Where do you get your book cover designs? Do you pay for custom book designs? Most custom artwork by a digital artist will cost $200-$2,000 if the image is highly artistic and detailed. That price would be suitable for a long novel. My question is more about authors that write 25 to 100 short stories and publish them on Kindle. I have bought short fantasy adventure and fantasy erotica stories from Kindle and they all had unique covers. Where do people that publish eBooks for Kindle have their fantasy covers designed? If they write 25 or 50 or 100 stories a year it would get expensive if they spent $100 or $200+ per unique book cover.
you can get templates in canva and pictures free from unsplash or pixabay and DIY , or you can get templated covers for less than $50 the top tips for that approach are - use a decent font (not a basic display font), keep it simple, and if you are using templates be careful of copyrighted elements (not all designers are that switched on) This is the cover I did for my Novella Honest Intent using canvaand a picture from unsplash. Its not going to win any prizes, but its okay, and I wasn't spending money on a cover for a 25k giveaway. If you want 3D that's easily done using a free conversion service
If you're self publishing, why not get creative? I think Pixlr is a great app for image resizing, editing and formatting. The level of quality would rely on your amount of effort.
one point is that you don't sell books by being different - covers set a genre expectation for the reader, such as pink and fluffy with swirly text = chic lit , silhouette of a man with as gun and a filtered landscape ahead of him = thriller , hunky bloke showing off his chest = steamy romance. dragons =fantasy you don't have to follow them slavishy but if your cover is very different from the norm it risks readers being misled as to what the books about
I highly recommend fionajaydemedia.com. She is reasonable (@$250), fast (a few weeks) and good. She has done The Eagle and the Dragon for me, @K McIntyre 's Parham's Mill, and is working on Karen's third. She has been recognized by USA Today and has won some awards.
I used to be of the "you can't judge a book by the cover" but no more. In fact, the cover is the first thing that will attract readers to your book, out of all the others. So make a good first impression.
Will you get enough more sales to pay for $200 let alone a $2000 expense for a kindle book? Why do so many writers think they need to spend a fortune on covers instead of DIY?
Good cover. I would have liked it to be a bit clearer at thumbnail size, but I can read the title. Would have helped to have a sub title to help grab interest.
First you have to get them to look at your book at all. Other books are not a concern here. Don't worry about other folks. Just make sure your cover does not confuse them and is legible at amazon thumbnail size. Good sales copy on the back is helpful.
https://www.canva.com/templates/book-covers/ https://www.postermywall.com/index.php/g/book-cover-posters https://spark.adobe.com/make/book-cover-maker Google for many more cover aids. More importantly is the sales help the cover gives not the artistry of the image used. Make it clear and legible at amazon thumbnail size. Don't confuse or make it illegible by hiding letters under the image.
Grekul do yourself a favour and ignore the " advice" above he doesn't know what he's talking about. The real key is to look at the style of covers in your genre, you want to stand out, but not be completely different because covers set reader expectation of genre content... E.g swords and dragons = fantasy, hunk man with his top off = steamy romance, silhouette of a man with a gun and a washed out landscape = thriller. There is no problem with having images overlap the text, so long as the text is large enough to still be readable, this gives the cover depth and stops it looking like a picture with some text slapped on top. The genre expectation thing also extends to font choice.. Thrillers tend to have fairly bold impactful fonts like league gothic, where as swirly text, or brush texts that look like lipstick etc suggest romance, text that feels old worldly suggests history and so on. I'd also suggest checking out podcasts where cover designers are interviewed, and getting Stuart baches new book on cover design for authors
I’ll do something for FREE. Simply tell me what you want and I’ll attempt something. If you don’t like it you don’t have to accept it. I want practice and a reason to try new types of artwork.
Still nobody? Do I have to beg for something to practice? Simply give me a few pages to get the feel of the book and other bits you’d like illustrated. From there I will try and produce diffrent styles which you can freely use as part as a book cover - honestly not mad about book design per se, but willing to try something after I’ve made the main illustration.
I do all of my own covers, which really cuts costs. It helps that I'm a book cover designer by trade, though, and I already have a ton of licences for fonts and stock images at my fingertips. Premade covers are pretty cheap from what I've seen on Facebook, a lot of them under $100, which is pretty neat and cost effective. You could also try making your own, but, as I say to everyone on Facebook attempting to make their own, please try and try and try again to make it, don't expect your first book cover to turn out looking like you paid thousands for it. Covers aren't really something you can/should make yourself, but I can really see why people do. Saying that, I've seen excellent homemade covers, but I think if you've never touched PS before, you should draft it and draft it again, and then seek advice from other writers about it, or even see if your designer friends will offer advice. YouTube is full of tutorials that can help you. Also remember about fonts and stock, you can't just pick something off Google and go, you need to properly see if you can use them for your cover, or if you need to buy a licence. Here's a quick cover I did, admin, please tell me to delete it if not allowed (the book isn't published, and the cover is simply a first draft, so I don't think it classes as a self-promo), that took around 15 minutes. The stock was purchased through... I think it was Dreamstime or DepositPhotos. The font I had a licence for anyway. It's simple, and isn't polished yet, but I only used basic tools on Photoshop! All of the tools I used can be learned in about half an hour by watching tutorials, if you were wondering about making your own. Another thing to note is that you should check out the covers of trending books in your genre to see what sells these days. Genre covers are always evolving, so you need to find something that really conveys the genre, and meets reader expectations.
I use GIMP to make my covers. My first one isn't the greatest, but it is much more lively than some I have seen, which is a plus I guess. Second one is much better but it is not ready for release yet. Though it isn't that fantastic, it is a much improvement on the first books.
I don't have any novels published (yet) but I do make art/covers for my friends and my college newspaper sometimes. Depending on what they're going for I either do everything in corel painter or I do elements traditionally. Normally my traditional stuff is used for political pieces or news articles for whatever reason. If your book is a small scale/novice thing I usually don't charge more than $50 for it with the condition that I get more if the novel does super well and you become the next JK Rowling. If it's just indie kindle publishing I'm not going to charge a huge amount unless you're really persnickety and a pain to work with.
and that's a condition i'd never sign up to - I'd rather pay a cover designer $200 dollars flat, than have strings attached to a $50 job
To each their own. Granted if someone wanted to pay that much up front I wouldn't put in the 'if it does super well' stipulation. My goal is primarily to make custom cover art more affordable for people that would otherwise use random stock photos and most likely won't make a ton of money.
I'm a little confused, so your covers are in that range, or what? I charge under $100 for eBook covers, and usually around the $45 mark during sales.
tbh if they aren't planning on making any money they may as well do it themselves - I wouldn't spend any money on something that I wasn't planning to sell
