Welcome back to marketing Indie Books series. On Jan 06th, I introduced the first part of my reflections on writing and marketing indie book. If you haven’t read the post, I invite you to check it here.
Today I want to share with you my ideas on – CREATING COVERS.
You know that old saying ‘you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover’, right? Well, the thing is – most people do that. Some people do that all the time.
In my defense, let me just make it clear that I know covers can be misleading. I know a beautiful cover image does not always means the content is to our liking. On the other hand, a plain-looking picture on the cover of a book may hide a treasure inside its pages.
I know all that. However, I often wonder – why not combine an excellent story and a compelling cover. Does it seem easy enough for you? Well… it’s not that simple, actually. One must have a picture they can use. I mean, the author must have taken a useful picture himself/herself to avoid facing copyright issues. If they don’t have it, they need to find an image, with good quality resolution, and appropriate dimensions, at one of the many royalty-free stock image websites available in the Internet.
Does it still sound simple? If you’re an author, you know it isn’t. If you’re a reader, let me propose an exercise. Think about a book you’ve read. Any book. Think about it’s storyline and main characters. Forget its actual cover and go online searching for an image you think portraits that storyline and those characters. How long did it take you to find it?
Great. You have your image. But, is the picture royalty-free? Is it ready to be used on the cover of your book? Do you need to edit it? Do you need to include a title and the author’s name? How do you do that? How long will it take you to finish your cover?
Phew! I’m tired already. Aren’t you? I told you it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Now, if you’re a reader, you may now have a slight idea of what we have to go through to offer you a decent-looking cover. If you’re am author and want to know more about it, I’ll tell you about my personal experience.
Editing pictures can be tricky. I’ve tried using Photoshop many times without results that satisfied me. Don’t get me wrong – it is a great program. I can’t seem to master it, though. I found an excellent website for editing images which offers user-friendly features. Mainly for those users who, like me, are leaning towards the ‘Photoshop-dumb-users’ kind. If you want to check it out, it’s called Pickmonkey. My favorite source for royalty-free stock images is Big Stock Photo because they have variety, high-resolution quality, and fair prices.
That’s all for today. folks. Tune in tomorrow, at the next stop on Lucky Blog Tour, for my musings on formatting your eBook.
