SCI FI BOOK COVERS
Regardless of genre, nothing represents your book like its cover: it’s a critical marketing and branding tool. You want an experienced and talented design team to distinguish your science fiction book cover on bookstore displays and book-selling websites.
Coverkitchen cooks up visually stunning designs worthy of the time and work spent writing your science fiction masterpiece. Click below to read more about our Sci Fi book cover design process and see some examples of our work.
Sci Fi is an adventurous genre, your book cover should be too
Science fiction (Sci-Fi or SF) represents a sub-genre of speculative fiction (such as fantasy, horror, alternate history, post-apocalyptic, etc.) detailing the impact of science and technology, real or imagined, on individuals, societies or worlds. Time and space travel are common themes and as SF expands globally, books like The Three Body Problem (Cixin Liu), The Martian (Andy Weir) and Ninefox Gambit (Yoon Ha Le) have sold millions of copies. The genre covers a broad spectrum of work.
The ever-evolving science fiction universe rests upon numerous subgenres. The following list represents a small part of this expansive story-telling system, with a massive crossover between these subgenres (think Alien, Frankenstein, 28 Days Later or A Clockwork Orange).
Hard SF strives for realism and incorporates actual science. The Martian and Seveneves represent included titles.
Soft SF relies less on science and technology and more upon characters, plots and themes. Star Trek, Ender’s Game and Slaughterhouse Five are well-known soft SF titles.
Space Opera revolves around space travel, romance, absurdity, exotic locations and epic characters and plots. Movies include Star Wars and Space Sweepers while books include The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Ninefox Gambit.
Space Westerns employ classic western troupes, including lawlessness, vast vistas, barroom brawls, shootouts and quiet machismo. Like the wild west, space offers new frontiers to be tamed, thus the comparison. Titles include Cowboy Bebop and The Martian Chronicles.
Steampunk creates a retro-futuristic world where Victorian-era, steam-powered machinery and fashion inform modern technology and style. Titles include League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and The Time Machine.
Cyberpunk envisions a high-tech, alienated dystopian future run by corporations and sentient machines. Noted titles include Blade Runner, The Terminator and The Matrix.
Coverkitchen Creates Powerful and Effective Book Covers!
Our proud, award-winning team of creatives know exactly what it takes to design a truly impressive cover design. When we’re collaborating directly with you (and giving unlimited revisions!) you know you’re going to end up with a cover design you’ll be proud to distribute and have your name on.
Here are just a few examples of science fiction book covers we’ve designed for our happy clients:
Marte Trilogy
These three striking science fiction book covers represent the Spanish editions of Kim Stanley Robinson’s beloved and award-winning trilogy. Coverkitchen’s consistent imagery, palette and typography render an unmistakable expression of genre and narrative across the trilogy’s covers. Coverkitchen has also created stunning Spanish edition book covers for classic science fiction heavyweights Philip K. Dick and William Gibson.
The Hysteria of Bodalís
Marcos Hernandez’s debut novel depicts a near-future world and alien invasion with mind-bending twists and turns. The design expresses this narrative through the stark cover with its iconic alien figure and retro typography.
The Traveler's Cup
Coverkitchen chefs combined all the right ingredients to create this retro-stylized, 20th-century futurism-inspired modern sci-fi book cover. The custom geometric typeface, spaceship icon and color scheme communicate the exciting sci-fi/fantasy adventure narrative told between the beautifully designed covers.
Go with the pros!
The Cover Kitchen design team excels in typography, color psychology and imagery (photography, hand-created or computer-generated illustrations and 3D imagery) and will create your perfect and unique book cover.
We work closely with authors and publishers to create original designs! Your cover is not finished until you sign off on it. Our team is highly trained and experienced, and we love what we do. Our chefs create masterpieces, not fast food - and there’s never a hidden cost or surprise!
Our simple 3 stage design process
Creating the perfect custom design for your business book cover is easy with Cover Kitchens simple three-stage design process. You don’t need any design experience or knowledge because we’ll assist you every step along the way.
Step 1: Pre-design process
Select one of our premium services or packages, then answer easy questions to assist our team in creating the best possible cover for your business book.
Step 2: Design process
In approximately 10 working days after receiving your order, we’ll present three different cover concepts, then request feedback. Note: expect a 5-10 day turn-around time between revision requests. Two to three revisions are standard, however, we will keep revising until you’re happy with the design.
Step 3: Production process
When you’ve approved and signed off on the final cover design we’ll get your cover to the final stage: Publishing!
After delivering the files, our team will be available to assist you and answer any questions you may have during the production process.
Technology and science fiction go hand in hand
SF readers are particular and demand respect for the genre and your book cover needs to convey that respect without resorting to cliche. SF often depicts the relationships and struggles between technology and humanity, the future of technology and sometimes worlds destroyed or terribly altered by automation, machinery, computers, mechanization, of course, robotics.
Go beyond the stereotypical, it’s a fun genre to explore!
Science fiction allows readers into uncharted worlds, different from our own socially, physically and emotionally. If our world is predictable, SF brings us the unpredictable, mysterious and speculative. While science fiction is often utopian, depicting societies freed from labor, crime, inequity and sickness (usually due to technology) other sci-fi explores worlds dying because they relied too heavily upon machines. Like fantasy, SF encourages amazing world-building experiences, limited only by imagination.
Use your typography as a form of visual storytelling
While all the design elements of your modern sci-fi book cover are important, typography is particularly crucial, expressing futurity and technology and sometimes alien or galactic themes. Fonts such as geometric sans-serifs, and 20th-century rectilinear fonts look surprisingly futuristic: your typography, like all other design aspects of your book cover, is a form of visual storytelling. Whereas classic sci-fi covers utilized robots, spaceships and futuristic cityscapes, modern SF blurs and combines genre, allowing abstract designs to convey atmosphere or suspense. A great science fiction book cover avoids hackneyed imagery, typography and palette by presenting well-executed and original concepts.