Your book cover matters, so it’s important to get it right.
I love book covers and I’d love to design yours.
I’ve got a passion for eye-catching design and always aim to make a cover that not just matches the heart of your book, but one that stands out in a sea of same-y design trends.
I marry 15 years of design, illustration, fine art and self-publishing experience with a robust arsenal of artistic and creative skills. I prioritize working with LGBTQ+ and BIPOC authors to give their book an unforgettable face, but am of course happy to work with anybody.
Here’s just a sample of my design work:
Try Finger But Hole is a notebook cover design that I printed, foiled and sold in my Etsy shop. The Care and Keeping of Lesser Demons is a fake book using real paper textures, old woodcuts, a scorching pentagram, and text with an antiqued ink bleed effect with hand-painted adjustments.
In The Woods is a fake full cover for a horror-thriller complete with warped, blurred text and some celluloid-y film over the top of a stock image. Planet Rasputin is a real cover I did for my friend Oli Johns. It features a custom digital painting of an alien wasteland that wraps around to the back cover.
Everlasting Tapeworm is another fake book, this one featuring a custom digital painting and a really fun ‘old paperback’ texture I scanned and made myself from a ratty old copy of Dracula. The cover for Vernon Lee’s story collection Hauntings is one I plan to release myself.
Devotion makes use of an Open Access photograph of a medieval statue of St. Barbara. This is paired with an old paper scan and text elegantly arranged with just a hint of weathering, suggesting a contemplative read lies within. Enter the Megatube is a cyber-thriller about… tubes! It’s not a real book, but you can tell the computer in it would be evil, and the world dystopian.
These two are album covers for albums by bands that don’t exist. Dripping Lucifer takes art from the Met museum’s Open Access section, pairs it with bleedy, fuzzy, super-chrome text for a crazy dungeon synth album. Paw Prince is a joke band from me and my friends’ Sprawl ttrpg game. They’re a catboy boy band and I imagine their music is intolerable! The photos are all from unsplash (with some, uh, subtle editing on one of them to turn the singer into a catboy), and the Paw Prince sticker I made myself for the job.
My favorite covers to design are ornate & historical, and my favorite genres to work with are historical fiction, horror (of all flavors) and surrealism. You’ll make me a very happy designer if you give me a style you like and let me mimic it as closely as I can!
I offer full cover work (front, spine and back) and cover art and illustration. If you’re interested in commissioning me for cover art, please see my art commissions page. If you know you want custom art, but don’t know who to hire, I can help you with that! I know tons of fantastic artists who work in all sorts of styles and mediums that I can bring in to work with us.
Because the scope of what I can do for a single cover is so large—you might want a custom digital painting for the art as well as design (more expensive), or we might find the perfect stock photo (less expensive)—I don’t have fixed rates. Generally, covers start at around $350 and go up from there. Extra fancy and lush covers with custom art, lettering and all the works, can easily reach $1000. Please email me at thornapplepress@gmail.com with your book details, intended publication date, and design idea and we can chat about how to bring your vision to life. I can give you a quote then, once I know what the work will entail.
If you have a fixed budget, I’m happy to explore what we could do within that budget to make you something perfect for your book and fantastic to look at. If you’re a trans writer with a smaller budget, give me an email anyway 🙂
If you’re new to emailing designers, here’s a handy checklist of what I need to know about the project:
– Book title and genre
– Book length (in formatted pages) and size
– If you have any ideas for what you want your cover to be (it’s okay if you don’t!)
– Cover and book inspiration: feel free to attach character/setting art, link to pinterest mood boards, book covers or art you really love, or anything else like that.
– When you’re planning to publish your book
– The date at which you’d like to have the front cover done so you can begin promotion
This will give me a good idea of what you want, I can assess the work required and give you a quote. To help you plan for payment, I require half up front and half upon completion.
Again, my email is thornapplepress@gmail.com. I look forward to hearing from you 🙂