Start with two sentences on what the book is. Add one sentence on how it should feel. Then do the part most briefs skip: place the book on multiple genre axes, and name the wrong directions you do not want the cover to drift toward.

For example:

A quiet literary novel set on the coast of Maine, with a thread of grief running through it. The cover should code first as literary: spare, composed, restrained. It should not read as beach-read commercial fiction, cozy mystery, or memoir.

Or:

An upmarket domestic drama with a slow-building edge — less crime than reckoning. The cover should sit between literary drama and quiet suspense. It should not read as psychological thriller, women’s-fiction pastel, or true crime.

The sentence that begins “It should not read as” is doing real work. Genre is defined by what you exclude as much as what you include, and most books at the border of literary, commercial, suspense, domestic drama, or coming-of-age can slide in several predictable wrong directions.

A designer who knows the three directions you don’t want can skip them before round one. Two axes, named exclusions. Every brief should have them.

2. The audience — book behavior, not demographics

Give the designer one paragraph on who buys this book. Not just demographics. Book behavior.

For example: readers of literary fiction who buy one to three hardcovers a year; readers with strong indie-bookstore overlap; the person who pre-orders Lauren Groff, Liz Moore, or Tana French and is willing to try a debut if the cover gives the right signal.

Demographics tell the designer who the reader is. Book behavior tells her why that reader reaches for one cover over another.

Name the channels, too. A book that will live primarily on indie-bookstore face-out tables has different requirements from one that must survive mostly as an Amazon thumbnail. The first needs to hold its own at 6 × 9 on a wooden table, in imperfect light, beside ten other new releases. The second has to read at 120 pixels wide on a phone.

A cover can do both. But if neither use case is named in the brief, you may end up with a cover that works beautifully in one environment and fails in the other.

3. Palette and tone — where most briefs fall apart

Palette is not “colors I like.” It is the emotional register of the book translated into color, contrast, and temperature.

This is where many briefs get vague. Authors reach for words like muted, moody, literary, atmospheric. Those words are not useless, but they are not enough. Designers need the logic behind the palette, not just the mood.

Write the palette section as five decisions.

First: saturation. Is the world of the book muted, saturated, stripped down, lush, bruised, sun-bleached, high contrast? For literary fiction, “muted and organic” is often the default, but you still need to say it. If the book has moments of surprise, danger, or warmth, name whether you want one controlled accent rather than neutrality across the whole cover.

Second: warm or cool dominance, and why. Warm palettes — amber, ochre, rust, brown, cream — often suggest intimacy, nostalgia, memory, heat, or decay. Cool palettes — gray, blue, green, slate, washed teal — suggest distance, reflection, interiority, dread, or restraint. Many literary covers live in a hybrid space because the books themselves are doing more than one emotional job.

Don’t say “cool and moody.” Say “dusty blues and driftwood grays, with one restrained warm note.”

Third: seasonal lean. Dawn, dusk, high summer, late fall, early winter. Season carries emotional information before the reader has processed the literal palette. A dusk-leaning cover feels transitional and faintly ominous. A late-winter cover feels isolated, spare, and hard-won. High summer often reads more commercial or expansive, which may be right for some books and wrong for others.

Fourth: the contrast point. A cover needs one point of visual contrast to read at thumbnail. Name it. A single bright area against muted surroundings. A warm lit window inside a cool landscape. One saturated object in an otherwise washed palette. The contrast should feel embedded in the image, not pasted on as decoration.

Fifth: what to avoid. This is as important as what to include. No black-red thriller palettes. No neon. No pastels. No glossy high-saturation treatment. No pretty sunset. No ominous teal sky. A designer who knows the three palettes you don’t want can avoid three revision rounds before they happen.

A usable palette line might look like this:

Dusty blues, driftwood grays, and muted ochres, leaning late winter. One controlled point of warmth for thumbnail readability — a single lit window or small fire, embedded in the image rather than treated as a graphic accent. Avoid black-red thriller palettes, neon, soft pastels, and high-gloss contrast.

That is designable. “Moody but readable” is not.

4. Comp covers — surgical references, not a mood board

Use three to six published covers near your book in genre, voice, or market position. For each one, identify one specific element to borrow. Not the whole cover. One element.

This is one of the biggest upgrades you can make to a brief.

If you give a designer six comp covers without saying what each one is doing, she has to average them. The average of six good covers is usually a mediocre cover. But if she knows you want the muted palette from one, the non-literal figure treatment from another, and the type-image interaction from a third, she has three clean moves to work with.

For example:

Comp A: Borrow the muted palette and non-literal depiction of the figure. Do not borrow the composition or photographic style.

Comp B: Borrow the fragmented crop and the sense of internal pressure beneath a polished surface. Do not borrow the palette.

Comp C: Borrow the way the typography sits inside the image rather than on top of it. Do not borrow the color treatment.

Three comps. Three moves. No ambiguity.

Keep the list short. Three to five comps is usually the working range. More than six and you’re asking the designer to prioritize references, which is your job, not hers.

When you name a comp, name it by title and by function: borrow the palette, not the image; borrow the crop, not the type; borrow the restraint, not the object. Link to a version the designer can see at real size. Thumbnail-only comps are worse than no comps.

Good sources for cover references include The Casual Optimist, Spine Magazine, Literary Hub’s annual cover roundups, The Book Cover Review, and Fonts In Use. The freshest ideas often come from covers slightly outside your direct genre — close enough to be relevant, far enough not to become imitation.

5. Visual material from the manuscript — primary, secondary, tertiary

A brief that names what is physically inside the book is stronger than a brief that only names how the cover should feel. Designers work with images. The best images usually come from the manuscript, not from generic genre vocabulary.

Organize the book’s visual material in three tiers.

Primary: one to three dominant images or symbols that could carry the front cover by themselves. A coastal literary novel might offer a bleached dock at low tide, a lone figure cropped at the shoulders, or a kitchen window reflecting sky. A Southern family drama might offer a screen door caught mid-swing, a hand on a porch railing, or dogwood blooming against a gray sky.

One of these may become the cover. The others may become back-cover anchors, endpaper ideas, or interior motifs.

Secondary: five to eight supporting images that reinforce the book’s world. These should be specific: an object the protagonist carries, a view from a particular window, a piece of clothing, a recurring landscape, a room seen from one angle. Small and exact beats large and generic.

Tertiary: textures and details. Paper grain. Weathered paint. Water stains. Old photography. Wood. Fabric weave. Dust on a surface. These should not lead the cover, but they can give the designer a vocabulary for overlays, typographic treatments, and subtle visual cohesion.

The point of this tiered list is not to hand the designer a menu and make her choose. It is to show that you have looked at your own book as a designed object, not only as a manuscript.

6. Typography — named registers, not “strong type”

“Strong typography” is not a brief. “Literary-looking type” is not a brief.

Typography has registers. Naming the register you want — ideally with one or two reference covers — helps prevent a cover from drifting into the wrong market signal.

A few useful registers:

Bold uppercase sans serif with wide tracking. Confident, clean, legible at small scale. It can signal literary drama with authority. The weight gives seriousness; the spacing keeps it restrained.

Stacked, weighty sans serif. Title set across several lines, with mass distributed across the cover. This works when the title needs presence and the image is doing something quieter.

Custom hand-drawn titling. Irregular, unstable, and specific. This can push a composed image toward psychological tension or make a cover feel more singular.

Expressive handwritten or script-adjacent lettering. Intimate, personal, slightly imperfect. Useful for emotional literary work, coming-of-age, or memoir-adjacent fiction, but risky if it tips too soft.

Classical serif with editorial presence. Useful when the book is more literary than genre — a character study, family drama, or quiet suspense novel. Look at FSG, Graywolf, NYRB, and Tin House covers for this kind of register.

Specify one primary register and, if needed, one backup. Keep the cover to a clean hierarchy: title, author name, optional descriptor. Do not pile on fonts just because each one looks good in isolation.

If you can identify the typeface used on a comp, name it. Fonts In Use is useful for this. But the register matters more than the exact font. You are not asking the designer to copy. You are showing her the market language.

7. Titling treatment — type and image as one problem

How the title interacts with the image is its own design decision. It is often better to name a preferred treatment than to leave it entirely open.

Useful approaches include:

Tucked or embedded. The type sits inside the scene — within foliage, architecture, shadow, or negative space — so it feels part of the world rather than placed on top of it.

Warped or distorted by the image. The title is rippled, blurred, submerged, stretched, or otherwise affected by the image’s physical logic.

Emerging from texture. The title appears carved, pressed, burned, lifted, or pulled out of a material that belongs to the book’s world.

Physically interrupted by a figure. A body, hand, object, or shadow occludes part of the title. The figure and type share the same visual plane.

Integrated as an object. The title exists inside the image as a sign, inscription, marquee, carved surface, label, or other physical object.

Name one preferred direction and one fallback. A designer who knows you want embedded type is less likely to waste a round on flat title-over-image layouts.

8. Format, must-haves, forbidden elements, and timeline

This is the mechanical section. It is not glamorous, but it prevents expensive confusion.

Include trim size, spine width if known, format requirements, and any special production treatments you are considering: hardcover dust jacket, paperback, ebook, audiobook, foil, spot gloss, embossing, deckled edges, printed case, endpapers. If the spine width is not final, provide the page count, trim size, paper stock, and printer specs so the designer can calculate it when needed.

List must-haves: title, author name, subtitle if there is one, “A Novel” designation, publisher mark, series information, and any blurb or award language that is already confirmed. Do not brief a quote you do not have yet.

Then list forbidden elements. No silhouetted women. No birds in flight. No hand-lettered wedding-invitation script. No teal sky. No shallow-focus figure in a field. No stock-photo thriller lane. This is not negativity; it is efficiency. A designer who has to guess what you hate will eventually guess wrong.

Add a deliverables clause before the first sketch. Confirm what you will receive at final delivery: editable source files, printer-ready PDFs built to your press’s specifications, ebook cover files, audiobook square art, paperback or dust-jacket variants if needed, and any layered assets you are paying for.

This is not a detail to save for the end. You want to know the file policy before you sign, not when the designer has moved on and you need to update the cover.

Finally, name the timeline. Give the final-file deadline and the date it derives from — print run, ARC upload, catalog deadline, retailer metadata lock. Name the approver too. Is it you alone? You and an editor? You and a publisher? Too many unnamed approvers turn revision rounds into committee drift.

Three rounds is a normal working structure: round one for direction, round two for refinement, round three for polish. If the scope needs more than that, define it up front.

Before any comps — the read-back

Before the designer begins visual work, ask for a one-paragraph read-back of the brief.

Not sketches. Not a mood board. Just the designer’s understanding of the assignment in her own words.

For example:

What I heard: this book sits between literary drama and quiet suspense. The cover should code literary first, not commercial thriller or beach-read fiction, with a muted palette and one warm accent for thumbnail readability. Typography should sit in either the bold-sans or stacked-weight register, with the title tucked into the image or subtly warped by it. For round one, I’d like to try two directions: one primarily typographic with minimal imagery, and one image-forward with a tightly cropped figure and restrained type.

That paragraph is the test. If her read matches the book you wrote, proceed. If it doesn’t — if she heard “commercial thriller” when you meant “literary suspense,” or “upmarket women’s fiction” when you meant “literary drama” — fix the brief before she designs.

Fixing a brief is cheap. Fixing a round-one misfire costs a week.

Round one: two directions, not one

A strong round one usually gives you two or three distinct directions. Not three versions of the same cover. Different theories of the cover.

At this stage, your job is not to move a title up half an inch or debate whether the blue should be warmer. Your job is to choose the direction whose promise matches the book.

For a literary novel with suspense pressure, a useful pair might be:

One primarily typographic direction with a small embedded texture drawn from the book’s world.

One image-forward direction with a tightly cropped figure and restrained type.

Each makes a different promise to the reader. Pick the promise, not the prettiest isolated image.

If the designer sends one direction only, ask why. If she sends three that are essentially the same, she may be hedging. What you want is difference with purpose.

Rounds two and three — and the rule that saves you from round four

Round two is where the chosen direction becomes real. Typography tightens. Palette gets specific. Image treatment lands. The hierarchy starts to behave across front cover, spine, back cover, ebook, and thumbnail.

Round three is final polish: type weight, spacing, small color adjustments, spine treatment, back-cover composition, export details.

Here is the rule: if you are still changing the concept at round three, something upstream slipped. Either the brief didn’t capture the book, the first direction was chosen for the wrong reason, or the project’s positioning has genuinely changed.

More rounds rarely fix a brief problem. They usually calcify it.

If the concept still feels wrong at round three, pause and have the larger conversation. Don’t keep sanding the wrong object.

Payment, rights, and one common trap

For serious custom cover work, pricing varies widely by designer, experience, illustration needs, licensing complexity, and format scope. Many professional cover projects come in below the premium range, but for trade-quality custom work with full print, ebook, audiobook, and marketing deliverables, expect the budget to rise quickly — especially if original illustration, complex compositing, or extensive jacket work is involved.

A common structure is half up front and half on final delivery, though some designers use milestone payments.

The bigger issue is rights. Confirm what you are buying: print, ebook, audiobook, advertising, social media, retailer listings, press materials, foreign-rights presentations, and future editions. If stock photography or licensed illustration is involved, confirm those licenses separately. Do not assume the designer’s fee automatically covers every use you need.

Also confirm exclusivity. You do not want a contract that allows the same final cover art, or a near-identical treatment built from the same stock image, to be reused for another author’s book. This happens more often than authors expect in stock-heavy workflows.

A cover brief is not a limitation on the designer’s creativity. It is a guardrail that lets her do her best work for your specific book.

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