Jed Samuel Books

Step By Step Guide: Creating Your Own Book Cover

1. Plan your book cover

Think of what your book is primarily about and brainstorm ideas about what your front cover should look like. Your book cover will need to look good when big and when thumbnail size. You won't be able to have all aspects of your book on the cover, so focus on the most important parts.

2. Find a picture

You can either create your own picture or use a non-copyrighted image. Search for non-copyrighted pictures online using Google or using some of these sites we've suggested:

Before you use a picture, make sure you have checked the copyright status of the picture.

3. Use photo editing software

Open up some photo-editing software, whatever preference the user has. One free recommendation we have is paint.NET

Resize the image to be a suitable size for book covers. For the most professional and high quality look set the dimensions to 2500 pixels (height) by 1563 pixels (width). Or you can set the dimensions with a ratio of 1.6 (height) and 1 (width).

Copy your chosen image into your software and resize it to fill the book cover without stretching and damaging your image.

4. Choose a font

For the next stage, you must pick a suitable font and colour to make your work look professional. Some great book cover fonts which are available for free are listed here:

Sometimes when creating cover art it is hard to get a professional look as the colours available using photo editing software is limited. If you use the website - Color Hunter, you can quickly find colour palettes which contain colours that compliment and work well with each other. You can also upload your own image and find a specific colour palette for your work.

5. Perfect your cover art

Place your book title and name in your chosen font and perfect your book cover.

6. Have a professional book cover!

@font-face{font-family:yola_heading_font;src:url("resources/Chunkfive.otf");}MAKE YOUR OWN BOOK COVER

MAKE YOUR OWN BOOK COVER