I was just reviewing my old book cover design gallery and thought I’d share a modern update on how book cover design works. This will include important things to watch out for, whether you’re going design your own book cover or hire a professional. What IS a book cover? Your book cover is packaging. It’s 75% of whether a reader will even begin the process of considering buying your book. Most cheap book cover solutions look homemade and unprofessional, but the process is the same – it’s just putting it all together takes time and skill. Best photos and images for book cover design Book designs ..read more

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 publishing community, I’ve devoted thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours into building DIY book cover tools, templates and resources – so authors can design their own covers without making critical mistakes. This is obviously a work in progress, because cover design is complicated, but the templates have been downloaded ..read more

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 find them again, so I decided to link to my favorites here. Please note, many of these are not good enough as is – they have potential or great art, but in many cases (not all) the text would need to be redone to really make the cover as epic as the art suggests.   Betwixt Sold By:: Exquisitely Covere ..read more

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 came up with these. If you like these covers, can you help me out by pinning them on Pinterest? If you actually want to READ them, check out my fiction site, Urban Epics. What good are animated book covers? They won’t work on Kindle or iBooks (though I’m going to test them anyway, maybe I can find a ..read more

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 portfolio; then contact a bunch of authors with platforms and offer to remake their covers for free in exchange for a link and testimonial. If you have great samples, and your price is reasonable – between $100 and $1000, depending on your experience, quality and expertise – you’ll get orders. How many orders depends o ..read more

Clients usually start out describing all their characters, a pivotal scene, a hundred details, the expressions on everybody’s faces and the way their bodies are posed. That won’t work. All your cover needs to do is: 1) Appeal to your target audience 2) Indicate time period and setting. That’s IT. If you need to choose between adding more detail, more scene, more “stuff” and having a simple, powerful, emotional cover (emotion is done by colors and contrast, not so much character’s faces), you MUST always choose the powerful cover and sacrifice the details. This is very difficult for authors to ..read more

If you’re like me, you use Photoshop for graphic design. It’s better for blending layers and images. However there is some limitation with text – one common and frustrating problem is trying to figure out how to embed fonts. Photoshop doesn’t have any obvious option for this. Printers will ask you to embed fonts for quality. Take a look at this sample: If you zoom in 500%, the file with the embedded fonts has sharp and clear text – in the other, the text has been rasterized so you only have digital enlargement, which causes pixellation (click on the image to zoom in and see the differenc ..read more

Several months ago I was helping an author try to make a book cover. They had something very ugly, and I made something much better. I was working mostly for free (something I’m trying to stop doing) because I felt bad for the author (I feel bad for authors with ugly covers). Even though I did lots of revisions and ALSO offered to do the formatting for free, ultimately the author became unhappy that I wasn’t doing it exactly as he wanted, and got fed up waiting for me to make changes. Today, looking over another book cover designer’s website, I found that the same author had hired a new design ..read more

A video of me talking about book cover design (and trying not to look uncomfortable on camera). I ramble a little but there’s some good info here.   ..read more

I enjoyed this video about book cover design, as I’m starting to make my own videos. She mentions: 1. Contrasting colors 2. One color scheme 3. Matching sets (for series) And some other good stuff.   ..read more