The Importance of a Great Book Cover

     If you are an indie author creating a great book cover is something that you will definitely have to pay close attention to.  A book cover is the first thing that a reader will see before they even think about reading your book's description to find out what your book is about.  If your book cover isn't great most readers won't even go forward with wanting to read your book. Most readers, in general, will just go to the next book.  

     Here is a video talking about Bad Book Covers:

     I remember back when I first self-published in 2012' this was something I failed badly at.  Read my previous blog entry where I talk about this: "The First Thing I Learned When I Decided to Self-Publish on the Internet".

     Luckily, today having a great book cover is easier than you might think.  See the video below where I found someone on youtube.com talking about 5 Free Book Cover Creators.

     The Book Cover Creator that I totally love working within creating my book covers is: CANVA  @  http://www.Canva.com.  I can't say enough about this site.  The site has a free side and they also have a premium side that will cost a small amount every month.  But, let me tell you I basically work off of the free side of this program and find it to be most effective.  (See below a 3-part video series I personally created showing how to use Canva to make your own book covers.

     There are many other people on youtube.com explaining how to make a book cover using Canva. So if you feel you would like to learn more about how to use this program you might want to check out more videos on that site.

     The other website that I truly love going to with helping me design my book covers is Pixabay @ pixabay.com.  Pixabay is a public domain, creative commons website where you can use photos from this site for free without having to give attributions (credit) to the person who owns the photo.  On this site, the person has basically relinquished their copyrights to the image and is allowing anyone to use it for commercial use.   The only downsize when using a photo from this site for your book cover is that others could also use the same photo.  This makes having an original book cover which is all your own difficult, to say the least.  What I generally do is try to put together more than one photo when I download them to Canva to work with in order to make my book cover.  This way by using more than one photo on my cover, I feel like I am changing up my cover somewhat from someone else who might claim one of the photos that I might be using.  Plus, note you can buy photos at Canva for $1.00, which gives you a one-time use license.  They do have a requirement that must be followed when using their photos from this site on your book cover although, and it is:

$1.00 one-time license use (allows you to use their photo on a book cover 2,000 times before you need to upgrade to the multi-use license which is $10.00 (it allows you to use this book cover photo for 250,000 times).  If you exceed book sales over this, (which I could only hope for), then you will need to purchase the extended license for $100.00, which will give you unlimited copy use for your book cover photo. This information is included in their terms and conditions if you are interested to know where these stats came from.  You can also watch the video below which will explain this:

     If you would rather not do any of this there is an easier way for indie authors to obtain great book covers if they are willing to spend a little money, and that would be going over to fiverr.com where you can find a lot of people who would be willing to design a cover for you.  I can't say enough about this site if you are not a tech savvy person because most of the things that indie authors need can be found for a low price over on fiver.com.

    In my next blog entry, I'm going to talk about the importance of a GOOD Book Title.

So stay tuned!