How to work with a cover artist

After a long and careful search, you’ve finally found the cover artist of your dreams. How do you work with them to produce a great cover that will help sell your book?

Below, I’ll tell you how I did it. I don’t claim to be an expert on this yet. Not with only one book published! But hopefully my example will be helpful to others. And I can always write another post later if I need to apologize for how naïve this one is.

But before we start, let me back up just a bit. Last time, when I described how to find a cover artist, I glossed over some details about the query email, which is what begins your working relationship with an artist.

Send an effective query email

I strongly believe it’s best to query one artist at a time, instead of shotgunning a query out to dozens of them and hoping that you get a hit. Why? Three reasons:

I don’t want to waste a dozen artists’ time when I’m only going to hire one of them. Doing the queries one at a time is a way to respect the artists’ time and attention. I’m sure they don’t enjoy getting spammed by tons of queries that have a low chance of becoming paying work for them.
I don’t want to use up all of the artists on my shortlist at once, with my first attempt at a query. An artist early in my list might turn my query down, but give me some good feedback that helps me improve it before I send it to the next artist on my list.
The best queries are personalized to each artist. You want them to know that you’re soliciting them because you specifically want them, because of their individual strengths and experience. A generic query makes it sound like you aren’t too particular about who you end up working with.

Your query email should explain what you’re looking for, and your deadlines, if any. Keep it short, and try not to come across like a jerk, cheapskate or weirdo. Any good artist has plenty of potential clients, so you need to sound like someone they’d like to work with. Here’s what my successful query email looked like to Fernanda Suarez:

Hello Fernanda,
My name is Wade Walker, and I’d like to commission a cover illustration for a YA time travel novel set in ancient Greece. I’m contacting you in particular because I was struck by the expressiveness and bold use of color in your portfolio, and I love how you feature so many strong-looking women and a variety of beautifully-done animals. This novel’s protagonists are a young Latina scientist and a giant intelligent dog, so I think your style would really lend itself to the subject.
My goal is for this book to look exactly like a release from a major publisher like Penguin or Tor, and I’m happy to pay for work of that quality. You did the covers for Leslie Vedder’s Bone Spindle books, so I know you’re familiar with the industry already. I’m flexible on the schedule, with no hard release date yet.
Would you potentially have the interest and availability for such a project? If so, please let me know, and we can talk in more detail.
Thank you for your consideration,
Wade Walker

I always put the “ask” in the first sentence, so they don’t have to read the whole email to know what it’s about. I also tried to make it clear that I had done my research about her, and that I picked her because I had good reasons for thinking her art would fit my project. Every part of these emails should be customized to the recipient, so that it’s impossible for an artist to imagine that you’re just spamming out dozens of these with the salutations changed.

Negotiate and sign a contract

Once an artist accepts your query, you need to negotiate and sign a contract. Fernanda didn’t have a standard contract, so I found a public-domain one and rewrote it for us. I make no claims about its usefulness, legality, or anything else, since I’m not a lawyer. But if you’re interested, you can view it here. All the detailed terms, like what number and type of sketches would be delivered in what order, I got by asking Fernanda what her customary process was.

Be aware that a contract isn’t going to save you if things go sour during the illustration process. Realistically, you’re not going to sue someone who probably lives in another country, for an amount of money likely not much greater than a lawyer’s fee. So the contract is really there to clarify the expectations on both sides, and to make sure the rights are clear if your book blows up into a big enough success where there’s real money at stake.

Be generous with it. I added a bit in the contract to specifically give Fernanda the right to use the work she did for me in her Patreon videos, since I noticed that she also did technique tutorials. It cost me nothing, and helped set a good tone for our time together.

Send a cover brief

Once the contract is in place, and your initial deposit is paid, you need to prepare and send a cover brief. This tells the artist just enough about the book so they can draw a good cover.

Sorry, fellow writers! An artist is not going to read your whole magnum opus before they put pen to tablet. They probably don’t even want to know the whole plot. What they do typically want is descriptions of the characters they’ll be drawing, a sense of the mood and tone, and examples of book covers you like and dislike in your genre. As an example, here’s Lance Buckley’s questionnaire for authors.

Fernanda didn’t have a standard form, so I wrote my cover brief after asking her what she wanted via email. Here’s what it looked like:

At 14 pages, it probably weighs in a little heavy. OK, a lot heavy! But most of it is photo references, which I figured would be helpful for an artist. Plus, it helped me to clarify in my own mind what I was looking for. I also know that I tend to over-write, so I intentionally made the query letter short, and didn’t expose poor Fernanda to this kind of wordiness until after the contract was signed.

In addition to summarizing the cover size requirements in the cover brief, I also sent Fernanda the PDF book cover templates from Amazon and IngramSpark that I generated. These used an estimated book thickness, which I arrived at by comparing my word count to some sci-fi books in my library with similar word count and format. I also asked her to paint the image such that if the book designers had to chop a little bit off the back cover or back flap, it wouldn’t look bad.

Iterate on sketches

After digesting your cover brief, the artist comes up with some initial concepts, sketches them out, then sends them to you with some explanatory text. The text is needed at this stage because the sketches themselves don’t contain much detail yet.

I imagined having the 2 characters in the foreground, Having Anna wearing Greek clothing and Indy wearing her collar and harness, and maybe her collar can have lights going on.
In some of the options I have Anna holding her phone, to have that contrast between the old and the modern.
Behind them I thought having a spiral, like a time travel spiral, and at it´s center show the city of Livadeia, or it could be a different place in Greece. I thought having warm colors as we move closer to the center of the spiral and starting to turn a light blue as we move away.
As we move towards the outer parts of the spiral, the design can be very simple and open, so it´s easy to expand if necessary. I thought we could have modern elements flowing or falling into the spiral, that is the ones you see more on the Back of the Cover, maybe a laptop, some books and papers from college, and even some physics equations scribbles and symbols.
-Fernanda Suarez

You pick the one or two the sketches you like best, and then iterate on them. In my initial request to Fernanda, I had Indy wearing a harness that she wears in the book, but the sketches made it clear that would be too busy-looking, so we took it off to let her coat show better.

During the sketch process, Fernanda was using scratch text to make sure that there would be room for the book title. The results looked something like this:

That should demonstrate why we need both a cover artist and a cover designer :)

I had been sharing the sketch progress with my book designers as we went along, and at this point they mocked up the cover text to help Fernanda refine the sketch placement. Alan and Ian at theBookDesigners are awesomely responsive, which was a huge help in this process, since I knew nothing about art direction or what pitfalls I should watch out for.

The main decision here was which way Anna should face. I asked Fernanda to try her facing right instead of left, but that covered Indy’s hind legs and made the pose look less dynamic, so we went with the original instead of the one above.

At this point, you’ve settled on the characters, pose, and placement. The idea is for each round of revisions to address smaller and smaller details, to avoid rework. So make sure you like the poses at the end of your sketch phase, or you’ll be paying extra to get them redone later!

Color mock-ups

Once you approve the final sketch, the artist does color mock-ups. These show a little more detail, and let you choose between color options. Here’s what mine looked like.

I went with the blue background, but asked Fernanda to make the dress brown instead of one of the choices shown in the roughs. This is because in the story, Anna lives with poor shepherds in ancient Greece, so her clothes shouldn’t be too nice or too clean.

I also gave some feedback on the background elements. The Corinthian Greek columns Fernanda showed were from a later time period than the book is set in, so I sent her some photo references for an earlier type. I also sent photos of period-appropriate coins and pottery, trying to get as close to the dates of the book as possible.

Works in progress

When the final rendering starts, you’ll get works in progress. You can see that Fernanda did detail work on Anna first:

Then Indy:

Then the background elements, and adjustments to Indy’s collar lights:

Most of my input here was on the background elements. Originally, Fernanda had thought to have a modern book filled with equations as well as an ancient one filled with text. But as an engineer, I didn’t want to have to create an unimpeachable page of future-tech equations, and I also didn’t want to just stick in some cliché, like the Schrödinger equation. So instead I found pages from Herodotus’ Histories, which describes the events depicted in the book, and was published just 50 years or so after they occurred. The older book is all Greek, and the newer one is a Greek-English parallel edition, something like what Anna and Indy might have referred to in the story.

Final art

I was very, very happy with how the final art came out:

Everything I want the prospective reader to know about the story is in there somewhere:

The cell phone in Anna’s hand, and Indy’s lighted collar, let us know that this is sci-fi
The ancient Greek clothing and background elements tell us that it’s time travel
Indy’s protective pose and collar hint that she’s an intelligent being, not just a giant dog
The center of the “time spiral” shows the little town in Greece that they’re thrown back to
The beetles’ robot eyes and glowing antennae are Easter eggs, which the reader will realize after reading the story
The color scheme and characters’ expressions convey the overall tone of hopeful seriousness

My last feedback, just before these final images, was a minor issue where the big beetle’s legs didn’t quite match those of a real Texas June bug. That’s in accordance with the principle of feedback progressing from the large to the small. By the end of the process, the only thing left to fix was this tiny detail!

Final thoughts

Here are a few principles that helped keep me focused during this long process.

Resist the urge to have your cover artist illustrate a scene from your book

A great book cover can convey many things about a book’s genre, characters, story and mood, all at the same time. Have you noticed how Netflix doesn’t use screenshots from movies as their cover images? It’s the same with books. There’s probably no single scene in your book that does everything you want the cover to do. And if you try, the resulting image can end up stiff and cluttered.

Give your artist enough freedom to do great work

Don’t be more specific than you have to be, and don’t nitpick details that don’t matter. If you’re too prescriptive, you’ll still get art that’s perfectly rendered. But it’ll be down at your level of aesthetic taste and judgement, instead of up at a great artist’s level. Put another way: if you’re eating at a Michelin-starred restaurant, don’t be too quick to reach for the salt shaker. You’ve got to trust the chef.

Keep it professional

There’s a difference between “objectively bad” and “not to my taste”. Art is highly subjective, so be careful not to phrase things in terms of good and bad when you’re really talking about whether you like it or not. You shouldn’t hire an artist who isn’t technically accomplished, so it will be very rare that you see something objective that needs to be fixed. You’re paying the bills, so you ultimately call the shots, but don’t make them feel bad if their taste doesn’t match yours.

Send positive feedback as well as negative

If you’re loving how the art is coming together—and you should be—then say so, and be specific about why! Everyone wants to feel good about their work. As the customer, we’re often focused on where things aren’t quite what we want. And artists do need to know when something isn’t working for you. But if your feedback is all negative, it can make the whole relationship strained. Don’t just be a critic, be a partner.