As a self-published author, book covers are an important topic to me. When you’re promoting your book yourself, how catching your book cover is can either make your marketing way easier, or dreadfully difficult. In this article, I will share with you a few tips on how to get your perfect book cover. (Not talking about illustrated books here, only small illustrations you can find in a novel or in a collection of poems for example.)
When you’re about to publish a book, or just in the middle of writing one, you will at some point think about what kind of cover you want to have for your book. So, how to proceed ? Here are the two options you have :
#1 – Do it yourself. For several reasons, whether you have a tight budget or you have great skills in design, you might want to do your cover on your own. If it’s a question of money, I’d recommend you Canva. There’s a free version, and they have book cover templates. And if you’re great with design, then you know how to do it better than me haha. I guess I can mention Photoshop ? Other than that, I don’t know which softwares to use, sorry.
#2 – Hire a designer/illustrator. I have to say, having someone creating a unique cover for your book, is something incredibly satisfying. I ordered Talking To The Moon’s cover from an artist on Fiverr, and it was an amazing experience. More than Fiverr, I’d recommend the artists you can find on Fiverr, if you look closely and choose wisely (read all the reviews etc, be sure that you’re hiring a good professional, a trustworthy one). I’ve hired two illustrators from there, and it went very well with both (@fatimaseehar and the other one lost her Fiverr account unfortunately, but can be found as @akther_mary on Instagram). Other than Fiverr, you can find designers/illustrators/artists on Twitter (easy to get recs if you ask within in the writing community), or on Facebook, as there are groups dedicated to book covers for indie authors – I’d recommend Etheric 720 Designs, and RFC Cover Design !
If you’re choosing this option, please make sure that you think about what you want before contacting a designer/illustrator. It’s important that you can provide key elements right away, so that they can assess whether they can do it, and how much it will cost you. If you’re not good with explaining, try to make a little doodle, even if it’s ugly it will help to show what you want, how you want things to be in your book cover. Be ready to give them the measurements, the title, the blurb on the back if you order a full book cover… It’s better to know exactly what you want while giving the artist some creative freedom, rather than being vague and ending up with something you don’t like, right ? So please keep this in mind.
In both cases, you can go to Amazon KDP to define the size of your book, all the detailed measurements etc, they also have templates but I’ve never used them.
If you have any question, feel free to ask me, I’m always happy to help my fellow indie writers š !
I hope you all had a beautiful day (yeah I’m posting a bit late today haha), and see you next Wednesday !
Marie.
Marie K. Ricci - Author | Translator 