We’ve all heard the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but let’s be honest—everybody does. While the cover design on a book doesn’t necessarily make-or-break the sales of every individual book, it is the first thing a reader notices. Before reading the back-cover blurb or looking up reviews online, the reader’s first instinct comes from their impressions of the cover design.
What were the main cover design trends for 2017? And what beauty do we have to look forward to with 2018 releases?
To start with, many genres have a standard for how their covers are constructed. Since the cover often sets the original tone for a novel, covers generally have some sort of stereotype to live up to. For example, when reading a true crime novel, you wouldn’t want the cover to be abundant with rose petals and rainbows. Instead, you would be looking for a more gritty cover—something dark, potentially with boxy lettering to clue you into the world of the book. These tropes are not likely to go away with the new year, but they are likely to enhance themselves to appear new and genuine and exciting.
Some of the more recent trends of 2017 include the use of muted colors and nature imagery, mainly found on young adult and women’s fiction covers. A few great examples showcasing these trends are Anna Todd’s The Spring Girls, Anne-Marie McLemore’s Wild Beauty, and our very own title, The Ocean in My Ears by Meagan Macvie. Going on theme with Pantone’s last few rounds of “color of the year,” these novels, along with many others from 2017, have striking covers that continue to catch the attention of readers worldwide.
With those trends in mind, what can we expect going into 2018? While our upcoming release, 50 Hikes in the Tillamook and Clatsop State Forests, is beautifully on par with nature imagery, a few more trends are expected to spike in the cover design world within the next few months. According to The Digital Reader, we are expected to see a number of things including bold typography, minimalistic backgrounds, “throwback” styles, and hand-drawn covers, among many others.
What do you think about these upcoming trends? And what are your favorite cover reveals of 2018 so far?