Finding the Best Stock Photos for Your Book Cover

An adage tells us not to judge books by their covers, but that’s just what everyone’s going to do anyway, especially when talking about actual books. If your name isn’t quite enough to sell the book on its own, the cover design might be. On the other hand, a bad cover might drive away from the otherwise interested buyer.

It doesn’t matter whether you are planning to sell your book online or in a brick-and-mortar store or even as an audiobook. Front cover, or its thumbnail is the first thing a potential buyer will see when browsing the book section. And yes, the reports of the death of printed books have been greatly exaggerated. While the number of bookstores has been declining, printed books remain the most popular medium with audiobooks gaining popularity and e-books losing some of their charm lately.

So, the design is essential. But a good plan costs a lot. Well, not always. But before talking about the cover images themselves, let’s talk about the general design guidelines and current design trends a bit.

We won’t go into too much detail about the cover typography here, but good typography is essential and should match the overall design. Handwritten or big bold sans serif fonts for fiction and clean and crisp fonts for non-fiction are popular choices.

You may have seen the words “Millennial pink” and “Gen-Z yellow” thrown around. They aren’t witty comebacks to “OK boomer” but popular contemporary design colors. Millennial pink is a dusty pink color popular in fashion magazines, Tumblr, and books aimed at the young and millennials. Celebrities like Beyonce and Kendall Jenner popularized Gen-Z yellow, and it remains a popular color for dust jackets and book covers. Trends change fast, and we don’t know what will become popular in 2020. Pantene color of the year is always a trendsetter, so maybe we’ll see Classic Blue in bookstores this year. But keep in mind that using something that doesn’t have real staying power can make your design look outdated fast.

What about the actual cover images then? First, think about your genre and audience. Each style has its stereotypical theme. Fantasy novels have knights, swords, and dragons. Planets, androids, and spaceships are ubiquitous in science fiction. They might be cliches, but that’s partially what the buyer is expecting to find. Don’t always aim for the least common denominator, though. Floral background and a shirtless beefcake on the cover signals a romance novel but may drive away everyone except the lovesick and romance hungry.

When you have the theme in mind, you need to think about the style you wish to go for. Making an exceptional design takes some experience, but there is one affordable shortcut that takes advantage of already proficient designers: Stock photos. There are stock images of almost every theme with many different styles, so there should be something for every need. So how to find what you need? Dreamstime employs a powerful search engine where any search keywords can be filtered with different modifiers. You can limit your search to only images with people, choose pictures that haven’t been used before to avoid using the same image as someone else, apply desired color composition, exclude undesired keywords, and so on. Choices are almost endless. For inspiration you can check the editor’s choice section for some of our popular images.

Finally, a couple of useful tips: Choose a few different covers and run them through a test audience. With stock images, this won’t be prohibitively expensive. Also, I would avoid the so-called “free stock” sites. Any good public domain images are probably already in use in a million different places. You would want your book cover to be unique.

When you have decided on your cover image, make sure you get the correct image license. There are licenses for every need, from online publishing to printing.