Book Covers for $25 or Less? You betcha!

You can create a professional cover without breaking your piggy bank. So far for my four self-published books (two of which are forthcoming in the next few months), I’ve utilized a total of 55 credits for artwork at Dreamstime.com, which equates to about $70.00 out of my PayPal account. Remember, that artwork covers a total of four books. I love this site and nearly exclusively buy all of my images there. The package I bought for Soul Runner: A Novel of High Adventure cost $24.95 and the rest covered the other three books. You can see the end results for my two most recent novels below.

   

And no, that’s not a sales pitch (unless you really, really, really want to buy one of my books, in which case I won’t dissuade you). Ahem. Anyway, I’m delighted with the end results of both covers, but even more with the fact that since I changed them out from the rather bland ones I started off with, sales have picked up. Don’t believe it when someone tells you a cover doesn’t sell a book—not even for a moment. Maybe the cover won’t sell a book but it will definitely get people to take a closer look if your cover’s eye-catching.
Make sure when buying images at Dreamstime that they are at least 300 dpi. If you can’t find what you want there, don’t hesitate to try fotolia, as well. I have purchased one image from iStockphoto but I find they’re overpriced in contrast to the other two sites I’ve mentioned.
But what about the creation piece? Well, it’s not as difficult as you might think (yeah, I know, easy for me to say as I’m a technology professional). There’s a free image tool I absolutely love called the GNU Image Manipulation Program, or affectionately known as GIMP. This software is free, installs on a number of different operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc.) and is extremely intuitive to use.
When creating a new file in GIMP, you want to set the image for your book to be at least 0.25” larger in width and height than your trim size (that being the actual size of the book). See this chart at CreateSpace for a breakdown of industry standard book sizes. My preferred sizes for a book are 5.5 × 8.5 in. or 5.25 × 8.00 in. I know some authors prefer the 6.00 × 9.00 in. and that’s okay, but as a reader I find that a bit uncomfortable to hold (particularly as I do most of my reading in bed). I’m kind of a spoiled brat. Once you’ve created the correct size and dpi (dots-per-inch) setting of at least 300 x 300, you’re then ready to buy your images and add them to the background palette created in GIMP.
Finally, there’s the issue of lettering. I think the fonts for the title and your name are some of the most important aspects of cover creation. My exclusive tool for creating titles and my byline on the cover is CoolText.com. I welcome others to contribute comments as to what they’ve used for creating covers. Still, this process has proven pretty solid and I look forward to making more covers in the future. Once you get the process down, it’s not really all that difficult—in fact, I think it’s pretty fun! Good writing to you.