Cover Design

Get your book cover designed by award-winning designer Derek Thornton.

What is the IBR cover design service?

Congratulations! You’ve written a great new book, or you’ve acquired one for your small press. You are finally ready to find the perfect cover for it. And lucky for you, you’ve found the IBR cover design service.

Independent Book Review offers high-quality fiction and nonfiction book cover design from an award-winning designer. Whether you’d like to offer suggestions for your design or prefer that we work strictly from your genre and back cover description, we’re confident we can provide a cover that you can fall in love with. At IBR, we know how important a professionally designed cover is when we choose to review books, so we want to make sure your cover has the opportunity to stand out, too.

The IBR cover design service includes a full front cover design, a spine, and back cover. After you receive a professional mock-up of your cover, you can even share a few revisions for how to improve it. We want you to love your cover just as much as your audience will.

When is the best time to purchase a cover design?

While we often recommend that you finish writing your book before you purchase a cover design service, we’d be happy to work with you at any point in the publishing process. Still going through the drafting phase? Let us know.

As long as we have guidance from your suggestions and a book’s genre and description, we can get started on creating your book cover. If you don’t have the specific file requirements for your publishing platform yet, we’ll create the cover and then wait to create the files you need.

Who will be designing your book cover?

Photo credit: Tim Park

Derek Thornton is an award-winning designer accumulating eight awards in the publishing and print industry so far. His love for print and good design translate directly to the passion he puts into every book cover he creates. It’s not an accident that his portfolio is riddled with outside the box ideas—and a passion to make every cover he touches stand out in the crowd. Creating something new that’s never been done before and thinking outside the box is where he shines most. Derek is the owner and lead designer at Notch Design. He loves spending time with his kids, playing music, and dreaming of future tattoo endeavors.

Rates & turnaround time

Derek Thornton creates full book cover designs at $599. This includes one project with limited revisions, and it accounts for the designer’s time as well as any imagery we find necessary to purchase in order to do the best job on your project. If you choose to get a second book cover after realizing you would like to move in a new direction, we’d be happy to work with you on a discounted second comp.

At this time, Derek is able to complete his cover designs in three weeks. We are proud to offer payment plans to keep this service possible for you, and if you need an expedited service, please let us know in the contact box below. We’ll see what we can do to help get your work to you faster.

How to get started

  1. Please fill out the form below including all the required information.
  2. We will contact you within three days if we are able to work with you on your project and parameters, or if we need any additional material.
  3. We will agree on a payment plan together. When the first payment is made, the three week turnaround time will begin.
  4. A personalized contract will be created outlining the terms of service, deadline, and more.
  5. In three weeks, you will receive a mock-up of your front book cover. You may request limited revisions and work with us to make sure you are happy with your product.
  6. Once the final design is chosen and agreed to, we will start designing the back cover and spine. Please allow for up to 3 to 5 days.
  7. When you know exactly which file requirements you need to send to your printer, we will share the final files with you.


Thank you for considering our IBR cover design service! If you’re looking for quotes for your cover or a free sample from a professional copy editor , please also keep in mind the following author services.