Getting Ready to Publish
When I finished writing my first book, I wanted to follow the procedure that I had read about in some books on self-publishing. That is to publish to paperback on createspace.com first, because at the end of that process, they will ask you if you want to then publish to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) for your e-book.
You don’t have to complete this entire process at one time. After you’ve accomplished a few steps, you can stop and come back and finish at a later date. But, I was ready to do it all at once. My e-book was ready, so I wanted to create the book cover for it next. When you create your separate cover for your paperback, you start with your e-book cover and just add a spine and a back cover using a template you can download from createspace.com.
Before you even think about designing your book cover yourself, google: “bad book covers” and look at drawings that could have been better done by a ten-year-old, too many picture elements just thrown together, text that can’t be read because the font is too hard to read, text that can’t be read because of badly contrasting colors, and visual themes that don’t tell the reader what the genre of the book is. If you’re still interested in doing your own covers, go to amazon.com, bring up the “Books” search box, and type in “book cover design”. If you would like to explore paying for a cover design, google: “hiring a book cover designer”.
If you really want to create your own book covers, I suggest that you buy Photoshop Elements and at least two books about it. Your first step should be to go to a large bookstore and browse their books on Photoshop Elements. As a first book, you should look at a “For Dummies” or a “Missing Manual” type book for the latest version of Photoshop Elements. For a second book, you should get a book about how to use the layers function of Photoshop.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the KDP Guidelines states that the preferred image for an e-book cover on Amazon is a .jpg file 2560 pixels tall by 1600 pixels wide, at a resolution of at least 350 pixels per inch. It is easy to create a blank canvas of that size using Adobe Photoshop Elements. You can download Photoshop Elements on amazon.com. You can also download a discounted package of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. Photoshop Elements is for creating, editing, and cataloging digital pictures, and Premiere Elements is for editing and cataloging digital videos.
When you have finished your image, be sure to save it in Photoshop format so that all your layers remain, in case you want to modify or improve your image later. Then, perform a “Flatten Image” and save in the .jpg format using the “Maximum Image Quality” setting. That’s the file you will upload to KDP during the publishing process.
You don’t have to complete this entire process at one time. After you’ve accomplished a few steps, you can stop and come back and finish at a later date. But, I was ready to do it all at once. My e-book was ready, so I wanted to create the book cover for it next. When you create your separate cover for your paperback, you start with your e-book cover and just add a spine and a back cover using a template you can download from createspace.com.
Before you even think about designing your book cover yourself, google: “bad book covers” and look at drawings that could have been better done by a ten-year-old, too many picture elements just thrown together, text that can’t be read because the font is too hard to read, text that can’t be read because of badly contrasting colors, and visual themes that don’t tell the reader what the genre of the book is. If you’re still interested in doing your own covers, go to amazon.com, bring up the “Books” search box, and type in “book cover design”. If you would like to explore paying for a cover design, google: “hiring a book cover designer”.
If you really want to create your own book covers, I suggest that you buy Photoshop Elements and at least two books about it. Your first step should be to go to a large bookstore and browse their books on Photoshop Elements. As a first book, you should look at a “For Dummies” or a “Missing Manual” type book for the latest version of Photoshop Elements. For a second book, you should get a book about how to use the layers function of Photoshop.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the KDP Guidelines states that the preferred image for an e-book cover on Amazon is a .jpg file 2560 pixels tall by 1600 pixels wide, at a resolution of at least 350 pixels per inch. It is easy to create a blank canvas of that size using Adobe Photoshop Elements. You can download Photoshop Elements on amazon.com. You can also download a discounted package of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. Photoshop Elements is for creating, editing, and cataloging digital pictures, and Premiere Elements is for editing and cataloging digital videos.
When you have finished your image, be sure to save it in Photoshop format so that all your layers remain, in case you want to modify or improve your image later. Then, perform a “Flatten Image” and save in the .jpg format using the “Maximum Image Quality” setting. That’s the file you will upload to KDP during the publishing process.
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