Free Vella Covers (writing contest giveaway)

I’m excited about Amazon’s new platform for serialized fiction Vella (if you haven’t heard of it yet, here’s a post where I break down the details: “What is Kindle [...]

  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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

  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, [...]