My friend, John, asked me, “How do you design a book cover?”
Finally a technical question! There’s several different ways to go
about it. I designed my first book on the Windows Art program. Honestly, it’s
my favorite cover. Unfortunately I had to cave into business pressure and go
with a photograph based cover… mainly because my second book had a photo cover.
Speaking of that, my publisher of El Tiburon was amazingly cool to
have given me a great book cover. I’ll admit I asked them to stay with my
design style, but no. So I had to approve their design, which meant saying no
to several models because they didn’t look right.
My first experience with making a professional quality cover was
through a friend who used a Fiverr tech. We made Counterpart’s new cover.
Again, I only had yay or nay power. I wanted to have control from the beginning.
For my recently published book, In the Crossfire of Revenge, I
contracted with Fiverr all by myself. I felt so grown-up! :) I chose from their
long list of book cover specialists based on reviews. I wanted one who allowed
for multiple revisions. My lady was in Germany. We dialogued back and forth about
how I wanted the cover to look. I was directed to an enormous photo bank to
choose the photo I wanted (it took me about a week to decide). Then I sent it
to her and she went to work. It took about six revisions until I was satisfied.
I love the results… and it only cost me about $45 bucks! She gave me a cover in
3D, a thumbnail for eBook sites, and a square one for the audiobook, and the
cover for the paperback.
Then I learned how to make it animated with glittering light using Glitterboo. I think it looks pretty cool on the cover I made for the McGee Series. That one I did using the phone app called Canva. My nephew took an artistic photo of his police gear for me to use. Canva is a great app.
