How to find a book cover designer

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been researching book cover designers. I started by going through the list of cover designers that Joanna Penn has on her website (https://www.thecreativepenn.com/bookcoverdesign/). It's not an exhaustive list, but I needed to start somewhere and these were people that either Joanna Penn had used herself, or who came recommended to her. There are about 70 names on the list I think and I looked at every site, plus another set of sites that had been personally recommended to me. There's also a list on ALLi of recommended services: https://selfpublishingadvice.org/self-publishing-service-reviews/ graded by how much they trust them and I looked at anyone who was in their 'green' (trusted partner) category. I would recommend checking that page once you've chosen your shortlist, in case ALLi have flagged up any issues, even if you don't use it as a starting point.

After trawling through 100+ book cover designer sites, let me share my tips and tricks to make the process as easy as possible! Most of these apply to getting a custom-made design, rather than a pre-made, but some apply to both.

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