4 Proven Ways to Brand Your Book Series + a Free Tool to Test Your Current Covers
When it comes to selling books, book covers and branding are key. Your cover is what greets the reader and entices or repels them from clicking through on Amazon or picking it up in a bookstore. And if it’s a series of books, you might lose more than one book sale.
There are several different ways of branding book covers for series. Below, you will find practically proven ways to brand covers, 20 examples, and a tool to rate and review book covers to see if they are working cohesively together.
1. Same Cover Concept with Small Differences
This is the easiest branding option for book covers is coming up with one design concept and then changing small elements of it while keeping 80-90% of it the same otherwise. This can be as simple as changing the color of the entire cover or swapping one color for another on a single element. In the case of the latter, the single element is usually the one that stands out the most. As this is the easiest option to produce, it is often the least expensive and fastest.
Another, more recent example of this small change for basically the same look is this Simon King’s Sam Rader series covers:
2. Different Cover Concepts with One ”Signature Element”
A good example would be Russell Blake using the same font for author’s name across all his books, even though he also has his separate series branded and look different too. You can see both examples here, but the font of the author’s name stays the same. So it’s almost double branding, the author can have a specific font + different ”feel” for each brand. In the 2nd series shown above, the font has more treatment and effect so it looks a bit different but is still the same.
An example of Sci-Fi covers I’ve done for a client. We kept the eye on top as a signature element, the text stayed the same as it should be and we rotated new visuals to fit each new book:
3. Traditional Series Look
The most common and strongest series branding is to keep the general color scheme, font, and, if possible, placement the same while rotating the main image. It’s a traditional way to do things and it will always work. It’s very easy to recognize for the readers, looks great and when working with a book cover designer it’s not as expensive as making covers for individual books.
Many designers offer a series branding discount for this type of work, so you don’t need to pay for each cover as a completely new one. Another example of similar branding is below:
4. Clever, Multi-Piece Designs (Or Puzzle Designs)
This a rare thing and rightly so. Some amazing series were made by having to combine all books into one bigger image when you have them next to each other. Really really cool, but more for Print books. Ninja-level stuff and probably the most time-consuming. For bold authors who want to and can stomach the risk.
Can Premade Book Covers Be Serialised?
With premade book covers becoming more and more common, many authors wonder if it’s possible to serialize them. Most of the time most premades can be turned into series covers. It can be done in two ways:
- Most designers will be willing to take any premade cover and make a series out of it by finding new stock images for the next covers and then using the same elements and style from the premade. For example, I took one romance premade cover and turned it into 4 cover series(even though the main guy from the premade didn’t fit the story):
2. Most designers also can take multiple different premades from their selection and make them look like a series by taking the design look from one and applying it to others. The simplest example would be just taking the fonts and text style from one cover and applying them to others. Other covers can have more elaborate changes with color scheme changes, background changes, etc:
FREE Tool: Series Cover Inspector
Here is the AI tool to test your covers. It is available for free for everyone with a paid ChatGPT plan (only cuz it needs GPT 4o abilities and that is paid plan part). Click on the image to head to it:
Inspiration of Book Covers for Series
Sjon series by Rodrigo Corral
Peter Carey books designed by Jenny Grigg
Shakespeare Book Cover Series by Alex Cruz
Book Covers for Garbiel Garcia Marquez by Eduardo RH
Harry Potter covers reimagined in classic Penguin covers style by M.S. Corley
9/11 Series designed by Marius Hole
Urbanite’s Guide book series designed by Alyssa Liegel
Eli Weisel’s Night Trilogy designed by Carla Brown
Lemony Snicket’s Unfortunate Events series designed by Christie Tandiono
Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers designed by Trevor Hutchison
Hope you enjoyed this post and it gave you some inspiration and ideas for your book covers. As you see there are plenty of options and great designs to get inspiration from. When picking and branding covers, be mindful of book cover design mistakes to avoid.
Best wishes,
Adrijus
This was really interesting, especially as in the not too distant future I’m looking at getting covers for a series. I want to brand it, so this post had impeccable timing really.
Thanks for sharing 🙂
Awesome to hear! Glad it’s helping. If you need any tips or advice, shoot me an email any time! You know where to find me! 😉
Adrijus
Hi there this is kind of of off topic but I was wanting to know if blogs use WYSIWYG editors or if you have to manually code with HTML. I’m starting a blog soon but have no coding know-how so I wanted to get advice from someone with experience. Any help would be enormously appreciated!
You can use WordPress and Elementor plugin which is an awesome WYSIWYG editor for websites. It even starts with free version. It’s great. It’s at http://www.Elementor.com
Thanks for this inspiring collection..,.some gorgeous work here.
Cheers Jonathan! My pleasure, I hope this post is educational and helps too! 🙂
Best wishes,
Adrijus
When I received your email today Adrijus, I know this post would be inspiring, and you did not disappoint 🙂
Like Taitrina, I too am looking to create a series and while I have thought about a similar theme for all 5 books, I did not realize how many options there were to achieve this.
Very valuable and timely content.
Thanks again…
Steve
Hi Steve!
Very good to hear! 😉 Feel free to email and ask any questions if you need, any time!
Enjoy the writing and cover creation process!
Adrijus
Proud o have my books shown as an example of your fine work!
Likewise proud to have you on board as client! 😉
very informative. you have given me food for thought for my three series.
thanks,
Nina
Cheers! Glad to help! 😉
hi again, i have a question, please. when working with you, do you offer suggestions on the best way to brand a particular series? i ask because i have three different ones (a demon series, a ghoul series and a zombie series) and i wouldn’t want all the covers to look like the exact same series.
thanks again,
Nina
Each series should have its own branding. Just the covers in the particular series should match the look.
My suggestions for each series would be different of course.
Hello! The title says 5 ways to brand books, but the article only features 4 ways. Just wanted to point that out since the article was good but I ended up looking for the “5th” method.
Dang… talk about a huge blunder!!! Thank you for letting me know! 😉
No problem 🙂 Anything to help out a good article.
I appreciate it! 😉
Thanks for the informative article. Do you know of any book covers on this site that are made for a three book series?
I see that on other sites, but I haven’t ran across it on this site yet.
Hi,
you’re very welcome, glad to help!
What do you mean by ‘sites that are made for three book series’? A site for inspiration of those or a book cover designer who do those?
Adrijus
I’ve seen sets of three covers for sale. Not on this site though.
Well, all designers do them. Just not all designers post their pricing for those on the website. Never hesitate to ask/email them about it. My price for 3 book series covers is $750(ebook covers) or $899(ebook+print covers). I just didn’t want to have too many prices in the pricing table. 🙂
Hey, I’m trying to contact you about a cover and the field is buffering.
Hi, thanks for heads up! I will look into it. You can email me at info@rockingbookcovers.com directly.
Good article. I have nine books in a series already published. The series will have over twenty-two books by the time I am done. I am thinking of remaking the book covers. The series is about the events leading up to the Vietnam War and the war itself. I like my current book covers and the series is selling well. But honestly, I am running out of ideas for the covers and I believe the current covers lack uniformity, especially in the color pallete. I would need ebook, paperback, and hardback covers. What would it cost to redo the nine, then what would it cost moving forward when I publish a new book in the series?
Hello,
that’s quite a series! And I checked out the series on Amazon and I think covers look good. It’s quite likely the same issue of running out of ideas in any design due to the length of series. It will be tough to come up with 22 designs for anything. Esp. limited to one main topic. I don’t think you have cohesiveness issues really, they could be a bit more uniform but at the same time it’s not a crime to have variations. I don’t think you’d need be desperate for updates. Covers are solid I’d say. 🙂
The price for 9 covers at ebook/print/hardback would be about $2000. And about $200 per cover going forward.
Feel free to ask anything else, email me any time too, easier to discuss ideas in private.
Adrijus
Wow. Thanks for the great curation of ideas here on series covers. Extremely helpful!
You cited your cover prices this way: ” My price for 3 book series covers is $750(ebook covers) or $899(ebook+print covers). I just didn’t want to have too many prices in the pricing table. 🙂”
Pardon my ignorance, but is that the price for each book or for all three?
I’m considering changing my mystery series covers so they each have individuality but also appear as part of a series. Sometimes that looks like a challenge.
Thanks
It’s 3 book covers is $750. Single cover price is $299.
That is the thing for all series covers most of the time. Nothing unusual. 🙂