Have you ever wondered about the process of creating a book cover? A lot goes into it, so let’s take a behind-the-scenes look (through the author’s lens) at how we made the cover of Just a Little Wicked.

How do we go from a concept to a cover?

The first thing I did was hire an incredible artist, and that was Ali Shearer (@juniper.charm on Instagram). She designed author Kelly Ohlert’s An Ex-Citing Proposition, and I thought her style would fit what I wanted. Because Just a Little Wicked is book 2, it needed to match the vibes of book 1.

Once Ali and I were ready to go, we went through the following steps.

Step 1. I sent her a Word document with other covers that I liked, a short synopsis of the book, the setting, ideas for the front cover/back cover/and spine, themes, and tropes.

Step 2. Then I sent her some “inspo” photos for Winter & Erikson, including clothing they might wear. Here is Winter’s:

Step 3: Ali sent me color palettes next, which is good because I’m visually super NOT talented. Here are just a few that she shared based on all we’d discussed. I picked the palette with the cedar berries.

Step 4: Ali then created some very rough sketches with different color schemes, poses, and more! This was to give me an overall “idea” of what direction I might want to go in—and it was super helpful!

Step 5: I think you can already see this taking shape. At this point I couldn’t decide if I wanted Erikson to be wearing a cable-knit sweater or a sweatshirt with his backwards hat, so Ali made a quick sketch to help me with that. Ultimately, as you know, I chose the sweater, but he COULD have looked like this:

Step 6: We went through a LOT of poses. Ali shared some sample poses, and then sketched Winter in a multitude of poses to get everything *just* right. I’m not going to share all of them here because that would be a lot, but here are some of them:

Step 7: Then came colorization and choosing a font. I don’t think I can overstate how much went into this process, the back-and-forth looking at dozens of different fonts, and THEN the making of the back and spine. Ali really wanted to make sure it was exactly what I wanted. This is getting a little long, so I’ll show you a couple more of those progress pictures, and then of course the final product!

And there you have it! From start to finish the entire process took just over a month and I ended up with the perfect cover. If you’re an author looking for a cover designer, I highly recommend Ali. You can find her here.

What do you think about the process? Did you know so much went into cover design?

JUST A LITTLE WICKED: The Making of a Cover