What can the best book cover designs of the year teach you about effective cover design and what really stands out on the book shelf or anywhere else for readers?

As part of our Non-Obvious Book Awards, we review well over 500 non-fiction books every year. Along the way, we collect some of our favorite book covers and in this session you'll hear some of our picks for the best cover designs of the year each year.

In this compilation video, you can hear Rohit's take on some of our favorite book covers and why they work. This video will be continually updated each year as we add more content and review more titles.

NOTE - We didn't include the 2020 selections in this video because the audio quality isn't great and the discussion of covers was quite short. If you do want to watch Rohit share the picks from that year, you can see it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/live/0eLpuNCyiS8?feature=share&t=746

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

[ARTICLE] - "These Book Covers are So Terrible You Won’t Believe They’re Real” by Madeline Raynor

https://electricliterature.com/these-book-covers-are-so-terrible-you-wont-believe-theyre-real/

This list of humorously poor cover designs exemplifies some ideas of what not to do when designing a cover on your own. Bypassing all expense or time investment will lead to significantly fewer sales because people do judge books by their covers.

[VIDEO] - "Top 5 Book Cover Design Mistakes That Are Killing Your Sales” | Rachel Harrison-Sund

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QogiSFYcXKI&feature=youtu.be

This video goes through five cover design mistakes, comparing examples that both overcame and fell victim to these mistakes in order to give viewers a good idea of how these mistakes materialize.

[WEBSITE] - Non-Obvious Book Awards Winners List (2022)

https://www.nonobviousbookawards.com/2022/

As mentioned in the video, this longlist of winners can serve as inspiration for great titles and covers, among other aspects of award-worthy books.