The non-artist’s guide to creating an e-book cover
By Paul Biba
Such is the title of this excellent article at eBooks Just Published. It tells you how to find cover illustrations, what size illustration to use, how to edit and size the image in Photoshop Elements and has a number of clever tips for you along the way. The suggestions apply to almost any image editor you might own, and the author even tells you where to get some free ones.
As a bit of a Photoshop maven I can tell you that the author’s suggestions are all right on. I agree with the final point: You’ve spend months to years writing your novel. Now it’s worth spending a little extra effort designing a cover before publication. All you need is a few basic computer skills.
March 2nd, 2009 at 7:17 pm
Unfortunately far too many self-published pbooks and ebooks turn a potential reader off with terrible cover design. My suggestion would be to experiment with Photoshop plus a professional vector layout program like Adobe Indesign. I’d also recommend using Indesign for your interior text too.
Like Paul said, you’ve spent months/years writing the bloody book, may as well learn how to ‘Design’ the book.
Due to the high price of Creative Suite that has Indesign & PS bundled in it, you are better off downloading a demo version at Adobe. It only takes a few days, maybe a week (depending on your learning capabilities) to understand how to use the basics of the program. You won’t be utilising all the features of the beast since most people will be producing ebooks
Firstly, design doesn’t have to be ‘busy’, it can be minimal and clean. The one thing to remember is to make it ‘professional’. Look at the covers of the books you like, then make an effort to discover how that look was achieved.
I’ve put a couple of examples at the links below from the magazine I used to publish. One cover is a traditionally busy with a magazine-type feel. The other one is minimalist ‘Journal-type’ design - we charged $14.95 for this mag and sold thousands of copies, so the ‘clean-ness’ of the design did its job. There’s also a double spread to give you an idea of the crispness of Vector Programs when designing, as opposed to pixel programs like MS Paint etc.
http://i195.photobucket.com/albums/z266/capeyorker/cover_2005.jpg
http://i195.photobucket.com/albums/z266/capeyorker/cover_2007.jpg
http://i195.photobucket.com/albums/z266/capeyorker/44_45_spread.jpg
Just my 2 cents.