For reasons too complicated to explain, though if you’re terribly curious go here (yes, it’s political, but only tangentially political, I think.) I’ve been doing a book promo a night on my blog and I’ve once more run face first into the fact you normal, average indie writer has no clue what to do with covers.
Look, to an extent I sympathize, okay. I mean, as it happened when I started publishing indie I was taking art classes. I couldn’t precisely draw a cover, but I actually tried a couple of times. The truth though is that I had no clue what to do.
My first few attempts at getting covers bombed badly. At one point I paid $500 which I couldn’t afford and what I got back was far worse than what I could have done on my own.
After that, I found royalty free art sites, and bought subscriptions, bought art and made covers that way. This is doable, mostly. Except I took a course on how to letter it, and even so there was a ramp up in learning. If you decide to do that, I’ll give you three tips for free:
1- your font should be bigger. No. Bigger than that. Unless what you’re writing is literary and little, the font should be big. I don’t know why but beginners are always terrified of this.
2- DO NOT USE A FONT you’d use on the interior. No Times New Roman, No Arial. Go here. I did two searches, Fantasy fonts and Science Fiction Fonts. Make sure the “commercial free” selector is on, meaning it’s free for commercial purposes.
See here:
Remember that no matter how cool a font looks, it should be readable. So, do try to strike that balance. And always look at your cover in thumbnail. If the font is not readable at that size, it should look like it should be readable.)
3- Try to suit the font to the contents. Do not use a comic font with a serious work. Do not use an antique, flowery font with science fiction.
Okay, got that? But, you’ll tell me, you’re broke. How do you afford even royalty-free art? No, you’ll just use Amazon cover designer, and–
Don’t. Just don’t. Those are fine for non fiction, but what you’ll be signaling to everyone is that your book is nonfiction.
Which brings us to: Why you need a cover at all.
Look, I know you’re going to say you never look at the cover. That’s kind of like saying you never look at beautiful people, or you never eat stuff that’s bad for you. You might think you don’t, but you do, though you might not even be aware of it. We all do.
Covers, even in thumbnail on Amazon are how we get the feel for the book, even before we read the blurb. What feel?
Well, your cover should tell me what genre you’re writing, the general feel of your book, and — most of all — it should reassure me you’re a professional, you know what you’re doing, and you took a modicum of trouble with the book.
Sure if you can get a cover that has something that looks like your character and has the right hair color or whatever it is better, but it actually matters more to you than the reader.
Why? Well, before the reader reads your book, he doesn’t know that the main character is a petite redhead. And afterwards, if your book is good, the reader won’t CARE.
So, if you’re using cheap art, are broke and don’t have the time or ability to get a costume cover, concentrate on signaling two things: genre and tone. (The tone is mostly but not all font.) While on that, look at coverss of your genre and subgenre. You don’t have to look like that (I have a friend who revels in having unique covers, but then she’s a brilliant artist. Most of us aren’t.) But you should pay attention to things like: is it a photo or a drawing/painting? Because that’s important. Fantasy, science fiction and mystery are usually illustrations (some mystery can be photos, but … well, look at your subgenre.) Romance are either photos or super-realistic paintings.
If you look at the links above, you’ll find I did Pixabay searches for each genre. Most of the pictures will be wildly inappropriate to your novel, but if you look through, I’ll bet you’ll find something. For sf, from space opera to mil sf and unless you’re doing Phillip K. Dick type stuff, spaceships are always appropriate.
Before you take a pixabay photo and use it for a cover, do a reverse image search in at least two services, to make sure someone didn’t upload a stolen or otherwise too close to a movie image. Additionally, if taking photos and there is no model release (there usually isn’t) you can still use the pic, but in such a way we can’t see the faces. (Now you know why so many romance covers are headless.)
If you want to get more sophisticated and do specialized, unique images, there’s allways midjourney bot, on discord. I have a paid account, because I use it a ton, like for the illustrations on most of my pieces here.
Using midjourney is an art on its own but if you’re going to be writing a lot of books, you might want to develop a hobby of playing with it.
But SARAH! You can’t copyright AI art and Amazon will ban you, and and and–
Um… actually you can copyright AI art, just not TO THE AI. That was what that whole article was. You can’t copyright things if there is no human “author.” Also the Midje basic subscription is not private, so other people could take your art. So…. Well, I pay for the private subscription and I do post processing, so I do claim copyright.
Amazon won’t ban it. The Amazon questions about AI are mostly used to weed out (mostly) Chinese scammers who can put up 30 or 40 books a day, written by “AI”.
Look, at this point photoshop is AI assisted. It’s everywhere. So don’t worry about those questions and keep on trucking.
Now, in other times — and look, it’s really important to update your covers. I’m in the process of doing it now. But covers done with just photo and photoshop? Yeah, you might as well say your cover is from the 2010s. And it will look incredibly amateurish. Same goes for Daz covers — I’d recommend DAZ 3D. Which has an even longer learning curve than Midjourney bot.
Why aren’t I? Because I haven’t used it in months. These days I mostly use it when I can’t get Midjourney to GET the point. (Which to be fair it sometimes refuses to get when you want more than one person in the picture. It’s getting better, but…) So I do a base render, and upload it, then ask for modifications.
But it’s probably not worth wasting months of your life on learning DAZ (or Poser) for that.
However, at the most base level you don’t need any of that. Find an image that will do on Pixabay, use an interesting font, and make yourself a cover.
Oh, yeah, well, for image processing for free, there’s Gimp. I find it very unintuitive, so I use paintshop pro. You can usually find it on a sale so it’s not prohibitive. My kids used paint.net. I never have, but they said it was painless.
Oh, yeah, before publishing? Show it to a few friends for critique. It will help.
Heck, have to or three alternate covers and ask them for opinions.
You’re in good company, Jim Baen used to do that at cons with proposed covers.
Anyway, go forth and do the best you can.
Maybe your first effort will make people run screaming, but it’s not an arcane art. The traditional publishing houses often gave it to beginner receptionists to do, at least for midlisters. You’ll probably do better than that.
Come on, you put all those beautiful words inside the book. Why would you wrap it in plain brown paper? Give readers a chance to discover your writing.
Go.
Mad Genius Club 
24 responses to “It’s Time To Talk Covers Again”
the beginner is looking at the cover image blown up on their screen (commonly a 27″ screen, sometimes larger) and they set things to look reasonable there.
Then the image gets shrunk down to a 1″ thumbnail and you can’t even tell that there is any text on the cover at all
David Lang
Save your cover as a jpg.
Go into Windows Explorer.
Look at it as an Extra-Large Icon
then Large
then Medium
then Small
Take that back. “Small” no longer displays as an icon.
Also notice that Medium is hard to pull off anything striking at.
Interesting thing, apparently you can have Grok take a look at a manuscript and ask it what genre and age range it is, and it produces reasonably good answers.
Helpful if your looking at your thing and thinking it’s a fantasy adventure romance, that you’re not really sure if it’s T or up because of themes.
And it comes back with, no, this is slice of life, and the descriptions are suitable for most audiences, even if it’s probably too complicated for anyone younger. Ok. Fair cop.
DO NOT PUT AN AGE RANGE ON AMAZON. No matter what. If you do, it restricts who it shows it to.
Good to know.
This this thisity this.
GIMP is very unintuitive. I’ve have used it for years. The secret with it is not to try to do everything with it at once. Use it for very basic stuff at first. (Perhaps changing the format of an image. Taking an image in a lossy format like .png or .jpg and saving it (via Export) to a non-lossy format .tiff or .tif.) Then try resizing images. Or maybe converting them to B&W using desaturation.
Learn one new thing every time you use it and pretty soon it becomes a very useful tool. Admittedly it is not for everyone but you can do some really cool stuff with it. Eventually.
Right now all I do is take in JPG and export PDF
Get. A Midjourney. Subscription. Even *I* can afford it, and I’m so poor I always get a tax refund no matter how little withholding I have.
Yep. Honestly, worth its weight in gold. And you can train it in the evenings, when you’re mind-blown for anything else.
You may notice books with Times New Roman or Arial on the cover. You should also notice that that occurs when the title and byline are incorporated into the cover art.
So if your art is an open book with the title indicated on the page, you can get away with it, but you can’t plop the font on the artwork for the same effect.
Also, on readable fonts — there’s a limit to how fancy you can make your cover. The plainer your artwork, the more elaborate your font — though not very elaborate even when you are aping a illuminated manuscript with your title, byline, and perhaps a marginalia figure.
I remember seeing a Brandon Sanderson kickstarter for printing some books he’d written in his *spare time*.
And he had sillhouette covers up. The one that I saw was a simple green background with what looked like the sillhouette of a witch dual wielding handguns.
I’ve never actually read any of his books. I’ve heard he’s good, but I was very curious what that one was about.
Something which also needs to be emphasized about the AI copyright issue is what are you actually selling?
Because to my understanding, when people make covers for their book they aren’t selling the cover; they are trying to sell the book. So even if the cover has no copyright attached……. who cares?
The other angle is the fear that if you don’t hold copyright someone else can claim copyright. Which does apply in some cases, but cannot apply if no one can claim copyright on something.
Yes, of course, but Midje says you can claim copyright if it’s private. This is important, because it means people can’t steal your cover.
Something which also needs to be emphasized about the AI copyright issue is what are you actually selling?
Because to my understanding, when people make covers for their book they aren’t selling the cover; they are trying to sell the book. So even if the cover has no copyright attached……. who cares?
The other angle is the fear that if you don’t hold copyright someone else can claim copyright. Which does apply in some cases, but cannot apply if no one can claim copyright on something.
Don’t trust your Amazon category, either, to help you with covers. “Historical Fantasy Fiction” has everything from the latest in TradPub time-travel romance and adventure covers to literary fantasy to portal fantasy to Anne Rice. You’ll need to go finer on your search, into specifics like “portal fantasy” or “dark fantasy romance.” Even then, look at the date – new Outlander-series covers are stills from the TV series. Older ones fall into two different patterns, depending on when that edition was released.
However, all the ones in the top twenty in Historical Fantasy Fiction had HUGE lettering with author and title.
Amazon thinks vampires are science fiction. (Sobs.)
Someone could probably come up with a science fiction origin for vampires but yeah vampires are horror or fantasy.
David Weber did it. Whether we’ll or not is up for debate.
This is a filk by the late Cynthia McQuillan.
I have a dream that I will be able to afford to hire some of the artists I love to do covers.
Until that day, I sell as many of Great Aunt’s books as I can.
For those who use Windows, may I recommend a program called Paint Dot Net? You can do almost anything with it that you can with Photoshop. It is free. They ask if you like it, to donate. https://www.getpaint.net/download.html#google_vignette It can also be purchased in the Microsoft store. I have been using it for almost ten years.
The kids use it and love it. Kids… well, one is 30 and the other 33, but yeah