The cover mistakes that keep turning up
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R. S. Breed Founder
A cover has one job at first contact: tell a browsing reader what kind of book this is, at roughly the size of a postage stamp. Most cover mistakes come from forgetting one half of that sentence.
Designing at full size. It looks great filling your monitor. Then it shows up in a search result next to twenty others and the title is unreadable and the image is mush. Shrink it to thumbnail size early and often. If you can't read the title at that size, nobody else can either.
Wrong genre signals. A cosy mystery in a dark thriller palette, or a romance that looks like literary fiction. Readers shop by pattern. Go to the bestseller list for your exact subgenre, screenshot the top forty and look at what they share: colour, type, whether there's a figure, what the figure is doing. You don't have to copy it. You do have to speak the language.
Fonts. The ones that come bundled with everything, which readers have seen on a thousand fete flyers. Script fonts that turn to spaghetti when small. Four different fonts on one cover. Two is plenty, and one is often better.
Too much going on. The sword, the castle, the dragon, the locket and the moon, all fighting for space. Pick the one image that carries the mood and let it breathe.
Recognisable stock photos. Some models turn up on a lot of covers, and readers in some genres notice more than you'd think.
Low contrast. Pale title on a pale background, or dark on dark. Check the whole thing in greyscale and see what survives.
Generated art you haven't looked at closely. Hands, lettering, jewellery, anything that should be symmetrical. Some readers now pass on a book because of it. And KDP has asked for AI-content disclosure since 2023, so know how you'd answer that question before you upload.
Forgetting the print cover exists. The spine and back are a whole second design job. A strong ebook front stuck onto a plain-colour wrap looks unfinished on a shelf.
If you're paying a designer, send them five or six comparable covers from your subgenre rather than three paragraphs about your plot. They need to know where the book sits, not what happens in it.