Creating a Unifying ‘Brand’ for My Book Covers

by | Jul 14, 2025 | Bones in the Wash, Page-turners with a Conscience, Pirates of Sausalito, Wasted, When I Killed My Father

I have long wanted to create a “brand” for my four books to unify them. Make them look like they belong together. My books are not a series, but they share enough similarities that they do indeed belong together. But the covers do not demonstrate that.

Here are the front covers as they exist now — in the order published.

They do not look like they belong together, though the first and the fourth are close, and my intention was to redesign the other two to match.

When I Killed My Father was easy, though I have not uploaded the new cover to the two sites where I publish my books — Amazon/KDP and IngramSpark. (One of the benefits of self-publishing is that authors can upload new covers and corrected manuscripts at any time for no cost. It can be time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be.)

Wasted has not been easy. Over the last number of years, I designed more than ten different versions of the cover and was not happy with any of them. Now I’ve got three that I think are better. I welcome your feedback.

When I designed the Wasted cover in 2015, I was pleased with it. I’d been a graphic designer for decades, but I did not realize until later that there are “rules” about book covers that I did know, one of the most important of which is that the cover telegraphs to the reader its genre. Here’s what designer Joel Friedlander, former president of Bay Area Independent Publishers Association (BAIPA), said about the Wasted cover: 

Obviously the designer is skillful, but the big fail is that the book looks like nonfiction or a corporate publication, and has no trace of what must be the excitement and drama in the story.

Guilty as charged

I’ve been messing with all sorts of cover ideas for a while, and when I sought feedback on them a two years ago, more people liked the one I considered ugly than any of the others. But I didn’t like it. 

This is the ugly one.

I recently created another version of the cover that I like better. Then I took the existing cover, the one that looks like a nonfiction primer on recycling and adapted it to fit the brand. Rules are made to be broken, right?

Below are these two new versions. What do you think?

So here are new front covers that all share the same branding.

And then I had another idea, to make the branding more explicit by including the tagline: “Page-turner with a Conscience.” I have used that line many times in marketing the book, during book talks, in this author letter, on my website, and on sites where I sell my book. So I took another pass at each of my novels and added that to the top.

What do you think? I value your feedback. I’m too close to my books to be as objective as I need to be. Please share your feedback in the comment area below or contact me via email at johnbyrnebarry@gmail.com. 

One way or the other, I am committed to branding my books. 

Now that I look at them at the small size most people will see them, the “page-turner with a conscience” is barely visible, so I probably need to scrap that idea or make it bigger.

Enjoy the rest of your summer.

P.S. You may wonder whether devoting all this time to redesigning my book covers might not have been better spent writing my current novel. The answer is surely yes, but designing taps into a different part of the brain than writing and it’s “fun.” That’s my excuse anyway.

I would love to hear from you, even if you don’t have an opinion on the covers.