Commissioning an illustrator
Hiring someone to draw your artwork and hiring someone to design your cover are two different transactions. Authors routinely buy the first while believing they bought the second, and find out at the end, when there is a beautiful painting on the screen and nowhere sensible for the title to go.
The first decision is which one you need
An illustrator makes an image. A cover designer makes a cover: the crop, the hierarchy, the typeface, the spine, the back, the way the whole thing behaves at 120 pixels tall in a search result. Those are different skills with different training, and they live in the same person often enough to be confusing but not often enough to assume.
A beautiful illustration with amateur type set on it is the commonest expensive mistake in self-published covers. The art cost real money, the type cost an evening, and the type is what a browsing reader reads first. If you are buying illustration, you are buying half a cover and you need a plan for the other half — a designer, or yourself, working to a brief.
Decide before you approach anyone, because it changes the conversation, the deliverables and what you are paying for. Hire a cover designer, or do it yourself? is the other side of this question.
Finding one: look for the exact thing, not for talent
Portfolios are easy to admire and hard to read. Look past whether the work is good and ask whether it is the work you need.
Illustrators specialize more narrowly than their portfolios suggest. Someone whose gallery is all character art — faces, figures, costume, expression — may have no landscape in it at all, and there is a reason for that. The same goes the other way: an atmospheric-environment artist is not automatically the person to draw your protagonist. If you need a windswept coastline and every piece on the site is a half-length portrait, keep looking.
Look for book covers specifically, or at least for images built to sit under type. An illustrator who has only ever delivered square social pieces will often compose dead center, edge to edge, with nothing to spare — which is the one composition a cover cannot use.
Check the medium matches the genre, not just your taste. Illustration or photography? covers what each one signals, and Genre conventions: what your cover has to promise covers what your category already expects.
What the brief has to carry
Writing a cover brief, for a designer or for yourself is the general document. An illustrator needs these things added to it:
That it is a book cover, and the trim size. Say it explicitly. A cover is not a poster: it gets cropped, wrapped, shrunk and overprinted with words.
What must stay clear. Name the area the title and author will occupy — a band across the top third, the lower quarter, wherever your composition wants it — and say that it needs to hold quiet tone, not detail. This single instruction prevents most of the trouble.
The genre and three comparable covers, with a line on each saying what you are pointing at. Color, or composition, or the level of finish — not all three at once. See Comp titles: reading the shelf you want to be on.
The mood in adjectives you can defend, and what must and must not appear. Both halves. The second is usually shorter and more useful.
The deadline, and where the art will also be used: the ebook cover, cropped to 1600 × 2560; the audiobook square if there is one; social images; and the printed wrap, which is wider than the front by a spine and a back. Anything you might want later should be said now, while it is one job rather than a second commission.
In the Cover Maker. Bring the finished illustration in and see it on your real wrap: live trim, bleed and safe-area guides, a spine computed from your page count and printer, title and author kept as live vector text you can move over the art without re-exporting anything. Start your cover → · about the Cover Maker
The rights conversation, which you should not avoid
Authors skip this because it feels awkward and because the art has not been made yet. Settle it in writing before work starts. What needs settling:
- Exclusive or non-exclusive. Can the same image be licensed to somebody else?
- Which formats and which territories. Print, ebook, audiobook, worldwide or not.
- Later uses. Merchandise, a boxed set, a hardcover edition, advertising. Cheaper to agree now than to renegotiate when the boxed set is real.
- Portfolio display. Most illustrators want to show the work; most authors are happy for them to. Say so, and say whether there is a date before which it stays unpublished.
This is a commissioning agreement between two parties, not a matter of law we can advise you on. Terms vary by country and by what the two of you agree. Write down what you both think you agreed and check that the two documents match. If the artwork uses licensed stock as a component, ask what that license permits — Stock images: what the license actually lets you do.
Deliverables and specs
Ask for the layered source file and the highest-resolution export, not a flattened JPEG at the size the artist happened to work at. The layered file is what lets anyone shift the composition later when your page count moves the spine or a new format needs a different crop.
Give the numbers in the brief. A 6 × 9 front panel with bleed is 6.125 × 9.25 in, which is 1,838 × 2,775 px at 300 DPI; a full wrap is that plus a spine plus a back, so considerably wider. Ask for generous margins beyond the live area rather than an exact fit. Anything under 200 DPI at printed size is visibly soft — Resolution: why a good-looking image prints badly explains what that looks like on paper.
Make your cover
The Cover Maker is free to use: name your book, bring your artwork, and it draws the full wrap — front, spine and back — to your printer's own measurements. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Writing a cover brief, for a designer or for yourself · More: Illustration or photography? · One cover, many formats · Pairing typefaces on a cover