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!
