Typography and hierarchy
Ask an author what's on their cover and they describe the image. Ask a designer and they describe the type. The designer is closer to how readers actually use it.
Type is doing more work than ever: current professional practice often gives the title 70–80% of the cover's visual weight, and in thriller and mystery it's increasingly the whole cover — one strong color, huge letters, little or no imagery at all.
Hierarchy: decide the order, then enforce it
Every cover has three or four pieces of text competing. Your job is to rank them and make the ranking obvious.
The usual order for fiction:
- Title — biggest by a clear margin
- Author name — second, and much smaller unless you're a brand
- Series line — small, consistent across the series
- Tagline or endorsement — smallest, optional, often better cut
The exception matters: once the author's name sells more copies than the title, the ranking flips. That's why a Grisham cover puts GRISHAM at the top in letters twice the size of the title. Until you're at that point, the title leads.
Debut authors routinely oversize their name. It's understandable and it costs sales — the name means nothing to a stranger yet, so it's spending your most valuable space on your least persuasive asset.
Enforcement means contrast, not just size. If your title is 60pt and your author name is 48pt, you don't have a hierarchy, you have two similar things. Make the gap unmistakable — the title two or three times the size of the name is normal, not excessive.
Cut the tagline
Most self-published covers carry a tagline. Most would be better without one.
At thumbnail it's illegible, so it contributes nothing where it matters most, while stealing space and attention from the title. If you keep one, make it short enough to read in one glance — four or five words — and accept that it's a full-size flourish, not a selling tool.
Endorsement quotes are worth it only if the name is one your reader recognizes. "A gripping read — Amazon reviewer" actively cheapens a cover.
Choosing a typeface
Type carries genre before anyone reads a word. Broadly:
| Feel | Faces | Genres |
|---|---|---|
| Bold condensed sans | Heavy, tight, all-caps | Thriller, suspense, action |
| Classic serif | Traditional, generous | Literary, historical, memoir |
| Ornate / display serif | Sharp, decorative | Fantasy, romantasy, gothic |
| Script / handwritten | Flowing, warm | Romance, women's fiction, cozy |
| Geometric sans | Clean, modern | Sci-fi, business, self-help |
Two working rules:
One or two faces, never three. A title face and a supporting face is a design. Three is a ransom note. If you need variety, use different weights and sizes of the same family.
Avoid the tells. Papyrus, Comic Sans, Curlz and Bleeding Cowboys mark a cover as amateur faster than any other single choice. Trajan is a subtler trap — it was the film-poster face for two decades and now reads as dated rather than epic.
Setting it well
Track your capitals. Large all-caps titles almost always need letter-spacing opened up. Default spacing is designed for lowercase text at reading size and looks cramped when blown up.
Tighten your leading. Multi-line titles set at default line spacing float apart. Big display type wants the lines closer together than feels natural — often tighter than the letters are tall.
Break lines on meaning. The Long / Walk Home is wrong. The Long Walk / Home is right. Read your break out loud; if it sounds odd, it looks odd.
Give type its own space. The strongest covers reserve a region for the title rather than laying it over detail. See Composition and negative space.
In the Cover Maker. Title, author and series lines are real text layers — pick the face, size and color, drag them where you want, and they stay sharp vector type in the print PDF. Change a subtitle later without regenerating your artwork. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
Why live text beats baked-in text
If you're generating art with AI, you'll be tempted to let it render the title too — and some tools do this genuinely well now.
For print, setting the title in the editor still wins on three counts. It stays vector in the PDF, so it prints crisp at any size rather than as 300 DPI pixels. It stays editable, so a new edition or subtitle doesn't mean regenerating your artwork. And it lets your spine and back cover match the front, which they can't if the front's lettering only exists inside an image.
The middle path is the good one: let AI produce lettering that's genuinely part of the illustration — carved, painted, in perspective — and set the actual title as live type over 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: Color and contrast · Back to What makes a cover sell