As The Huffington Post’s Anis Shivani says

Book cover design is an underappreciated art form, yet it can help make a book. What goes into the thought process, and how do authors, designers, publishers, and marketing people collaborate? What degree of author input is generally solicited, and how do inchoate thoughts get translated into striking covers?

Luckily for us, The HuffPost took a look at 21 book covers and asked designer, authors and editors for some insight into the design process.

For example, this cover for Bernhard Schlink’s The Weekend features a shot of Barbara de Wilde’s (the designer) husband’s overnight bag.

The Weekend is the story of an untraditional reunion of friends after twenty-plus years of separation due to one character’s imprisonment for terrorism and murder as a member of Baader-Meinhoff. It is the first weekend of his release and the gathering inspires a confrontation of passions, loyalties, and ideals, and the question of his return to the movement. For the design I photographed my husband’s overnight bag, and placed the title inside. The significance of a piece of luggage without an owner has been burned into our consciousness in this current age of terrorism: is it a harmless bag or does it have a bomb inside? I probably would have preferred to leave the design with that bit of ambiguity, but the author wanted to see the bomb — so, I added it to the back.

See all the covers and the designers’ comments here.