Celebrating Independent Authors
Canva, an online graphic design site for do-it-yourselfers, offers hundreds of free design options for writers. You can create your own Facebook covers, YouTube channel covers, business cards, twitter headers, posters, flyers, menus, invitations, album covers, and, most importantly, eBook covers.
Let’s make an eBook cover right now. Continue reading “Canva for Free eBook Covers (and more)”
by K. S. Brooks & Stephen Hise.
The books that appear in features on Indies Unlimited have been through a comprehensive vetting process, a portion of which considers the book cover. In many cases, the individual elements of the cover design do not work together to convey a professional representation of the book’s content. Sometimes, this means that someone took a photograph the equivalent of a “snapshot” and inserted some plain text on top of it. This can result in a homemade look which, to readers, may scream “amateur.” While the self-published stigma is fading, indies still have to work hard to put out a good quality product. And the cover is a big part of that. The reader will keep going if the cover is anything less than catchy and professional.
We understand that many indies do not have the funds to spend on a professionally-designed book cover. At Indies Unlimited, we try to give authors the tools to do these kinds of things themselves. We’ve published a number of posts on the importance of a good book cover and even provide a resource page with tips and tools on how to design a book cover.
This article details the specific elements we take into consideration when evaluating book covers. Of course, each cover is evaluated on a case-by-case basis. But don’t take our word for any of these. Take a peek at this page filled with sample book covers and see the difference for yourself. Continue reading “Basic Elements of Digital Book Cover Design”
Making a book cover in Microsoft Publisher is extremely easy. If you don’t have MS Publisher, I’m sorry, I don’t really know any comparable alternatives in freeware or on Macs. (If you know of one, please feel free to let us know, and if you’d like to write a guest post about it – even better!) I’ve been using Publisher for a ridiculously long time, and that’s what works for me.
There are so many options in Publisher, I could never talk about all of them in this article. Nor do I probably know how to use all of them. I’m a simple person – and keeping it simple works for me. I’m using MS Office 2010. If you are using a different version, some of this will look weird to you, but the basics remain the same.
Open Publisher. Select blank (portrait mode) from the options under New. Continue reading “How to Make an eBook Cover in Publisher”
Author, oh author, why is your title so tiny? Don’t you want your book to have a big title, like the other books do? I know you do. And I know you know that size matters.
Then why, oh why, are you not using the space on your book’s cover to better display your title? What, exactly, are you trying to accomplish?
This perplexes me. This drives me up the wall. This makes me want to scream.
When you post a book to Thrifty Thursday or Print Book Party, do you just leave? Do you not come back to see your spiffy book cover looking all happy on our pages? Because if you did – you might see that no one can read your title.
The majority of what I’m seeing lately looks like this: Continue reading “Title Envy”