Illustration or photography?
Authors usually decide this by supply. Stock photography is instant and cheap, so the cover becomes a photograph. An illustrator is free that month, so the cover becomes an illustration.
Readers decide it by genre. The two media say different things before anyone looks at the subject, and a book whose medium contradicts its category is working against itself in the first half-second.
What a photograph signals
Real, immediate, contemporary. A photograph asserts that this happened, or could.
That is exactly right for thrillers and crime, where the promise is that the danger is plausible. It is right for memoir, where the reader wants a person rather than a rendering, and for most practical and narrative nonfiction, where a photograph reads as reportage. Parts of literary fiction use it too, though usually cropped so hard the subject is barely identifiable.
A photograph also dates the book. Clothing, hair, cars, phones and the color grading of the era are all in the frame, and a reader can place a photographic cover within about five years of when it was made.
What an illustration signals
Authored, styled, interpretive. Someone chose every line, which tells the reader the image is about something rather than a record of it.
That is right for fantasy, where the thing depicted does not exist and a photograph of a model in a cloak looks like a photograph of a model in a cloak. It is right for romance in its current illustrated wave — flat figures, bold color, stylized or absent faces — which has held the front tables of contemporary romance for years. It is right for children's books, where illustration is the form itself, for cozy mysteries, where the friendliness is the promise, and for anything where photographing the real thing would look cheap: period costume, magic, an imagined city.
Illustration also ages more slowly, because a drawn style is read as a style rather than as a date.
The practical differences
A photograph brings rights questions. A licensed image is fine; a recognizable face without a model release, or a distinctive building without a property release, is not. A book you sell is a commercial use, which rules out editorial-only images entirely. Stock images: what the license actually lets you do covers what to check and what to keep on file.
A photograph has to be big enough. A 6 × 9 front panel with bleed is 1,838 × 2,775 px at 300 DPI, and a wrap is far larger. Anything under 200 DPI at printed size is visibly soft. A screen-sized photograph that looks perfect on your monitor can still be too small for a paperback front — see Resolution: why a good-looking image prints badly.
An illustration has to be made. Commissioned, generated, or drawn by you. There is no stock middle ground that does not announce itself: stock vector illustration has a house look, and readers who browse a category all day recognize it instantly. If you are generating art, treat the output as raw material rather than a finished cover — AI cover art that does not look like AI cover art is the whole argument.
Photographs collide. Two books using the same licensed image is common enough that readers in some categories notice it, and in romance and thriller they absolutely do. A reverse image search on your chosen shot before you commit takes a minute. If it is already on three covers in your genre, crop it hard, recolor it, or pick another.
In the Cover Maker. Bring either kind of art in and see it at your real trim with live bleed and safe-area guides: the tool checks the file against the print guideline, flags anything under 200 DPI, and offers one-click enlargement to 300 DPI in your browser, with nothing uploaded. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
The hybrid that dominates now
Look at a category page and you will find that many covers are neither, or both.
The pattern is a photographic or generated background, heavily treated, with illustrated or worked type on top. The image is desaturated, duotoned, blurred, torn, overlaid with texture or pushed to near-silhouette. The title is drawn rather than merely set: custom letterforms, a hand-lettered word, a distressed or layered treatment, sometimes a piece of the artwork passing in front of the letters.
This works because the treatment removes the two weaknesses of a straight photograph at once. The dating goes, because the grading is no longer of an era. The duplicate-image problem goes, because nobody recognizes a shot they have seen at forty percent saturation behind a torn edge.
It also puts the money where it does most good. The background is the cheap part. The type is the part the reader actually reads, and the part that carries the genre — which is why the type treatment is usually where a professional cover spent its budget. Pairing typefaces on a cover covers the setting; the point here is that treated type belongs to neither medium and improves both.
The test that settles it
Open your category, take the top twenty, and count.
Not the all-time bestsellers — the current chart for the subcategory you will actually publish into. Tally how many are photographic, how many illustrated, how many hybrid. You will usually find one medium holding twelve or more of the twenty, and that is your answer.
If the split is genuinely even you have a free choice, and you should make it on what you can get to a high standard rather than on what is fashionable. A well-executed cover in the minority medium beats a weak one in the majority.
The result to take seriously is a clean sweep. If nineteen of twenty are illustrated, a photographic cover marks your book as an outsider however carefully it is set — and the reader making that judgment is not examining the cover. They are scrolling past it.
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: Hire a cover designer, or do it yourself? · More: Color, and what each genre expects of it · Genre conventions: what your cover has to promise · The thumbnail test