Producing an Effective Book Cover

THE BOOK COVER

Many good well-written books are let down by poor cover design. How can you avoid this and make your book stand out from the crowd, especially if you want to design your own book cover?

Let’s take a look at the anatomy of an effective book cover. The book’s title and the author’s name are the most important things you see. You will also want a teaser – something that hints about the book’s contents – and a graphic of some sort.

Many writers choose to hire a cover designer. If you can afford to hire a professional, that’s great, but some people aren’t in the position to spend that cash… at least not until they have sold a few copies of their books!

You might be fortunate enough to have a creative friend, maybe even a graphic designer or artist who can help you. That’s another option.

Or, perhaps you want to create the cover yourself. If you’re going to do-it-yourself, you will first need to research the covers of other books similar to your own. Your book cover isn’t just a picture, it’s your packaging. It should instantly communicate to the reader the kind of book, and so it needs to be similar to the other books of that genre.

We’ve all seen really sad homemade covers with high-school artwork or images that, while nice enough, have nothing to do with the contents of the book. Nothing turns a reader off faster than a poorly executed cover. It screams amateur and reflects badly on the quality of your content. The trick to a good book cover is to make your book distinctive, but anchor it to existing consumer expectations.

When creating a book cover, you need to obtain good images. Once you’ve figured out what kind of image you want, then it’s definitely worth getting a high-quality graphic. There is a big difference in amateur and professional graphics, so try to resist the temptation to choose a lower-quality image for sentimental reasons! There are some good stock photo websites that are not too expensive. Sometimes you can even find license-free images. It’s not that hard to get good graphics, so, use the best art you possibly can.

A lot of designers use PhotoShop or similar software to manipulate their images. These programs tend to be expensive and are not particularly intuitive to use. Instead, you might find simple, free tools online.

OR

Or you can let me do it for you.  I not only create striking book covers, but I can format your book and get it ready for publication as both a paper book and an eBook. Compared to most, my rates are very reasonable. If you are interested email me with a brief description of your project, and I’ll send you a breakdown of prices and services. Turn around is usually less than a month, depending on my workload. I only work on one book at a time, giving each client all the attention she needs to make her book the best it can be. Happy repeat customers are my reference.  I have several clients for whom I’ve done a number of books.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you!!!
Write to me at jmbolton.author@gmail.com