There is no envelope you open with quite so much apprehension as the one bearing your jacket-design. Most of the writers I know do so gingerly, at arm’s length, pull the contents out with shaking hands, look at it for a single second then fall shrieking to the floor.

No other part of the author-publisher relationship is quite so fraught with mutual mistrust, escalating to fury, as the cover. When we complain about bad marketing, half the time what we mean is how our book, on which we have after all spent years of labour, is going to be presented to the world. Will it be in the sack-cloth and ashes of a sepia photograph, indistinguishable from a thousand other Cinderellas? Will it be garishly made-up with a supposedly humorous cartoon bearing no resemblance to the serious stuff within? Will it be a design apparently made by your editor’s 6-year-old daughter with half of a potato?

Authors may not judge a book by its cover, but the rest of the world does. We all know that big chains such as WH Smith accept a book on its shelves almost entirely on the jacket design. A book, especially a novel, is always partly an impulse buy. You have to notice it, sometimes just by its spine, and be able to identify its front cover from about ten feet away. Muddled, over-detailed design is therefore wholly counterproductive: some of the best have been, like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth or Helen Simpson’s Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, bold and simple renditions of the title. The human face is immediately attractive, whether in a photograph or painting. Certain combinations of colours (red and green, blue and white) are particularly pleasing, whereas pink signifies what Bertie Wooster called Rich Goo. It isn’t rocket science. You would think these basic principles would remain uppermost in the minds of jacket designers, but no. I remember asking one ex-publisher of mine whether they had shown a particularly disastrous design to WH Smith’s and being told, “We don’t need to, they always love it.” Well, I didn’t. That was the start of a titanic battle which ended with my leaving them.

I don’t care if I reduce art directors to the state where, as one put it, he “had to lie down in a darkened room and stroke a cat.” I haven’t spent two or more years toiling on a novel to be fobbed off with a potato print. (Yes, I really was offered one of those.) Too many publishers see authors as solely concerned with words and ideas and visually handicapped. In fact, few, if any, of us would become writers were we not also obsessive book-buyers. We know what appeals because (unlike many publishers it sometimes seems) we haunt bookshops and buy their wares. Many of us are steeped in art-history, or have even worked as painters, photographers or rs. We have a pretty good idea what sells. The patronising guff you get about how “everybody in marketing loves it” is essentially the prelude to telling you to like it or lump it.

What happens when you lump it? Well, I did this with my fourth novel, In a Dark Wood, a black comedy about a man’s struggle with manic depression and fairy-tales. I was given a design of grey and black trees that was not only invisible even when placed in the front window of certain bookshops but radiated dreariness. Exhausted, I didn’t have the energy or confidence to kick up a huge fuss. The agent Jonny Geller, who recently read it, told me that each time he put it down he had to force himself to pick it up, simply because of the jacket. It sold abysmally, despite many wonderful reviews. In America, by contrast, my publisher Nan Talese at Doubleday actually asked whether I had any ideas. I hesitantly suggested Uccello’s painting, The Night Hunt in the Ashmolean – which is full of mysterious fairy-tale trees, but also vigour, wit and charm. This was used, and it did as well as the UK edition did not. Co-incidence? A different market? I think not. Good design works the world over.

It isn’t just one book that is spoilt by a bad cover - it is potentially your future career. You, not the designer, get blamed for poor sales; your advance next time round is smaller, as is the effort put into marketing it. One friend of mine has been trapped in this declining spiral for years. Despite writing romantic novels of notable talent and sophistication, she keeps being given covers whose vulgarity would make a Cosmo-reader blush. As mass-market fiction, they are so unaspirational they don’t sell, even in Asda. A witty design, like that on Kathleen Tessaro’s Elegance is aimed at precisely the same market, and does.

When a publisher has consistently good or great covers it’s because they are run by a mildly despotic man or woman who doesn’t consult the sales-team – and who fully consults the author. I’ve yet to see a bad Bloomsbury design, for instance, but few of the conglomerates seem to produce a consistent standard of excellence. I wish that, alongside the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Prize, there were a Bad Cover Prize – though the entries would inundate judges.

The difference when you do get a good designer is like moving from madness to sanity. I changed publisher for my latest novel, and despite an immediate rapport with them was dreading the cover row. To my amazement, what came out of the envelope from Little, Brown was precisely the picture (from Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes on the Medici Chapel) and precisely the detail that I had had pinned to my wall throughout the composition of it. Was it thought transference? Could Duncan Spilling, (the art director also responsible for, among others, Sarah Waters’ luscious covers), have actually read the book? I don’t know, but my whimpers of gratitude were repeated when a different paperback design for Love in Idleness came out. Not only did my editor, Richard Beswick, send me a selection of ten different images to choose from, they actually got it right. (At least, I hope so.)

Too many of us are cowed by the fear of a fall-out to protest, and too many of us, even when backed up by our agents, get the promised contractual “consultation,” let alone any right of veto. Esther Freud wrote recently in The Guardian of her own tussles with Penguin, which have resulted in exquisite covers, but it’s my strong impression that it’s exceptional for an author to be allowed to change a poor design, however polite or successful one is. I urge other authors to stiffen their sinews, however. Yes, you risk alienating your publisher, but what is the alternative? Who else will fight for your book? Which is worse to have, the reputation for being a pain in the neck – or the reputation for failing to sell? As the Chinese proverb says, Better one day as a tiger than 1000 years as a sheep.

Amanda Craig’s new novel, Love in Idleness is published by Abacus this summer. Her web-site, www.amandacraig.com includes numerous other articles on publishing.