The Unexpected Challenge of Designing My Latest Book Cover 📚

When I first self-published my Filipino book back in 2013, after eight years of sharing stories online, creating book covers came easily to me—partly thanks to working as a designer’s assistant. After 15 years, I assumed that my incoming debut novel under my newest pen name would also come easily to me. Over the years, I’ve designed each of my covers, making sure they align with the essence of my stories. I always had a clear vision of how the cover should look—and the process felt natural.

But for my upcoming book In Another Time everything changed. For the first time, I’ve found myself facing a real challenge. I’ve gone through several concepts, each one falling just a little short of capturing the story.

Here’s a peek at some of the ideas I’ve been toying with at first:

As a reader, I’ve always gravitated toward cartoon/illustrated covers, so I wanted it for my books as well, no matter how much I hate the idea of these styles of trending covers. However, it feels wrong for me.

So I switched to using stock photos:

I even formatted the one to the right for the print copy, but nope. It still feels wrong. So, I decided to hire an illustrator. I found one with gorgeous work samples on Fiverr. But that was all it was. Only the sample was beautiful. What I get seems beautiful at first sight but after a closer look, I regret paying $80 for it.

I like the background, but I later found old AI-generated art very similar to it. So, I messaged the artist and she got very angry.

My exact words were:

Personally after looking at what you delivered I think you used a modified AI art, I can’t use it for my intended project.

Her replies:

Ai art what ? are kidding me ? i have created each leave of it do you want me to show you psds of it ?

Me:

You might not remember but I paid to get the psd. The layers only separates the background and the character, it didn’t help. Anyway, sorry if I’m mistaken about your art. However, as I said, I couldn’t use it for my intended project.

She never replied after this and I moved on and looked for another artist who captured not only my imagination but also my heart and so here’s my final design using her art.

Finding the right cover for this book has been harder than I imagined, but I’m excited to share the rest of this journey with you because even though this is the cover I wanted. It’s not what the readers wanted. After making a poll in Instagram. I decided that this would be my final book cover: