The Ins and Outs of Cover Art Briefs (Patreon)

One the best skills I picked up while working at Angry Robot was how to write and execute art briefs for book covers. I created art briefs for over a dozen books during my time at Angry Robot, and in addition, I worked with artists for most of those books plus some others in executing the art brief and gave substantive input on even more. Almost everything I learned about this process is due to the mentorship of Marc Gascoigne, my boss at AR, who was both the Managing Director and the Art Director.

Commissioning covers is one of several types of art direction, and I focused on the art side more than the design side – since Marc had a strong design background, he tended to take point on that part of the business. But I thought it’d be useful to share some of what I’ve learned about the process as well as an example – the brief for the Genrenauts Season One Collection, which I commissioned from Thomas Walker.

Find Your Vision

Identifying the vision for a cover has always been my first step in creating a brief. A book cover is a piece of commercial art commissioned for the purpose of helping sell the book itself. Because of that, cover art is not just art for art’s sake, but art as marketing, art as a sales tool. A book cover is meant to catch a potential reader’s attention and to make certain promises about genre, setting, tone, and more. If a cover sets the wrong expectations, a reader excited by the cover may be disappointed by the reality of the book.

I think of covers as being design-focused, photography-focused, or illustration-focused. Illustrated covers are more the norm in sub-genres like epic fantasy, whereas sub-genres like urban fantasy often use photographs of people against designed backgrounds and/or a combination of stock images. A purely designed cover is much more like graphic design, with logos/icons and maybe with a greater focus on typography.

Here’s an example of each style. These examples are all taken from books I worked on at Angry Robot (I art directed The Copper Promise and An Accident of Stars, but not The Lives of Tao)

Photographic Style – Sword & Sorcery - The Copper Promise - Art by Gene Mollica 

Illustrated Style – Epic Fantasy – An Accident of Stars – Art by Julie Dillon 

Design Style – Comedic Science Fiction – The Lives of Tao – Design by ARGH! Oxford 

In practice, many covers combine these different styles in new and interesting ways – combining design and photography, illustration and design, etc. 

For instance, the covers to The Worldbreaker Saga are illustrated in a concept art style that feels almost as much design as illustration.

Hybrid Style – Epic Fantasy - The Mirror Empire – Art by Richard Anderson 

When you’re commissioning art in a series, you generally want all of the covers in the series to feel cohesive, so that a reader familiar with the cover of book one would immediately think of the series when they see the cover for the second or third book in the series. That cohesion tends to come from using the same artist, the same fonts/typeface for the title, and/or reprising colors/visual elements across the entire series.

In the 'Mancer covers, glowing red is a recurring motif - fire in the first cover, magical aura/energy in the second and third covers. All are against a black background with a single figure at the center, and all with large block-lettered titles with glowing letters. The letters F and X are repeated in each cover to increase cohesion/series style.

Series Style – Urban Fantasy - The ‘Mancer series - Design by Steven Meyer-Rassow 

Comparable Images

Since covers have their own visual language--with explicit and implicit symbolism--it’s important to place the art you’re commissioning within a context. This is perhaps most easily achieved with comparable images. 

If you’re commissioning the cover for a space opera novel, you’re going to want to give your artist/designer some idea of what kind of space opera cover you want it to be, and you do that partially with comparable covers. Providing a range of comparable covers sets the bounds of the conversation for the artist/designer, saying, “This is the general area and style we’re looking for.” It’s on the art director to make sure that set of comparable covers does all make sense together, and if there are sharp juxtapositions, that those are explained or contextualized in the brief. Something like, “The stylized figure work of these two covers but with the setting details and color schemes of these three covers.”

Sometimes you’ll also want to include example images of setting details, of props, and/or anything else where you have a specific vision and/or want to help provide a visual language for the artist to utilize. One of the main reasons that art directors use comparable covers in their art briefs is the same reason the sales teams use comparable books when selling to reps. If you’re using a cover to a book that sold well as a touchstone, you’re theoretically re-capturing or emulating some of what made that book a success with the cover for your own book. 

Ala “Military SF books with spaceship battles on the cover do well, so let’s give this military SF novel a cover with a spaceship battle.”

There’s always a balance between fitting within expectations for a sub-genre and trying to stand out enough to win a reader’s interest. Each reader’s taste is different, so like all artistic endeavors, this is a question of taste, perspective, and calculated risks.

Inspire & Inform

Some art briefs are incredibly specific, so specific that the art director basically wants an artist purely an agent of production, executing on a vision without needing to bring much of their own perspective to the piece. 

Some art briefs go entirely the other direction, where the art director instead sends the manuscript and says “here’s the book, let me know what catches your attention and what you’d like to do for a cover.” 

The artist-as-production-agent style tends to make more sense for covers for tie-in works where the universe has a strictly-defined visual style, while the latter "artist's vision" style tends to be more common when an experienced art director commissions a veteran artist/designer with whom they have a strong rapport. 

Most of my experiences were somewhere in the middle, where I was writing an art brief to do my best to inspire and inform the artist, to suggest tone while providing the details we were certain we wanted to include. Then the artist would bring their taste and perspective and find a way to execute on that vision in their own way, leading to a creative product that reflected the input of both art director and artist as an execution/interpretation of the novel itself.

Case Study - Genrenauts Season One Collection

When I ran the Kickstarter for the Genrenauts Season Collection, one of the aspects I was most excited about was the cover. Sean Glenn had been providing excellent covers in the style of the Tor.com covers for the individual episodes, but I wanted something different for the season collection. I’d worked with Thomas Walker on Angry Robot covers and was delighted when he said yes to creating a cover for the collection. 

I’m attaching the cover brief I sent as well as the final cover, which should illustrate many of the elements and priorities I talked about above. You’ll even see my terrible line art drawing with a potential concept/approach, as well as a much more skillful team portrait commissioned created by Fabian Lelay.

As far as art directors go, I'm still very much a novice, especially when compared to legends of the field like Irene Gallo, Lauren Panepinto, or my former boss Marc Gascoigne. But I know just enough to be dangerous and to pass on what I do know to help others.

What are some of your favorite covers to books? Did the cover set your expectations correctly for what your reading experience of the book turned out to be?