Self-published covers live or die at 160 pixels tall in a search results grid. Mine used to die there.
I asked Quodara for a literary thriller cover — title, author name, a single strong image — with one hard requirement: the title has to stay readable when the whole cover is scaled to thumbnail size. That single constraint reshaped everything it produced. Big type. Two colours. One idea.
The typography came out clean and correctly spelled, which is still the first thing I check. The title sits in the upper third with proper leading, the author name is small and confident at the bottom, and the wide band of empty space in the middle is doing actual work rather than being filled with clutter.
Then I ran the test properly: exported it, shrank it to 160 pixels, and looked at it on a phone in a browser tab full of other covers. Mine is the one you can read.
One chat, four cover directions, about five minutes. A cover designer quoted me three figures and two weeks.
If you are publishing and your cover disappears in the grid, the prompt below is built entirely around that one problem.