Publishing Help

Should You Design Your Own Cover?

Cover design is an area that most people struggle with. I will try to simplify the decision-making process for you.

First, decide what genre your book fits into. Go to Amazon and do a search of books similar to yours. Study the covers of the best-selling books. Take notes on what you see. What type of fonts do they use? What sorts of graphics or pictures?

Now the tough question: Can YOU create a similar cover? Do you know how? Do you have any design experience at all? Do you know where you can get stock photos? If the answer is no to these, you'll want to hire a cover designer. You can find them all over the internet, but make sure you look at their portfolios before deciding.

If you feel that you can design your own cover, try to make your cover image similar but not too similar to the best selling books in your genre. This is part of something called "writing to market." This is where you create a book based on the marketability of that type of book.

Anyway, you'll most likely want to find some stock photos. Look online. You can find some free ones, but make sure they really are free and it's legal to use them for your book. There are also pay sites where you pay for a monthly membership. Sometimes these sites offer a free week trial and you can download up to 5 images a day for the whole week. Doing this can get you a decent amount of images to get you started. This works best for genre writers and those who know what types of books they'll be writing because you'll need to download the images before the books are even written.

Sometimes my husband designs my covers in Photoshop and InDesign. He does a pretty good job, except that he relies on me to tell him every design element. He does the grunt work and I call ALL of the shots. He just doesn't know enough about romance covers to know what to do on his own.

Because of this, I have taken to designing my last few covers on my own. I don't have the fancy programs that he has, but I have quite a few stock images stored up, and I use Canva. If there is a design element that I really want but I don't know how to do it, then I email the image to my husband and he can do the rest for me.

Canva is awesome. I highly recommend it. It's a website and app. You can design your book covers and your promotional materials with it. They also have some stock images that are free to use, but keep in mind that if you use free images that are easily found on a popular design website that others will be using those images too.

When I wrote my Cupid's Camera series, I wanted to have pictures of real couples on the cover as that was what all the best sellers in the genre were doing. I wanted my couples to be fully clothed, as these are clean romances, but unfortunately, I had no access to stock photos. I came up with an alternate idea and had my husband design it for me. Though I liked the final cover, which featured a silhouette couple beside a tree with hearts for leaves, the 3-book series didn't do well. I didn't design my cover to market.

I have not bothered redesigning them, however. Instead, I bundled the series into one book with a more appealing cover. My husband worked very hard on the three covers he designed to my own specifications, so I wouldn't feel right replacing them.

Things to keep in mind:

Make sure there are no spelling or grammar errors on your cover.

If you plan to release a short series in one book, make sure your paperback cover doesn't mention anything about your book being a "bundled set." I have no idea why this is against Amazon's rules, but it is. You can say "complete set," or "complete series," but you can't use the word "bundle."

If you use Canva, you don't have to worry about the exact cover dimensions, as Canva takes care of that for you, but otherwise, the desired cover dimensions for Kindle are: 2560 X 1600

You can use the same cover image for your paperback book, but you'll need to make a few decisions beforehand. We'll get into that in another post.

Make sure your cover art represents the content of your book. Don't have half-naked models on your cover if there's no steamy scenes, but don't have fully-clothed characters if there's a lot of steam. Likewise, if you have a character that owns a dog, you wouldn't show them on your cover with a cat.

People judge books by their covers ALL THE TIME. I do it. I don't even feel bad about it. Your cover either sells your book or dooms it to fail.

I want you and your book to succeed. Again, if you have any questions about this lesson, feel free to comment or private message me.




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