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Guest post by Roz Morris.

‘Never judge a book by its cover.’

Does anyone think that’s true? Of course not. A good cover creates the sizzle that sells your book. It somehow, through a delightful alchemy of imagery and typography, tantalizes the right kind of readers and steers away the ones who won’t like what’s on the pages. And of course, a bad cover does just the opposite.

Capturing your book’s essential quality is an art. But it’s as much down to you as to the person who designs your cover. A designer will only do as good a job as the briefing they get — and no one understands your book’s spirit as well as you do.

Too often, writers don’t pay enough attention to this. The question of what the cover should be like sneaks up and takes us by surprise, rather like all those other tiresome tasks like writing synopses. But the longer you spend mulling over what you think would be right for your cover, the better your decisions about it will be.

And, folks, this applies whether you’re going indie or being published conventionally.

Why do you need to be involved in design if you’re conventionally published?

In major publishing houses, the author rarely gets to meet the art department. You might go to meetings with marketing and editorial, your agent may or may not be there, but the cover seems to arrive as though it’s been delivered from another universe.

That’s fine if the designer picks exactly the right image and mood — and of course some do. Sometimes they can invent something brilliant you could never have thought of yourself. But designers are only human and these days publishers are stripped to the bone. The designer will usually not have time to read your book. They’ll get a brief from the editor, and they will probably be struggling to get it designed to a deadline. It is easy for them misjudge the book’s flavor (or even put the wrong blurb on the back!) — but by the time you see it, it’s usually far too late to change anything. Many authors end up disappointed with their covers and feel they were not kept in the loop.

I used to be a book editor and I found that when covers went wrong, it was because the designers hadn’t been given enough information to understand the book.

When a designer starts work on a cover, they generally search image libraries under likely-looking tags, or look up suitable illustrators. You have probably already done this, to an extent, in the course of your research. Most writers I know have stacks of images and reference books to help them flesh out scenes and settings. If you collect a cover briefing file as you go, it’s a pretty painless process — you might even want to go online and search for a few more that give the right vibe. If you give those to your editor as early as you can, you can ask for them to pass them to the art department as part of the briefing. Although you obviously have to let them do their jobs and apply their own judgement, a busy professional can only be grateful for some nudges that put them on the right path.

If you’re an indie publisher, of course, you have ultimate control. In that case, success depends on how well you brief the designer. Your designer may have impeccable credentials, but they can only do what you ask for. And you will have to judge if it’s right. It pays to get acquainted with how covers work for the age group, the readership and the genre.

Cover design is too important to be left as an afterthought, or in the hands of someone else. If you can learn the language of covers, you can help make sure your book gives buyers the right signals.

Roz Morris is a bestselling ghostwriter, editor and the author of Nail Your Novel – Why Writers Abandon Books and How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence, available from Amazon. Her website is http://www.rozmorris.wordpress.com and she blogs at http://www.nailyournovel.com. You can follow her on Twitter at w and if you’d like to know more about her fiction, at www.twitter.com/byrozmorris. My Memories of a Future Life will be available from August 30. http://www.mymemoriesofafuturelife.com