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It’s been a stellar year in book cover design, and the third quarter of 2025 continues to prove this. Designers have upped their game, creating compelling images intended to force readers to judge a book by their covers–and frankly, why shouldn’t you? So many of the covers here were ones I would likely have missed if I hadn’t been taken in by their looks.
Book cover design is interesting because it’s got to play to some trends, got to play to some conventions of genre and age category, and because it’s got to play to consumer tastes. We need book covers to sell a book—it’s the number one marketing opportunity for any title. But we need those covers to also give insight into the story and to be nice to look at and to be easy to render on mobile.
Important to all of this is the team behind the cover’s creation. For too long—and still to this day—cover designers and artists are rarely credited for their work. The time it takes to find this information is embarrassing in 2025, and still, many of the covers you’ll see below don’t have this information available. Publishers still don’t put it on the landing pages for these books, so it takes good Googling and a lot of luck to dig up names to credit. Unfortunately, this also makes it easier for AI-generated art to get through to book covers (which we started to see last year). This quarter may be one of the better ones in a long time for finding this information.
One of the other fun things to notice throughout the year are the trends we see in cover design. Something other book outlets have pointed out in cover design is the trend to use works of art as the background for cover design. This won’t be slowing down into the rest of the year or into 2026, either.
Find below a number of the most interesting, visually surprising, and best book covers of 2025 from the third quarter of this year. These covers are for adult fiction only, as there are entire posts’ worth of covers for nonfiction, YA, middle grade, and children’s books. Because my earlier roundup of the best book covers for 2025’s new and forthcoming short story collections didn’t capture some of the books that hit shelves in the second half of the year, you’ll see short story collections here, too.
All of the covers featured here are for books published between July 1 and September 30, 2025. I’ve done my best to track down credit. You can and should check out the best book covers from the first quarter of this year and the second quarter of this year, too.
 Beyond All Reasonable Doubt, Jesus Is Alive by Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Cover design by Luísa DiasThere are many things going on with this cover and every single one of them is good. Titles that are full sentences are a favorite of mine, but more than that, it’s one that’s hard to forget. The cover gives desolation vibes on the top photo, but the toy (?) hand and coy cat stand in contrast to those vibes, begging the viewer to wonder what is actually going on. Let’s not overlook the clever blood splatter, either, nor the way the yellow contrasts so perfectly with the red shades elsewhere. That some of the image is off the page gives more visual interest, too. All Access Members, check out your exclusive content–including 19 more rad covers–below. |
