Typography matters. You can make a cover look much more professional, simply by using more genre appropriate fonts.
I make a lot of romance and fantasy covers and we love a swirly font. But the cardinal rule for book cover text is that The Title Must Be Legible (even in thumbnails). Often, the handwritten and swirly fonts look messy. Or worse, they make your title read like something else.
Last week, I spotted a poster for a film which was apparently called ‘The Faff’. The title was ‘The Fall’ the lowercase ‘l’ looked similar to an ‘f’. (If you want to see some hilarious examples of typography gone wrong, check out the ‘cover snark’ posts on Smart Bitches Trashy Books. My favourite is the ‘Always Be Anus’ cover on this one.)
Sometimes, you just can’t find exactly what you want in Canva’s font library. You’ve just seen the perfect font at a reasonable price and bought yourself a licence. How do you import it to Canva? In today’s video, I go through how to add the fonts to Canva, how to add glyphs and alternates when working on a PC. (If you work on a phone or a Chromebook, I don’t have an easy way to do it – the complicated way involves signing up for a Creative Frabrica account and using their Font Cloud feature.)
You can upload your own fonts to Canva. You save them in the brand template section. If you have Canva free, you get one brand template. If you have Canva Pro, you get a thousand. (If you want to try Canva Pro for free for 30 days, here’s my affiliate link: partner.canva.com/Jeev
To save a font into your ‘Starred fonts’ folder, click on the three dots and add star.
Here’s the tutorial. Just click on the play button to view on YouTube.
If you make your own book covers, you might be interested in my Bookcover Basics mini-course. I should have called it Book Cover Mastery, but I just can’t bring myself to lean into the hyperbole. This is what it covers:
- The real job of your book cover (it might surprise you)
- How to find comparator authors and comp covers
- What to expect from cover design in traditional publishing
- Working with a cover designer when you’re an indie publisher
- Researching book cover tropes and genre expectations
- What to do if you hate the cover you’ve been sent
- How to design your own book cover (if you’re feeling brave)