Creating eBook Covers: Basics

Basics of Creating Book Covers

Reason for covers

• Attract attention of reader.  How? Colour, image, or “mood” of the cover.

• Visually display genre. Why? Make it easy for readers of a particular genre to select my novel from all the other novels.

• Visually display author name and title for readers Why? If the reader is a true fan they will purchase everything written by their favourite authors, no matter which genre.

Creating eBook Covers: Introduction

Introduction

I have never, in my entire life, purchased a book based on the colour, image or text font size displayed on the cover, and I do not intend to start now. So I wondered how I could continue to create covers for my ebooks when most authors don’t think like me.

Finished Edit

I finished editing Broken Agreement, Book III in the Broken series.

I created the cover and wrote a blurb and formatted for Smashwords.

What do you think?

Jazz’s Asteroid Cover Improvements

In my last blog I talked about learning to create covers in Photoshop and GIMP.

Well, thanks to the wonderful feedback, I changed the picture slightly.

Important Parts of Covers

On a previous blog I commented on studying the best seller list  of fiction and non-fiction novels for 2009 and wondered why some of the titles in the fiction novel list included the words “A Novel”.

My thought process at the time wondered why there was “dirty data” and why the data was not cleaned up to Third Normal Form. These thoughts relate to my programming days, where data had to be cleaned for storage in a database. In other words, redundant data was a waste of storage space.