How to design your own amazing, cheap and easy book cover

Do you absolutely need a book cover designer? No. You can probably do it by yourself, if you follow these simple steps:

1) Resist the urge to put everything INSIDE your book on the OUTSIDE. The book cover is about getting interest and creating an emotional response. Sometimes, human figures/faces can do this very well. But so can a beautiful landscape. The trick is to find one amazing photograph that can represent a scene, object or person in your book, and stick with it. DON’T try to put all of the important things on the cover (ie the jobs of each character, all of the main scenes and places, and everything that happens.)

2) Get an awesome, royalty free image. There are lots of great sites to find excellent stock photography. Keep in mind that the most interesting/unique photographs will probably be used by other Indie Authors and will be easily recognized. So go for something more subtle (maybe cut out the model’s face, stick with her side/arms). Get a photo that matches the mood of your book – light, dark, funny, mysterious, etc. You can find photos on flickr under the creative commons, or get a friend to take something.

3) Use a simple, clean font. It can be a free font, but the more unique and bizarre it is, the more likely it will stand out (in a bad way). Find something subtle and crisp. Avoid basic free fonts. Do a search for fonts that fit your genre (mystery fonts, country fonts, action fonts, etc) and download a few. Avoid all text effects, like drop shadow, gradient, stroke… place the text in parts of the picture that make it stand out naturally (put white text in dark areas, dark text in light areas). It doesn’t even really matter if it doesn’t stand out that well. (Check out all of the books being published these days, that use small, minimal contrast text, like white text on light backgrounds.

4) Forget about the thumbnail!
 Authors always tell me that the text or certain little details can’t be seen from a thumbnail and that this is a problem. If you’ve chosen a beautiful photograph, that photograph will still be beautiful as a thumbnail. If the cover is too detailed and complicated, and it ONLY looks OK when you can see the whole thing closely, it’s probably too busy. Yes, your thumbnail is important – it should be nice enough to make them want to click and see what it is. Readers don’t have to actually have to see/understand your thumbnail clearly though, there should just be some nice bold colors or intriguing picture to make them spend that extra second to see it up close. Again, the best way to have an excellent thumbnail is to start off with a beautiful royalty free picture.

To sum up. ONE amazing picture, with a little bit of text on it in the right places, equals a beautiful cover.

Free book cover critique and feedback: 23 days

Ty Gray submitted this book cover for a review and critique. The memoir, “23 Days,” is a book with the theme of persistence, hope, and redemption. It’s about a police career. “How I transformed. The redemption of my resigning.”

First impressions: Too bold and busy. The text is too blocky/square for my tastes. The USA flag-behind-text could work, but with the bevel AND the background image, I think it’s got too much going on. The darkened out picture makes my eyes hurt, trying to focus in on it behind the bright text. If I were doing it, I’d probably center on the uniform, probably closer, maybe just the middle with the head/lower arms cut off, then put the “23 Days” directly over his chest. Still pretty big. Maybe still with the flag (if so, I’d desaturate the background image, change it to black/white or very simple colors). I’d probably also make the red white and blue more dirty/faded, softer.

I don’t mind the subtitle – it’s nice to have a subtitle to let readers know what the book is about (although this one could be edited a bit).

One of the main changes I’d make is the Author Name – it should be a lot bigger. Doesn’t matter if you aren’t a famous writer – putting your name small signals lack of confidence. If you want people to read your book, you need to be bold and at least appear to be a very confident author – this can easily be done with a big fat Author name.

Quick Fixes:

I contacted the author and got the background image. First I tried to recreate the original, but the plain guy/close up cop uniform was too boring for me, so I decided to use more of the picture. I think having this faded snapshot of a group of policemen is more interesting. I tried to get the 23-flag background to work but it doesn’t. The dark blue vs. white means it’s not going to look very good on either a light or black background. This can be fixed a little bit by a stroke, drop shadow or outer glow, but only so much. Ihis blue-green makes it pop out a bit more, but still not great.

So I got rid of the flag, changed to another font (Mangal) for some bold white typography. Overall much better, cleaner, easier to read. I used some gradient overlays to change the colors, get a darker effect with deeper blues. I like it – simple but nice enough to catch attention, let the reader know a little bit of what to expect. I like the contrast between the happy scene, but the dark and vivid colors….

I got rid

How to make your own book cover in Adobe Photoshop

If you have access to Adobe Photoshop and have time to play around, you can make a pretty amazing book cover by yourself. Making book covers is fun and – if you publish a lot of books – learning how to design your own book covers may save you a lot of money.

Here’s a short step-by-step of the book cover I just made for James Carter’s Scandalous.

1: Where to find pictures

Most book covers have some kind of photo-manipulation or collage, use one main image, or have a flat color background with a few small images. You need to find high-quality, high-resolution pictures to work with. To make sure they are copyright free, it’s usually better to look on paid stock image sites (my favorite is 123rf.com).

For Scandalous, we were looking for a Victorian-looking woman who looked broken or sad; at first we were thinking a portrait with some cracks in the face… but then I found this great picture of a statue…. very dramatic. But I wanted to bring it to life a little. So I found another picture of a woman to merge in.

 

2: Using layers and overlay

Open both images in photoshop. Make a new document that’s the right size of your book cover, and copy+paste both images into the new document. You’ll need to move them around until they fit together right – to do this you can set the transparency of the top one to %50, then use “edit: free transform” to resize or rotate it. For this picture, the eye and the mouth wouldn’t quite line up right, so I actually had to double the blonde woman layer and then delete everything except around the eye, for one, and everything except around the mouth, for the other. That way I could move each piece independently.

When things are in the right spot, you can change the blending options (lower right, under layers… or else top tab “layer”+blending options). Change from normal to “overlay”.

To get the colors and shadows to really pop out, you should download some free actions files. “Actions” are automatic series of processes – for example you can find a “300 action” that makes your picture look like the 300 movie. Or, just change the hue, saturation and contrast.

3: Photoshop Gradients

Whenever possible, I try to place text somewhere with the picture rather than in a ‘text box’, but this picture has too much variation of light and dark (unless I put the title on her face, which I didn’t want to do). So I copy+pasted a section of the background that’s the size I wanted, then went to “layer: layer styles: gradient overlay”. You can download tons of amazing gradients; so at this point you’re just trying them all, changing the orientation, colors, etc until you find what works best. It was so tough to decide here; I ended up with a bold red banner and a soft pearl one.

4: Best Fonts for Bookcovers

I’ve read a rule that a book cover shouldn’t have more than 3 fonts. That may be true (although I don’t like rules). But fonts are hugely important. Luckily you can download thousands of fonts, many of them for free. Try not to use something to messy or dirty or creative – the more unusual they are, the easier it will be for them to become overused and not cool anymore. For most books, a very simple, elegant serif or sans serif font will work best. Make sure it has a strong contrast so that it stands out. A lot of novels and literary books have very small, simple titles – that may be fine for bookstores but if you’re mostly selling online, big and bold will be easier to read.

For Scandalous I ended up using “Doulous”. My favorite other fonts include:

Serif: Perpetua, Dante, Sabon, Justus, Portland, Trajan pro

Sans Serif: Epitough, criticized, Telegrafico, Helvetica Neue, Ebrima

Once you get the size and font right, go to layers again and play with gradient options or color overlays. Sometimes you need a drop shadow to push the text out a bit, but don’t go to heavy and avoid it if you can. Plain white text on light blue is cleaner and more stylish than the same with a drop shadow (again – this is one of the areas that differ for print books; print books will be picked up and held so they can have a stylish look without worrying as much about legibility.

Before you finish, you need to kern your letters (adjust the spacing between each letter) by highlighting the letter and changing the spacing in the “characters” tab.

5: Final Touches – Eyes that Pop

I used a photoshop “teardrop” brush to place the drop – make sure you download as many photoshop brushes as you can get your hands on, you never know what you’re going to need.

To make amazing eyes that pop out, you need to use the “pen” tool to carefully outline the iris – then right click and “make selection”. Choose 4-6 feather. Then with your new layer, you can set blending option to “overlay” and layer style to “gradient overlay”. Changing the gradients will change the eye color!

Here are two of the finalists… I prefer the white/blue one – but I think we’ll use the red one instead (for an ebook, the red will grab a bit more attention and interest.)

 

 

COVER DESIGN SECRETS THAT SELL BOOKS

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