Book Cover Trends & Ideas 2025

Ollie Ander

Is probably just a couple cats in a trench-coat—the hair shedding and sunlight napping are highly suspect.

The saying, "don’t judge a book by its cover," has been left behind. There are plenty of services offering clean and cheap looking book covers, and even more programs available for indies to make ones themselves. Twenty dollars can go a long way, so there’s few excuses for a poor quality book cover. What’s more difficult than finding a book cover, however, is knowing what’s best for your genre market. 
Trends come and go, but avid readers are attuned to that flow. A book cover is expected to convey the tone of the work and communicate the genre—just from a glance. If you’re struggling with what to commission a cover artist for, or aim to make a book cover yourself, this article will go over the TOP genre’s cover trends going into 2025, how to play into them or how to subvert them. Maybe you’ll be the one to start the next wave of cover design aesthetics for 2026?
RomanceThe romance genre was booming in 2024, and although Booktok has partially dissipated with the accessibility of the Tiktok app in various countries, readers’ interest won’t be so easily lost. It was Booktok that popularized titles like Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yaros, and in 2025, the third installment of the series, Onyx Storm, has taken the Hot New Releases slots #1, 2, 3, and 7 with its various editions.
Compared to the "cartoonification" of romance covers in years past, the trend is now leaning toward dark, baroque (harsh shadow lighting), and titles with metallic inclusions of gold and silver. Most of the covers highlight a single attractive model as the love interest of the story.
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It is worth noting that illustrated covers are still holding on in spots #17 and 18. 
As well, there is a strong presence of recognizable series installment: Nicole Fox’s Litvinov Bratva book (1 & 2), and the Sky Ride Hotshots (books 1-3) even though they are written by different authors. Whatever you choose as your cover, if you’re writing in a series, it pays to have cover recognizability and consistency across installments, which will increase related/chain purchases.
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What Can Make Your Romance Cover Different?What isn’t seen in these covers are "options:" There’s a front-and-center presentation of the lead love interest, or a depiction of the couple the story will follow. Appealing to the reader as the vicarious voyeur, none of these covers are offering diversity in love interests. Your romance doesn’t need to be a harem to have multiple competing love interests (most contain some element of a love triangle) so why not entice readers with the choices the protagonist has on offer?
Mystery & ThrillersThe mystery and thriller genre stay true to staples of their design throughout trends. Most identifiable on their covers are the text. Titles are usually short, catchy phrases. With the genre so heavily saturated with repeat themes and keywords it’s important the text is clear and legible so there aren’t mix-ups in purchasing.
More than any other genre, mystery and thrillers but a focus on the author with their cover design. If the author is well known, their name is more of a selling point than whatever is in the book itself. As you can see in #1, 3, and 7, the title and the author name share equal weight on the cover, but in #4 and #10, the author's name outweighs the title.
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What Will Make Your Mystery Cover Stand Out?As you can see in this sampling, each cover has a strong color identifier. Many are nothing but a landscape in the background. To remain true to the genre expectations but still stand out, take these elements and choose a new, unseen colour combination for your cover. A detective noir being noir is played out, what if it was Barbie-pink? Electric!
Science Fiction and FantasyScience fiction and fantasy book covers show to be a combination of what’s seen in romance and mystery/thriller. Although there’s a weight given to title text, it is more stylized to fit the background (sometimes interact with it) and convey the theme of the genre through font and kerning. In those presenting the protagonists—unlike romance, which is more of a posed portrait—the characters on the covers of scifi and fantasy are interactive, shown in the world’s environment or currently IN the action!
These covers are full of the promise of adventure and aim to sweep readers away into a world of wonder (or danger).
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How Can Your Scifi/Fantasy Cover Compete?These covers and the stories between them are less beholden to formula. Readers aren’t looking for the same-old comfort read. There’s no good way to play into or subvert your book cover to suit these genres other than to be so unabashedly, uniquely yours that reader’s curiosity forces them to pick it up!
Biographies and MemoirsWhat’s the greatest draw in wanting to read someone’s life story? Knowing them! Or knowing of them, anyway. Facial recognition and parasocial connection are heavy hitters in fostering book cover appeal in the genre of memoirs. The focus is on the subject, leaving the rest of the space minimalistic: one flat color tone with legible but pretty standard fonts, leaning toward Times New Roman clones or thinner.
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How do you Break Through Against Basic Biography Covers?If you have the influence and the face, I’d be remiss to say you shouldn’t flaunt that on your cover in this genre. However, as seen in the house of my mother by Shari Franke, the topic (title) is given more precedence than the name attached to it. Putting your title first and bigger, more akin to the mystery genre, could work to pull in readers that weren’t going to pick up your book based on author reputation alone.

Now you’ve got an idea of what your cover should look like, where do you go? Here’s a list of $ 20 Book Cover Designers for Self-Published Authors: Original, Stock, & Premade$ : No matter your budget or genre, there will be someone in this article for you!