How do you get a great book cover? We started by writing a design brief.

The final edits on Chasing Money are complete, and now it’s time for the next steps toward publishing. Mission Point Press is going to get the book formatted for publication, and has recommended a graphic designer for the cover design. My wife, the marketing expert, thinks it is really important that we get the cover design done right, and so she spent some time working with me on a design brief to spell out our goals and our ideas. Here’s what we sent to the designer:

Cover design goals

• Create a cover that intrigues thriller readers in bookstores, online, and even in a thumbnail image.
• The cover design needs to work for advertising the book. We’ll test this on Facebook.
• We want a design we can re-use as the background theme for my website – we’ll update it to match.
• The cover design needs to be extensible to future books in this series (I’ve got six plotted out.)
• Most importantly, I want a book cover that I like and can be proud to call my own.

Book description

Most investor pitch meetings don’t end in murder – but then Marty and Bo haven’t had a lot of luck lately. They’ve been struggling to keep their startup business alive. It’s not high-tech, it’s not highly successful and the pressure to find capital has strained their bank accounts and Marty’s marriage.

So when Nico Scava offered to invest they eagerly accepted. He had money, connections in the art world, and a creative idea, but maybe they should have asked more questions. Now Nico’s dead and they’re on the hook for whatever scheme he was running. The Russian mob is after them, and if they don’t find $10 million and a mysterious missing painting in the next few days they’ll be dead too. 

Their frantic chase will lead them from a cabin in the Oregon woods to a Portland strip club, from an aging artist to a bogus baron, and deep into the history of a missing masterpiece that someone is willing to kill to obtain. As the bodies pile up, Marty and Bo will have some tough choices to make about how far they’ll go to protect their families, their company, and themselves.

Book series plan

Sorry reader, I’m not going to share this with you. But I wanted the graphic designer to know that I’ve got six books planned for Marty and Bo, with some basic information about what happens in each, so that she can be thinking about what kind of cover design would work across this series.

Ideal reader profile

My wife says in business marketing this is called the Ideal Customer Profile. You think about the one person in the world who epitomizes the kind of person who wants your product, or in my case, wants to read my book. Then you design your cover to attract that person. We’re calling him Dave. He’s 65, lives in Oregon, and is an avid reader of thrillers. He is newly retired from a career in business, so he’s got the time to read and is going to find a book about startups appealing. A million dollars and a mysterious missing painting, the Russian mob chasing two ordinary guys, and a backdrop of Nazi loot – these all make the story sound even better to him. He’s a fan of books by Elmore Leonard, Dan Brown, James Patterson and Daniel Silva, and he’s ready for a book that one reader has called “The DaVinci Code for grownups.”

Desired emotion

We want the book cover to communicate danger and darkness. This is a noir crime thriller with morally compromised protagonists. The heroes are not tough guys, cops, or ex-military – they are ordinary businessmen who are trying to scratch out a living. Everyone in the book is chasing money, and the bad choices that the heroes make (like partnering with Nico in the first place, not going to the police, etc.) will have deadly consequences.

Design ideas

Designers will often ask authors to share their ideas about compelling symbols from the book, or other design ideas. My wife and I came up with three different concepts that we thought might provide a starting point:

Concept A: The first murder victim

A simple, bold illustrated design in red, black, and white, showing the silhouette of a dead man in a chair, possibly with some drops of blood or a pool of blood beneath him. In the first chapter of Chasing Money, Nico Scava is duck taped to a kitchen chair in a cabin in the woods, and then shot in the head and killed. It’s a shocking event that sets the entire story in motion. It’s an image that is burned into the brains of Marty and Bo and referred to again and again in future scenes. The image of the murder victim in that chair would be a powerful symbol for the cover.

Book covers using silhouettes

Concept B: The setting

A photographic image of a car racing down a road in the Oregon woods. It’s the fall, late afternoon or early evening, misty or dark, and two men, Marty and Bo are in the car. The road is lined with towering Douglas fir trees. They are fleeing the cabin where their business partner has just been killed. The image needs to convey danger and the chase on which they’ve embarked. We thought that an image that communicates the setting of the novel might appeal to buyers and bookstores in the Pacific Northwest. The future novels won’t all be set in Oregon, but they will be in interesting locations that could appeal to new readers.

Book covers that emphasize location

Concept C: The missing painting

An image that’s based on the mysterious missing painting at the heart of this thriller. I don’t want to show the whole painting – that would give away too much of the story. But perhaps a small detail could be shown, or the background of the painting could be used as the background for the cover of the book. Or maybe an empty frame would be enough to communicate the salient point. I’m unsure about this idea though. Most of the examples I’ve seen of art crime book covers emphasize the art, not the danger, and I’m not sure that’s right for Chasing Money. And art probably won’t be at the center of the other books I’m planning for this series. If the designer can find a creative solution that incorporates this idea, and leaves room to go in different directions in the future I’ll be thrilled, but I’m not pinning my hopes on it.

Art crime book covers

A combination of concepts?

Is there a way to combine some of these very different concepts into one compelling cover for Chasing Money? Who knows. I’m eager to see what the graphic designer comes up with. And to help her with that, we added pictures of nine more thriller covers to the design brief, which might provide inspiration.

More of my favorite thriller covers

Typography and layout

We let the designer know that I prefer simple, bold typography like that used on the book covers of The Dry, The Chalk Man, A Double Life, Everybody Knows, The Last Mona Lisa, Stillhouse Lake, and Blacktop Wasteland.

And, we provided the priority order for the layout, which is:

• Title – Chasing Money – very large text
• Author – Michael Balter – medium text
• Space for a possible “money quote” from a review site 
• The sub-title – A Marty and Bo Thriller – small text

We also provided some guidance on the copy for the back cover. I hope to have three solid quotes from other authors or review sites to use here – but I don’t have that copy yet. I do have a short version of the book description that we provided, along with a short version of my bio, the URL for my website, the Mission Point Press logo, and the ISBN information.

What not to do

We closed the design brief with some guidance on symbols I wanted the designer to avoid. I asked her to please stay away from images of men in business suits or with briefcases. It’s easy to find stock photos with one or both of these elements, but they wouldn’t be true to Marty and Bo. That’s just not how entrepreneurs dress – at least not on the west coast. They tend to wear casual pants, a decent shirt but no tie, and maybe a sports jacket. If they have money they signal that through expensive watches or high-end shoes. And I haven’t seen a briefcase like the one on the cover of Her Deadly Game in years.

What will the designer come up with?

I’m waiting eagerly to see the first drafts and will post the best concepts here for feedback. If you want to see them too, sign up for my newsletter or follow me on Facebook or Pinterest.

Michael

P.S. All the book cover images in this post are linked to the current Kindle versions of the books on Amazon. However, when we linked to them, I was surprised to see that several of the covers have been changed, and, in my opinion, not necessarily for the better. They are excellent thrillers though and I encourage you to give them a read.