If you have landed here, you probably already know. The book is finished, the cover is done, and something about it looks like a self-published book rather than a book. This page is a diagnostic: twelve specific things that produce that feeling, and what to do about each. Most are fixable without starting again.
One reassurance first. "Looks amateur" is almost never about talent or taste. It is nearly always about a small number of technical conventions that trade covers follow and template covers do not. They are learnable.
1. The title is too small
This is the most common fault by a distance. A cover is judged at roughly 80 pixels wide on a phone. If the title does not read at thumbnail size, nothing else on the cover matters. Fix: shrink your cover to 80px on screen. If you cannot read the title, make it bigger — usually much bigger than feels comfortable at full size.
2. Too many fonts
Two typefaces. Occasionally three if one is doing a single job. More than that and the cover reads as assembled rather than designed. Fix: pick one display face for the title and one clean face for everything else.
3. Default or over-familiar typefaces
Papyrus, Curlz, Comic Sans and Brush Script are the obvious ones. The subtler problem is Trajan, Copperplate and the default Canva serif, which are not bad faces but appear on so many self-published covers that readers have learned the association. Fix: change the face before you change anything else. It is often the single highest-impact edit on this list.
4. Stroke, drop shadow, bevel and glow
Outlines around letters, soft shadows behind them, and anything resembling a bevel are the clearest tell of all. Professional covers achieve contrast by putting the text somewhere the background is already dark or already light. Fix: delete every effect, then solve the contrast problem by moving the text or darkening that area of the image.
5. Stretched or squashed type
Type scaled non-proportionally to fill a space. Designers notice immediately; readers feel it without naming it. Fix: only ever scale with the aspect ratio locked. If the title will not fit, change the line breaks, not the letter widths.
6. The image has been stretched too
Same fault, bigger area. Usually happens when a square stock photo is forced into a 1.6:1 cover. Fix: crop, do not stretch. Losing part of the image is always better than distorting all of it.
7. Recognisable stock photography
The same handful of free images appear on thousands of covers. A reader who has seen your image before will not know where — they will simply feel the book is generic. Fix: reverse image search your own cover. If it returns dozens of other books, change the image. Paid stock at £10 is a different and much larger pool than free stock.
8. Genre signals that are wrong or absent
Readers use covers to identify what a book is in under a second, and the conventions are real: thrillers are dark and high-contrast with heavy sans-serif type; romance is warm, illustrated or clinch; literary fiction is restrained, often with a single symbolic object and a lot of space. A cover that ignores its genre does not look bold, it looks unplaceable. Fix: open the Amazon top 50 in your exact subcategory, screenshot the grid, and ask honestly whether yours would look out of place.
9. Everything is centred
Title centred, author centred, image centred, all stacked symmetrically. It feels safe and reads as a template. Fix: try setting the title left-aligned and off-centre, with deliberate empty space. Tension is more interesting than symmetry.
10. Not enough empty space
Amateur covers fill the canvas; professional covers leave room. Crowding the edges with text also causes practical trouble, because print trim can take 3mm off any edge. Fix: keep all text at least 6mm from every edge, and resist the urge to use the gaps.
11. Too many colours
Two or three, with one clearly dominant. Covers with five or six competing colours read as noisy at any size and as mud at thumbnail size. Fix: pull your palette from the image itself rather than choosing colours separately.
12. A subtitle doing too much work
A twenty-word subtitle in small type is a non-fiction habit that rarely survives contact with a thumbnail. Fix: cut it to eight words. Everything else belongs in the Amazon description, where it will actually be read.
The five-minute test
Do this before you do anything else:
- Shrink the cover to 80 pixels wide. Can you read the title?
- Turn it greyscale. Does it still have contrast?
- Put it in a grid of nine bestsellers from your exact subcategory. Does your eye skip it?
- Show it to someone for two seconds, take it away, and ask what kind of book it is.
- Look at it on a phone, in daylight, outdoors.
Most covers fail one, two or four. That tells you which of the twelve to work on.
Does it need a redesign, or a tidy-up?
If the image is good and the typography is the problem, a type-only rework is usually enough, and that is a few hundred pounds rather than a full commission. If the image itself is the problem — wrong genre, over-used, distorted — the typography cannot rescue it and you are starting again.
Our cover design starts at £199, and we will tell you honestly which of the two you need. If your cover only needs items 1 to 5 on this list fixed, we will say so rather than sell you a redesign.
And if you would rather do it yourself: work through the twelve in order. The first four account for most of the effect.