a book cover sell · More: Resolution: why a good-looking image prints badly · AI cover art that works · Mistakes that mark a book as self-published