Making Your Own Cover - The Book Designer's Cover Templates - A Quick Review

Covers sell books. It is that simple. After good editing, a great cover is essential and in the case of marketing, it might be one of your most essential items. The cover has to grab your potential reader's eye in about two seconds. This is even more difficult given how small the images Amazon and other online retailers provide.

One of the easiest ways to spot a self-published book is its cover. Bad covers on self-published books not only hurt sales, but give the legacy publishing crowd food for their arguments against self-publishing and serves as further proof that Indie authors have no business publishing.

CreateSpace and Amazon's KDP both offer cover templates which are better than what many authors come up with left to their own devices. I have used these for some of my books and these covers were "OK" at best. You can tell they are templates and having used them, I can spot with ease covers using these same templates just by browsing Amazon.

The good folks at The Book Designer now offer a solution to the problem of creating your own cover and having it look like an expensive custom designed cover.

The image above shows the design I came up with for my next book. Now, you might not like the looks of the cover and that's fine, but DO NOT hold it against The Book Designer. Any design issues with the cover are because I have very limited talent for this sort of thing.

I was able to calculate and set the width of the spine, enter all of my back cover information and quickly insert the cover image in about 20 minutes. I spent another hour creating different versions by moving text boxes, changing text color and fonts. 

All told, in about 2 hours I read the directions and created 20 different possible versions of my cover. Granted, the time invested did not include writing the back copy or selecting the my photo from my collection.

The best part was I did not lose my temper once, feel the need to threaten my computer or feel my blood pressure increase, all of which are normal when I have to learn how to use new software or a new item on my computer. That's how easy the directions were to use!

You may purchase a license for a single-book, multiple-book or a commercial license, just like with their interior design templates. Purchasing several templates at a time will also allow you to take advantage of a significant discount. Two templates will garner you a 25% discount and three will earn a 35% discount. You can save considerable money by getting your cover and interior templates at the same time.

The cover templates come in a variety of common book trim sizes and designed for use with CreateSpace, IngramSpark and Lightning Source.

This neat tool also allows you to do some neat design tricks such as using a "wrap around image" on the cover. It comes with some 20 loadable custom fonts to allow you to create just the right look with your text.

I will be taking advantage of this great tool to revamp several of my less than desirable covers in the not too distant future!

 

Following the Amazon-Hachette Dispute? Here are a few interesting posts!

Just trying to keep up with what is going on in the Amazon-Hachette contract negotiations can make your head spin. Amazon is being vilified by Hachette and some well known authors and author groups. Since high stakes contract negotiations are very seldom carried out in public, Amazon's letter published today is enlightening.

For some informative reading about this dispute and what it may mean to authors, both traditionally and self-published as well as the publishing industry in general, you may want to check the blog posts I have linked to below.

Amazon's Latest Proposal

Hachette Complains in Public

Amazon Makes Offer to Authors

Konrath Takes on Chuck Wendig

This fight seems to have divided authors and there is plenty to be concerned about for our industry in the long term. Even for those of us who are indies or self-published, the outcome of this fight will have some kind of impact on our publishing efforts down the road.

Making a Living as an Indie/Self-Published Author

At best, it was always a guessing game about how many books self-published or indie authors sold and how much money has been earned. For authors who would like to make a living as writers and are considering self-publishing, this is a huge issue.

Below are a pair of links that you need to visit if this topic is important to you. Both are essential reading. Rather than talk about what each has to say, I encourage you to leave this site and visit the two sites linked to.  Here they are:

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2014/02/me-hugh-howey-and-legacy-john-on.html

 

http://authorearnings.com/

I promise you, this will be time well spent.

Improve Your Amazon Search Results

As self-published or indie authors, almost all of us rely heavily on Amazon to sell our books. Anything we can do to improve the search results for our books on Amazon is something we as authors have to consider. For many of us the biggest part of the marketing/sales battle is helping readers who would enjoy or benefit from reading our book finding the book among the millions of titles available on Amazon.

A new tool is available for sale that can help authors improve the search process for readers who use the Amazon search engine to locate books that might interest them. The tool, AK Booster, is now available for sale and allows authors to determine the best search words to use for the seven keywords Amazon allows authors to provide for their Kindle books during the uploading and publishing process.

Rather than duplicate a detailed review of the product, simply visit this review. I have purchased AK Booster and was surprised by the keywords it provided for some of my books. I experimented with a couple of my Kindle books and to my surprise, both of them moved up in the search results as a result of changing one, or in some cases, two keywords recommended by the results of AK Booster.

Current Topics of Interest in Self-Publishing

Here are a few recent blog posts I have found of interest as related to the business of self-publishing. Hope they are of interest to the readers of this blog.

Great post on J.A. Konrath's A Newbie's Guide to Publishing

Questions from Steve Zacharius, CEO and President of Kensington Publishing

From Morris Rosenthal - data on Kindle sales and Kindle borrows - Self Publishing 2.0

Prime Holiday Usage Data

Kindle Sales Comparison for Fiction and Non-Fiction sales

From Joel Friedlander's The Book Designer

Forming a self-publishing cooperative

Update on the Ingram Spark Program for Indie Authors

More on IngramSpark from Aaron Shepard

The 40% Error 

Marketing tactics and strategies from The Creative Penn by Joanna Penn

Info. on the task of marketing for authors

eBook Architects - Customer Service You Can Count On

Any author who has dealt with "author services" in an effort to self-publish their work is well aware how many companies are out there, competing for our limited and hard earned dollars. Many of those companies are best described as "wolves" looking to prey on unsuspecting authors.

Others are reputable and provide excellent service and a reasonable price. One such company is eBook Architects.

I have reviewed them in the past and posted a positive review.

Recently I needed to have two of my files sent to me again, and to my horror, I found a misspelling on the title page of one of my books. It was my last name no less.

I e-mailed the good folks at eBook Architects and asked for the files and how much it would cost to have the misspelling corrected.

Not only did they resend the files I requested at no charge, the made the correction in spelling at no charge and sent me the corrected file.

Keep in mind, I offered to pay for the correction as I considered it my fault.

If I wasn't already a loyal customer when I need to pay for a book to be converted to Kindle and ePub files, I am now.

eBook Architects could have charged me or taken their own sweet time in getting the files and the corrected file to me. I received the files within two days of my request. In this day and age, when getting the run around is the norm, it is nice to get that kind of service.

My Futile Predictions for 2014 and the Publishing Industry

I just read J.A. Konrath's Publishing Predictions 2014 and as always, Mr. Konrath has stirred the hornet's nest with his 10 predictions concerning the state of the publishing world for the coming year.

Some of his predictions I think will come to pass in some form. Other predictions I am not so sure about but I would like to see come to pass.

His first prediction, sadly, I think will come to pass. Perhaps not in 2014, but in the not too distant future. Barnes and Noble will file for bankruptcy, spin off the Nook and close most of its stores. I hope the Nook survives as there needs to be competition in the ebook retail market to keep Amazon honest in how it pays authors in its KDP program.

I also agree with Mr. Konrath's prediction visibility will become more difficult for authors as the number of authors publishing books increases due to the ability to successfully self-publish thanks to platforms like Amazon, Nook, iBookstore, etc.

His prediction that libraries will begin purchasing ebooks from self-published authors is another concept I think will come to pass. Largely because Konrath himself is working to start a company that sells self-published ebooks to libraries. Another market for us to tap into!

As for the rest of his predictions, well, we'll see what happens in 2014.

My own predictions for the coming year?

The competition is going to increase for visibility in the ebook market. This will be an issue unless the ebook retailers can find ways to continue the increase in the number of readers who prefer to read digital books and not print.

Self-published authors need to make sure their books are available as paperbacks for at least a few years yet. Print's not going away. Some books just don't lend themselves to the book format yet, particularly non-fiction of a technical nature. Until the technology catches up, and it will, lots of readers will be better served by a paperback book than an ebook.

Social media platforms will come and go and most of us will never completely figure out how to use them to promote our work. At least those of us over the age of 35.

Finally, authors who learn to diversify and are willing to adapt to the latest delivery technology for books will be those who have the most success in the coming year.

2014 will be an interesting year.