Do you need a cover artist?
In my previous blog post about the purpose of book covers, my examples all had custom cover illustrations. And to get one of those, you need a cover artist! But there have been plenty of very successful science fiction and fantasy books whose covers don’t feature custom illustrations. For example, check out the first book of the enormously successful Dresden Files series:
Storm Front by Jim Butcher
This is photo-manipulated from stock images, and it totally gets the job done. The shadowy wizard/cowboy, the magical staff with “matorikkusu” (matrix) inexplicably written on it in backwards katakana, the noir color scheme. The pull quote makes it clear that this is detective fiction with a magical twist. I have 18 novels of this series on my shelf, and loved them all.
The same goes for this book:
Dies the Fire by S. M. Stirling
This is the first book in a New York Times bestselling series that I bought the next 14 volumes of. It’s all there, right up front: a postapocalyptic city in the background, horses pulling an inoperative car, a grim-looking gentleman carrying a sword. Surprise surprise, it’s a story about what happens when all our fancy technology stops working one day, destroying most of human civilization and immersing the rest in a desperate struggle to survive.
There are plenty of great folks out there who do these kinds of covers. Alan Dino Hebel and Ian Koviak at theBookDesigners designed my book cover around a custom illustration, but they mostly do their own covers using similar techniques. I also really like the work of Lance Buckley, who does very cool and subtle lighting effects on his cover typography.
So, you can have a fabulous cover with just a designer, not an illustrator, and it’ll cost you about half as much. So why bother with an illustration?
One reason is the genre. Science fiction and fantasy novels often have custom illustrated covers, from the classic Boris Vallejo era of the seventies:
The Chronicles of Amber volume 1 by Roger Zelazny
Right up to the likes of this recent killer cover by Tommy Arnold:
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
But the main reason is this: A custom illustration can add tons of visual interest and make your cover stick in people’s minds. I can still remember the covers of books I read decades ago! Whereas with stock art, unless it’s done very carefully and with extremely good taste, it can have a feeling of generic-ness to it, especially when there are recognizable human faces involved.