How Do You Design a Book Cover?

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.

Eventually I asked them to remove the models from the cover because it looked like a steamy romance (after about two years and multiple complaints from readers that the cover was misleading). Don’t get me wrong… El Tiburon has its romance, but steamy doesn’t quite fit the bill.

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.