This is for the same reason that most people don’t make home- brewed beer even though it’s not terribly complicated, and why no one wears homemade clothes, even though they’re easy to make— they’re awful when compared to the professional alternatives. The only real difference between beer and coats, and book covers is that some people think they can design their own book covers, even if they really can’t. For some reason I can’t understand, many authors think they are also designers. I don’t know if it’s that design software is fun to use, or that great design has a simplicity to it that belies its difficulty, but let me be very clear about something: Unless you are a multi-year publication designer with 20+ titles in your portfolio, you should not be designing your own cover. 3. THERE ARE OBJECTIVELY GOOD AND BAD BOOK COVERS Book cover design is not completely subjective. There are good and bad book covers, and a good designer can clearly tell you the difference between them. This is because a book cover is a piece of art with a specific purpose: Book covers exist to give visual form to written content. A great cover makes someone in your intended audience say, “I need to read that,” by showing them why the book matters to them in a way they can immediately grasp (or at least raising their interest enough to want to learn more). It should help your audience realize that they should be reading your book. Another way to think about it is framed by Chip Kidd, a famous book cover designer, who said that “a book cover is a distillation of the content, almost like what your book would look like as a haiku.” hOW TO gET A grEAT BOOk COvEr · 281