How do you find a cover artist?
All right, so you’ve decided to commission a custom illustration for your book cover. With a bit of luck and a truckload of hard work, your book’s gonna come out looking great! But what should you expect from this process, in practical terms?
First, the cost. For a high-quality cover illustration, from a great but not yet famous artist, it’ll cost you single-digit thousands of dollars, depending on the complexity. Typical terms are half up front, half on delivery. This is about what it’ll cost you to do the entire book design, with cover typography, internal layout, and maybe some extra goodies like web site design thrown in. So you’re more-or-less doubling your book’s art and design budget.
How long will it take? Any good artist is booked way in advance, so you’ll typically need to wait a several months until they’re available to start. After they start, you should expect the process to take several more months to complete, since there are many rounds of feedback involved, and they’re probably interleaving multiple projects together to cover the gaps. In my case, it was about six months of waiting, and six months of doing.
At the end of the process, you get a set of Photoshop files that you’ll give to your book designer, and some JPEG files just for looking at. And mind you, this just the cover illustration. The text that goes on the cover, with all of its special treatments and effects, is typically done by the book designer.
Where do you look?
You can try googling “science fiction book cover artist”, but that gets you mostly useless spam results. You can also try hiring someone using services like Reedsy or Fiverr, but I didn’t have a lot of luck with that. What I did have luck with was good, old-fashioned painstaking searches through hundreds of artists’ portfolios on Artstation and DeviantArt.
Start out by searching for simple keywords on those sites to get you in the right ballpark. Something like “fantasy art” or “sci-fi art” will get you some initial hits. Then, when you see an image you like, find the artist’s name, and then search through what they like. You can also look at the “people who liked this also liked that” kinds of links, to take advantage of other peoples’ good taste. As a tech guy, I knew almost literally nothing about art, so this was a real help.
Once you’ve collected a few dozen links to good artists, evaluate each of them more carefully. You’re looking for things like:
Does their personal info say that they’re open for freelance work?
Can you find concrete examples in their portfolio where they painted things you want on your cover?
Have they drawn a range of faces, body types, and subjects?
Have they done book covers before? Do you like them?
Does the mood of their work match your book’s mood?
Make sure to pick artists who are right for your book, not just artists you love. That was another difficult thing for me as a non-artist—I had a hard time separating my personal likes and dislikes from the project at hand.
Some artists have stunning amounts of talent, but their genre isn’t a good fit for your book. For example, I loved Clockbirds’ animals and gorgeous backgrounds, but her style is more Princess Mononoke than time-travel sci-fi.
Some artists have incredible technique, but the mood of their art doesn’t match your book. I love Charlie Bowater’s gauzy yet precise technique, and she’s done covers for bestselling books by Brandon Sanderson, but her mood reads as more YA romance than I was looking for.
Some artists draw really cool stuff, but in a narrow range of subject matter. I won’t link to anyone specific here, because hey, to each his own! But for example, there are many super-talented artists who specialize in drawing things like busty witches with pointy hats and impractical skirts.
Some artists have been so art-directed on previous jobs that it’s hard to tell their “real” style. If their portfolio is all game art, like Magic the Gathering or similar properties, the customer dictates a very specific house style that can make an artist’s work hard to evaluate for other projects.
Once you’ve evaluated the artists carefully, sort them into buckets. My three buckets were:
Great: I want them to illustrate my cover
Great, but not right for me somehow (in style, technique, or mood)
Great, but unavailable (maybe they just closed commissions, or just started a new day job)
Once your first list is at a reasonable size, put them in order and start emailing them! Soliciting them one-by-one is how I did it. This was mostly to avoid wasting a ton of different artists’ time. But it was also to let me refine my query email if I wasn’t getting good responses to start with.
Case study
For The Gap Year, I knew that the two main characters, Anna and Indy, should probably be on the cover somehow. Anna is a young woman of Mexican heritage, and Indy is a giant, intelligent border collie physicist. So my short list of “what my artist should be able to draw” looked like this:
Young women, specifically girl-next-door types since Anna is a science nerd
Animals with luxuriant fur, so not just dragons/birds/horses
The tone of the book is “serious but hopeful”, so I knew I needed to focus on artists whose work wasn’t too dark or too cartoony. And the book is set in ancient Greece, so something mythological would be a bonus.
I ended up going with the fantastic Fernanda Suarez, whose work checked all those boxes.
I also loved Fernanda’s moody but vibrant colored backgrounds, which seemed like they’d help a book cover really stand out.
I’ll give you the full details in a later post, but she took me from this initial sketch (with rough title placement by the book designers):
To this final cover illustration:
Which I’m extremely happy with!
To my point above, about artists who’ve mostly done highly art-directed work, you can see that Fernanda’s game art is very different from her own natural style.
It’s still very well done, but I wouldn’t have picked her based on that alone. I guess that’s actually advice for artists, rather than authors—when you’re putting up your portfolio, make sure there’s more in it than just commissions of a specific style, or potential clients will have a harder time evaluating your work.