Add Drama To Your Book Art

Capturing the viewer with your art is no more important than when it’s on a book cover. Tommy Arnold reveals how to make potential readers linger.

- Tommy Arnold

There are so many images in our day-to-day world, all competing for our attention. As artists, we tend to think that sheer beauty through rendering is the key to getting attention, but the average viewer can’t tell the difference between something immaculately painted and something painted just well enough to do the trick.

You should certainly try to paint well, but you need to remember that your target audience is actually non-artists and that’s the vast majority of people. As a cover artist, my job is to make someone who wouldn’t have picked up a book or magazine stop, take notice, and pick it up. After that, my job is done.

This simple little interaction happens at something near the speed of light, and the time it would take for a potential buyer to “appreciate” an image doesn’t even come into play before they’ve made up their mind.

How can I make up their mind for them? I can simplify and organise my image in ways that make the image easy to look at and understand. I can make sure my cover is unlike the other images next to it on the shelf. I can make sure my image reads well from a distance as well as up close. I can ask the potential buyer questions in the form of an unresolved narrative, or try to bring my image to life by giving it a sense of movement. In every cover that I create, I try to use all these strategies and more if possible, because the battle for their attention is all-out war, and no one’s taking prisoners.

Sketching the idea