Does a translated book need a new cover?

A cover for a translated book does not have to be a new design, but it does have to be a new file: the title and the author's name need to appear in the language of the edition. In most cases that is a text swap, not a design project.

The interesting question is when it is worth going further and redesigning.

What has to change

Two things, with no argument.

The first is the text on the cover. A German reader who sees a book with a Hebrew title does not try to decipher it — they keep scrolling. It sounds obvious, and it is still one of the most common mistakes in translated editions.

The second is reading direction, if you moved between a language written right to left and one written left to right. That is not only about text: a Western eye scans a cover in a different order, and elements that were balanced in the original can look crowded on one side.

It is worth knowing that the stores' own translation services treat this as a routine step. Amazon notes on the help page for its translation service that you can change the cover during publishing — meaning it too assumes the new edition's cover is a decision in its own right.

What can usually stay

The image. If your cover works, there is no reason to replace it just because of a language.

Two things are worth checking first. The first is the licence: if you used a stock image, make sure it covers an additional edition and not only the one it was bought for.

The second is text baked into the image itself — a street sign, a newspaper headline, a line written on a wall. The reader will see it, and it will still be in the old language. In a children's book illustration this happens constantly, and there it stands out.

When a redesign is worth it

Three real reasons, and usually nothing else:

• The genre looks different there. A Scandinavian thriller, an American romance and a German non-fiction title do not look alike. A cover that does not speak the local genre language makes readers think the book is something else.
• The new title is a different length. A title rewritten in another language can be much longer or much shorter, and the design does not always absorb that. We explained why the title is rewritten rather than translated in the title and blurb get rewritten.
• The old cover was not working anyway. A new edition is a good chance to fix that without upsetting existing readers.

The check that takes a minute

Shrink the cover to the size of a stamp and look at it. That is the size most readers will see it at in the store.

At that size you ask three questions: is the title legible, is the genre obvious, and does it look different from the books around it on the page. If all three answers are yes, the cover is doing its job.

A second, less familiar check: look at it on a light screen and on a dark one. Covers with very dark backgrounds get swallowed in some apps.

Print is a different story

For a digital book the cover is a single image. For print it is a spread that includes the front, the spine and the back, and the spine width comes from the page count.

There is a small trap here: a translated book almost never comes out at the same page count as the original. Different languages take up different amounts of room, so the spine changes and the old file no longer fits.

That is also one of the reasons the translated version behaves as a separate item in every respect — including a number of its own, an ISBN (the international identifier a book carries in the trade), as we explained in do you need an ISBN. If you are ordering the stages after the translation is ready, frequently asked questions helps you put them in order.