I make book covers

It’s the first Wednesday of the month again, time for a post for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group.

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FEBRUARY QUESTION: If you are an Indie author, do you make your own covers or purchase them? If you publish trad, how much input do you have about what goes on your cover?

MY ANSWER: I had three of my novels published by small publishers. It was several years ago, and they are all out of print now, but at the time, I was not too happy with the covers the publishers provided. And I had very little input for those covers, except a fact sheet, which outlined my protagonists’ physical attributes, the story locations, genres, etc. Maybe that’s why I started learning to create my own covers. I like the process and the results. If I ever republish my novels as an indie, they will all have covers made by me. Even if my covers are not going to be perfect, at least I won’t be able to blame any artist for their flawed images. All the imagery would be my own choices.

Right now, my 8 stories on wattpad.com have covers I’ve made, and I’m proud of them all. You could see them here.

Also, in the past, wattpad had a forum (unfortunately, wattpad closed down the forum a few years ago). Many wattpad writers requested covers for their stories on that forum, and I made a few of them. You could see my covers for the other wattpad writers here.

Although I do not consider myself an artist, for me, making book covers is a creative process. It is like creating collages on my PC. I have a collection of images from free websites, like Pixabay, and I combine them (sometimes up to a dozen different images in one cover) using free Paint.com software. Most of my covers belong to the speculative fiction genre. If you write in one of the sub-genres of speculative fiction, I might be able to make you a cover too.

What is your approach to the problem of book covers for your books?