As usual, there were many questions related to cover design in our Ask Bethany House survey, but here’s one we haven’t heard before that (bonus!) gives me a chance to brag on our amazing staff.

“How large is your design team? How many covers are you working on at any given time? Your design team has produced some STUNNING covers!”

First of all, we totally agree—I’m always in awe of our art department. When in comes to people actually working in Bethany House’s office, we have…

• Paul – our creative director, who oversees all of our covers, including initial direction brainstorming and guiding covers through the feedback and revision process
• Kristen – who manages the details like taking notes in cover meetings, helping find the right models and costumes, and adding cover treatments
• Jenny – creates covers for many of our fiction authors, especially historical romances, as well as marketing materials
• Eric – usually works on nonfiction covers, but creates some of the promotional materials for our fiction books (ads, banners, bookmarks, etc.)
• Dan – same as Eric, leans more toward the nonfiction side of things except for marketing materials
• Chris – helps manage the designers’ job lists and keeps up technical tasks like uploading final covers to our website

In addition to these fantastic individuals, we use a number of freelance designers for some of our covers. Often, we’ll use the same designer to work on books by one author for consistency, unless we’re going in a totally new direction with the “feel” of their books.

As someone who has regularly attended cover design meetings along with representatives from our editorial department, I can tell you that I’m impressed with how designers can translate information from the author and our team and make it into something beautiful.

As for how many covers these designers work on, we divide our publishing calendar into three seasons: spring (all books coming out January-April), summer (May-August) and fall (September-December). That’s right, no winter! Each season, Bethany House has an average of 15 fiction books releasing, and often just as many nonfiction books. Now, of those, a freelance designer might only be working on one or two, but an in-house designer might be working on five or six…and that’s in addition to all of the newsletter banners and quote memes and miscellaneous other design jobs we send their way. Don’t forget, too, that back covers and spines also need to be designed!

If you’re curious to know who designed a book by one of your favorite authors, check the small print on either the back cover or the inside copyright page. You’ll often see them credited there.

To learn more about our cover design process, take a look at our archives on cover design, or follow our Instagram account, where we share a monthly video of the alternate designs for a new release.

Tell me about a cover design that you love so much you’d almost want to hang it on your wall.

When looking for a new cover-related question we hadn’t already answered in this blog series, here’s one from our survey that I found interesting: “What does the process for a cover photoshoot look like? You all find some great models!”

This was just one of many questions to our survey related to covers (if you’re interested in past cover posts, visit the archives here), so I thought I’d chat with Kristen Larson, our Art/Design Coordinator who helped me gather information and images for a blog post Lisa Bergren was doing about the cover of her book Selah.

Kristen, in addition to taking notes at all of our cover meetings and organizing our feedback, does tons of behind-the-scenes work for our covers. If you’ve ever appreciated a particularly cool prop or noticed the raised title treatment or cool texture of a cover, that’s probably her handiwork.

Q: Lots of the historical covers especially have really dramatic dresses. Where do you get the costumes?

Kristen: The costumes we use come from all over! Some we rent from out of state costume shops, some we have custom made, some we purchase, and some we rent local! Our favorite place in the Twin Cities is the Guthrie Costume Rentals, which rents out costumes from previous Guthrie performances. That’s where we got the dress we landed on for Selah.

Q: How do you decide on a cover model? Where do you find them?

Kristen: Our search for cover models is a fun one. Authors will send us the physical and personality descriptions of the character to be featured on the cover, and even include a reference photo they found online of what they were picturing in their heads when they were writing the book. We then scour our local talent agencies to find the best fit.

We sent some of the images to Lisa for her post, “Modeling for Selah,” and she also interviewed the cover model who posed for the book, so consider this a Part Two to her Part One and check out her blog (and the contest there) to learn more.

Readers, is there a costume on a book cover that you’d love to wear?

Questions about cover design are by far the most popular ones we received to our Ask Bethany House survey. And with good reason: art can sometimes seem a little bit like magic, and not many of us get a glimpse into the process of creating the lovely images that grace our favorite books.

Here’s the question I’ll be answering today: “What does the Bethany House team consider when deciding on a final cover?”

First of all, here’s a list of who’s on the team. The author starts the process by providing character and setting descriptions, covers with looks they love, and ideas for scenes to portray. Our art director and designers work with Bethany House editors and marketers to get the right look. And we always get feedback from the sales team as well, since they’re the ones who know the buyers who will be putting books in stores.

At the beginning stages, a designer will show the editors and marketers several sketches or rough stock photography mock-ups to give us an idea of what the scene on the cover might look like. Obviously, we’re not commenting on the details at that point, but we will indicate a direction by making bigger-picture design choices like whether a character should be pictured close up or as a small figure in the background, what sort of scene would be most interesting, or whether to include options that split the design in half with a title bar.

After the photoshoot (which I’ll cover in more detail in a future Ask BHP post), the designer will take different images and arrange them into designs like the ones the team agreed on, creating a draft version of several cover options. The examples below are alternate covers for A Light on the Hill. They haven’t been polished and tweaked, and occasionally the design team might ask for a major change like “move the model from 1 into the scene of 2,” but we’re starting to get to a clearer idea of the cover.

In this case, while all of these design concepts are striking, the team didn’t care for the harsh color scheme of the first. The third option was some people’s first choice and others’ second, but eventually the argument was made that it would be harder to continue that look for the whole series while still remaining distinct. (There was also one team member who pointed out that the sun being right there on the city made the title really literal.)

We all loved the striking image of the protagonist facing us, and the prominent title. Here is what the final cover looked like once the designer made some tweaks (including moving the series name and using a different image from the photoshoot):

Here are just a few of the things we consider when giving suggestions to the designer:

• Do the colors of the cover match the tone of the story? (Is it too dark for a lighthearted story or too cheery for a suspense novel?)
• How can we hint at the setting or historical time period in the background, clothing, or fonts? Is there anything about any of those elements that seems mismatched?
• Is the background too distracting or cluttered?
• What’s the balance between type that’s interesting but also legible? (This especially matters because the book will be showing up in a thumbnail online.)
• What sort of reader will be attracted to this design?
• If there’s a model, does he or she convey the essence of the character as described by the author?
• Is this cover too similar to one on an already-published book that readers of the genre would be familiar with? Is it too drastically different from everything else like it?
• Would you want to pick this book up just by looking at the cover?

There are individual questions for each cover too, of course. For A Light on the Hill in particular, we talked about the best way to show that the protagonist is ashamed of the brand on her face, and how we could establish that the novel was biblical since it doesn’t have the name of a key Old Testament figure in the title to give readers that cue.

So there’s a little glimpse into the process we use to determine what cover makes it on the final book. I love bragging about our designers…they do excellent work! If you enjoyed this post and would like to see more cover alternates, Jocelyn Green wrote about the making of her latest release, A Refuge Assured, on her blog. Be sure to check it out!

So, readers, what’s an element of book cover design that you love to see? Are you able to complete the phrase, “I’ll be drawn to a book almost instantly if its cover…”?