Indie Book Collective discussion
Help
>
Any advice for the girl who wants to do it all?
date
newest »
newest »
If you're handy with photoshop or a similar program, you can go to commons.wikimedia.orgLots of royalty free photos there to work with and create a professional cover. If you check out my book, Moonlight, you'll see a good example of what you can do with wikimedia & photoshop
For low-stress formatting, I recommend investing in Scrivener. It pretty much flawlessly compiles your novel into epub and mobi, as well as other formats.
If you use windows, you can get a free copy of window's movie maker from the windows/microsoft site and play around with that. I have 2 trailers on my profile that I made in the movie maker.
Moonlight book cover for reference:
Kara, I assume that you have the art and design skill, just not the technical ones? Because if you're like me, with limited talent in that area, I urge you to spend the money for a professional cover, or at the least find and bribe a friend. My DIY effort for my first book had so many flaws, I had to have it redone.
My first piece of advice would be "don't even go there", specially if, as you say, you are not good with the technical stuff. I tried to design my own cover, and it ended up in tears. But since you insist....
Smashwords has a free, very detailed book on how to format for publication.
Windows moviemaker is very easy to use, very intuitive, and even the greenest nontechnical newbie can create a pretty decent trailer.
If you choose to commission a cover, I recommend heading over to deviantart.com There are tons of super talented cover artists on there, many who charge $100 or less. You just need to find the right one :)
Thanks there's definitely some great art work there.
Ann wrote: "If you choose to commission a cover, I recommend heading over to deviantart.com There are tons of super talented cover artists on there, many who charge $100 or less. You just need to find the ri..."I have heard this from a couple of other people, how do you identify which people do this on there?
Kara wrote: "Hi Fellow Indie AuthorsI'm gearing up to publish my first ebook and I'm trying to do it all - Cover, Trailer, Formatting etc.
The problem is I'm not very good at the technical stuff and I have hi..."
Hi Kara
I have used a Kindle generated cover and it looked fine for what I needed. However I am sure I read something about Amazon retaining the copyright so am not sure you would be able to use it to generate sales through other outlets - you may want to check out their terms and conditions.
R.L. wrote: "Kara wrote: "Hi Fellow Indie AuthorsI'm gearing up to publish my first ebook and I'm trying to do it all - Cover, Trailer, Formatting etc.
The problem is I'm not very good at the technical stuff ..."
Thanks R.L.
That makes sense. I never thought about the copyright.
I am not sure exactly how the deviant art site works either, but perhaps someone in this tread can help.
R.L. wrote: "Ann wrote: "If you choose to commission a cover, I recommend heading over to deviantart.com There are tons of super talented cover artists on there, many who charge $100 or less. You just need to..."Just get poking around. Once you find one cover artist, you tend to start finding others. They form their own little groups and cliques, sort of like us authors :)
Here are some that I like:
http://fictionchick.deviantart.com/
http://angeliaart.deviantart.com/
http://ravven78.deviantart.com/
Re: deviantart. Do a few searches depending on what you are looking for; if you find an artist you like check their gallery (to see more) and their journal and profile (to read their comment, see if they do commissions, etc.).
Something else you can do to find a cover artist or designer is have a look at books whose covers you like, find out who the designer is, and contact them.
And depending on your budget, there is 99 designs, where a bunch of designers submit a cover. http://99designs.com
Ann wrote: "R.L. wrote: "Ann wrote: "If you choose to commission a cover, I recommend heading over to deviantart.com There are tons of super talented cover artists on there, many who charge $100 or less. You..."Thank you for this, some of these works are lovely.
Thanks Julia and Sabrina also, I'll definitely try those searches.
Kara wrote: "Hi Fellow Indie AuthorsI'm gearing up to publish my first ebook and I'm trying to do it all - Cover, Trailer, Formatting etc.
The problem is I'm not very good at the technical stuff and I have hi..."
Re: KDP Cover Creator
For reference her is the cover I created in KDP.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Simple-Little...
The only part of creating it that took any time was selecting the image and format (they provide a fair amount to choose from). Other than selecting your personal preferences, it is fairly instantaneous.
I used it as it was quicker and probably better than something I could design myself and the book was ready to go in every other way. The KDP enrolment period has recently come to an end, so I am considering not re-enrolling and instead trying out other sales avenues. Therefore I will be looking for a designer for that purpose.
Thanks!You're cover looks great by the way!
...and I discovered an even better way: Deviantarts has a forum where you can post the job and artists get to apply for it: http://forum.deviantart.com/jobs/offers/
I'm gearing up to publish my first ebook and I'm trying to do it all - Cover, Trailer, Formatting etc.
The problem is I'm not very good at the technical stuff and I have high standards for professionalism.
Right now my focus is on Cover Creation. There is a great tool in KDP I'd like to use, but I am wondering how I can use a cover I created using that program on other sites, like Smashwords. Does anyone know?
OR
Can anyone recommend a FREE similar web based template based design tool?
Thanks for your help!
Kara