How to design a Children’s Book Cover

I’m soon relaunching my Scaredy Cats KickStarter project.

One thing that bothered me, once I had launched previously, was the cover. I loved it, but after a while I realised that it was probably not the right cover. The style of the cat on the front of the book, did not fit with the illustrations inside.

Publishers often re-cover books with different styles, but I thought maybe it was also a bit too sophisticated for the age group the books are intended for and said something different to what was inside.

So I spent some time trying to do a watercolour version, but couldn’t get that right. In the end I decided to do a hybrid. Take the elements I loved about the first cover and add them to a physically drawn version.

The moral of the tale is that the first drawing is not necessarily the finished version. You can keep tweaking the design and a little time and distance is good – allowing you to see the design with free eyes.