How To Make A Book Cover That Isn't Lousy

Lots of people are self publishing books these days, including me. If you self publish you need to make your own book cover or pay someone to do it. I recently read a posting from an author in a Goodreads forum where she complained that she was no good at Photoshop and wondered if anyone would make her a book cover image for free. Somebody replied that he could do it, but he would charge thirty dollars. This got me thinking.

You can get a professional to design your book cover, and you can even use a website like 99 Designs to get people to design a lot of book covers for you, and you only pay for the one you actually use. Either way you're talking serious money. Certainly more than thirty bucks. Even I wouldn't do a book cover for that amount of money. I write as a hobby. I am willing to spend months writing a novel that might never make any money at all. However, I am NOT going to make a cover for somebody else's book without being paid a reasonable amount for my time.

As an author, on the other hand, I am like a small businessman. I absolutely hate the idea of having employees. According to Karl Marx, employees have a surplus value to their labor. What you pay them should be less than what their work is worth to you. The difference between what their labor is worth and what you make from their work is the surplus value. As a businessman you make money from the surplus value of your employee's work.

Now if you have an established business it's easier to like your employees, because their work has a significant surplus value. If your business is just getting started, you resent having employees because they are guaranteed to make money from your work, but you aren't. And that sucks. So you do the work yourself.

In my own case I have another reason to do my own book covers, etc. I actually am fairly good at it. By this I mean that I know my way around a computer and I know what it can do. I do computer work for a living, and under my real name I've written books about them (that don't sell either). So I know how to format an e-book like a professional, and I know how to make a book cover that doesn't suck.

Before I tell you how to do that yourself, let's look at some book covers. First, a cover of a science fiction book, one of my favorites:

http://www.amazon.com/Web-Spider-Wiza...

The art on this cover is by Rowena. No way in hell can you afford a cover like this. I've been to science fiction conventions and have seen exhibits of science fiction cover art, and the people who do it are real artists. I don't know if any of them ever get rich, but they deserve more money than you'd be able to pay them.

Now let's look at another cover:

http://www.amazon.com/Reamde-A-Novel-...

and another one:

http://www.amazon.com/Franny-Zooey-J-...

I like these covers. They definitely look professional, but you could make a cover like these pretty easily with The GIMP and some free fonts. The covers put the reader on notice that the authors think their words alone (and their names) are enough to sell the book.

As an unknown author you might not be able to get away with a cover like this. So let's compromise. We'll do a cover with a nice font and some free art. Like this:

http://www.amazon.com/Mahabharata-Boo...

Now that doesn't suck! Any author would be proud to have a book cover like that, and I'm going to tell you how to make one.

Stay tuned.