Book Covers-DIY Version

Well, one of the responsibilities of self-publishing is submitting your own book cover. To be honest, I'm actually not freaking out over this if I decide to put my book out there myself. Unfortunately, some of the amateurish looking covers from smaller publishers have been bit of a turnoff. Not saying this is the case with all small presses, some of them have fabulous looking cover art.

You have a few choices for submitting your own book cover:

You can go the DIY route. What you can do is take a few photos of whatever you feel could represent your book and upload them through your digital camera software. Upload a few faves into Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. . Play around with the tools in the software to add text onto the photos. There's an endless number of font, color and size possibilities. If you're not overly impressed with your own photos, try a stock photo website. On a side note, I downloaded Illustrator and it's fabulous. Came with a free 30 day trial, not sure if I'm willing to spring for the hundreds of dollars it costs to buy the software

You can also use templates provided through e-book and print publishers. CreateSpace offers up a free template for authors to build their own print covers. All artwork and text you place in their templates are formatted to fit on the book cover. There are also ebook cover building software online that are both free and paid (I have yet to find a good one that I like, so please comment me with any recommendations).

A new recommendation I've received is you can purchase book covers and artwork through DeviantArt. Really amazing images on the site, I was duly impressed.

Here's the cover I did myself that was my second choice for the book (I'll wait until my publishing details have been ironed out to make the big reveal for the actual cover). I used a stock photo and Illustrator.