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  Thriller, mystery and suspense covers have subtle differences that are important to get right. Even a poorly designed cover can work as long as it’s obviously communicating the genre, but having a beautiful, powerful cover works even better. Here are some of my favorites. [...]

This is a real quick post on getting more book reviews, biggest it’s one of the biggest obstacles to publishing success – especially since Amazon has started deleting hundreds of reviews from friends or family. It’s tempting to give up and throw in the towel, but you NEED at [...]

Many writers get stuck in the “idea” phase – they have too many stories to chase and constantly jot down scenes and characters, but have trouble writing a WHOLE book. I had that problem too, which is why I changed my goal: instead of trying to finish a novel, I tried to write [...]

Publishing a book is all about book design. All you really need to publish is a formatted book that’s professionally laid out for print, with smart font choices that match your genre or subject. Then you can convert your manuscript in ebook formats (epub and mobi) – I even have [...]

After designing over a thousand book covers (and earning about a quarter of a million bucks from my design business) I decided I’d rather write full-time than design covers for a living. But, since I’m deeply committed to helping indie authors and pretty established in the [...]

I spent lots of time looking through premade covers. I find way more than I can ever buy (in my last shopping trip I added over $20,000 in covers to my cart). But I want to share these great deals with other authors, and also keep them altogether in one place in case I’m trying to [...]

Yesterday I saw something on Twitter that blew my mind: it was a promotional image of a book; but inside the book cover the pieces were moving around. It was amazing. So I started researching animated book covers. I found some examples, looked for tools I could use for making animated gifs, and [...]

A lot of young designers (or old designers!) reach out and ask me how they can become a book cover designer or get started in this business. If you want to start book cover design… watch all the videos on www.diybookcovers.com first; then make 50 sample mockups and put them in a [...]

  This is an old post! The makeovers were fun but the opportunity is over. I’m presenting on book covers again at this year’s 46th Annual Willamette Writer’s Conference, but this year I’d like to focus on more case studies. So if you’re attending and [...]

An author asked for some feedback on a cover and introduced me to http://covercritics.com, where some awesome designers are helping authors by giving cover design feedback. This was the cover in question: It’s bad, but the badness of the hand-drawn sketches almost makes it cool enough to [...]