Your potential readers do judge your book by its cover…
…but it’s not hard to make a good first impression.
Today we’re going to look at a fairly common choice made by amateur book cover creators – that of using red text, and particularly red text against a clashing background that is often green or blue. I’ve seen this on so many covers submitted to my various groups that I had to start here.
These images are just mock-ups that I created in about five minutes each in order to illustrate my point. So the “after” covers are not meant to be the final product, only an idea of where you could go with it and why it is a better option compared with the “before” covers.
In the first example I can sort of see why the cover creator might have thought red text was their only option. Black text wouldn’t work because of the darkness of parts of the tree, and white text would be lost on the background and in between the branches. But you can see that the text is still extremely hard to read, especially on a screen, because of the clash of colours.
And remember: your book cover is going to be first seen on screen by the vast majority of your potential buyers. And most of the time it will be in thumbnail size. So we’ll get to some of the other elements and choices that are affected by size and platform in a later post.
But in terms of our red peril in The Littlest Tree, above, the solution I’ve gone for (and remember this is a five-minute mock-up, so there could be better options with even more thought) is to give the design more “light space” to work with at the top and bottom of the image. So we’ve pulled way back. I then selected colours from the image itself, rather than relying on system colours. That gorgeous teal colour of the text comes from the distant pine trees on the hill in the background. It contrasts beautifully with the pale blues and whites (as opposed to clashing) but it also looks balanced, colour-wise, in terms of the cover as a whole.
And we’ll talk about font choice in a whole ‘nother post.
And again we have a similar problem with the coral reef examples above. Because of that difficult bright patch of sunlight in the middle of the top third, it’s not a simple matter of selecting either a light or dark colour for the title text. Here, for the series title, I’ve picked out the darkest and lightest colours in that patch of ocean and used those together in layers, giving the text a slight 3D effect. Similarly, for the book title and author name, I’ve chosen colours from the sand and the shadows on the sand. That might well not be clear enough, especially in thumbnail size, but that would be something to continue experimenting with.
Red is not dead, but…
So does this mean you can’t use red at all? Far from it – here is an example of red text that works really well. In the cover of Refugee by Alan Gratz, the strong red text is given a contrasting background that it doesn’t have to fight, and it’s balanced by other points of red throughout the cover, especially the boat. (Click on the cover for a larger version.)
But the issue with the examples I’ve mocked up here is that they were designed using “system” red (RGB red) – in other words, the automatic primary colour that is served up when you select red on your computer.
In order to effectively use “red”, you need to change it slightly by expanding your colour selection tool and fiddling with the settings so that it doesn’t hit the eyes as a blinding computer capital-R Red when it’s placed in front of green or blue, or actually a fairly wide range of other colours. Of course, when the book cover is printed it might look a little better because it is no longer RGB red but a combination of magenta, cyan, yellow, and even a little bit of black.
Let’s see what happens when we use a Color Picker tool to select a pretty coral colour from the image and use it as our main text colour:
Maybe? Is it “growing” on you…? 😉
In the next post in this series we’ll look at more text-related design choices that could be sinking your book.
📷Mock-up book cover backgrounds: Adobe Stock. Designed by Elle Carter Neal.
Elle Carter Neal is the author of the middle-grade chapter book The Convoluted Key, picture book I Own All the Blue, and teen science-fantasy novel Madison Lane and the Wand of Rasputin. She has been telling stories for as long as she can remember, holding childhood slumber-party audiences entranced until the early hours of the morning. Elle decided to be an author the day she discovered that real people wrote books and that writing books was a real job.
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