Looking for tips for DIY book covers? If you’re a writer, you know how important a book’s cover is. The best way to ensure your book cover looks great is by hiring a designer. This saves you time and ensures that your book looks beautiful. In some cases, however, hiring a designer isn’t possible. Does that mean your DIY book covers are doomed to look amateurish? Not at all. Follow these six tips to make your DIY book covers look polished and professional.
- Reasons to Create DIY Book Covers
- 1. DIY Book Covers: Start with a Template
- 2. DIY Book Covers: Understand Color Trends in Book Cover Publishing
- 3. DIY Book Covers: Learn What Readers Want
- 4. Find Gorgeous Cover Art for Your DIY Book Covers
- 5. Avoid Copyrighted Art in Your DIY Book Covers
- 6. Don’t Ignore the Back Cover
Reasons to Create DIY Book Covers
You may have been told it’s crazy to design your own DIY book covers. After all, a book cover is the most crucial element in marketing and promoting a book. It’s the first thing people judge when they spot a book. Still, you may have very good reasons for doing DIY book covers, like:
- You’re on a tight budget.
- The book is a personal project not intended for sale to the public.
- You’re rushing to print and need those covers at once.
- It’s a chance to flex your creative muscles
1. DIY Book Covers: Start with a Template
Using a book cover template is the best way to start. You’ll save precious time on measuring, formatting, cutting, and setting the margins needed to make your covers print ready. With a template, the margins and other pre-print requirements are already done. All you need to do is change the title, byline, and other information, while adding your own colors and graphics.
Using a template will cut your workload and do the design work for you, which is why they’re the best place to start.
Where can you find easy-to-use, customizable templates? Here are some of the best sources.
- Microsoft Word: If you’ve drafted your book in Word, it’s an easy transition to use the built-in Word templates for all kinds of publications.
- Canva: This popular site allows anyone to do simple graphic design projects, including book covers.
- Adobe InDesign: If you have this software, it’s easy to find compatible templates that are fully customizable, besides Adobe’s included templates.
2. DIY Book Covers: Understand Color Trends in Book Cover Publishing
Are you aware of what current styles are in book covers? Like clothing and interior decorating styles, book design styles change every few years. If you look at book covers from the 1970s or 1980s, you’ll see that they look very dated, even if they were the hot, innovative design of their day.
You may not consider yourself a fashionista, but your DIY book covers must fit current trends to avoid looking dated or out of place. Those trends may depend on the genre you’ve chosen.
Today, book cover designers prefer clean, simple covers with bright, almost neon colors, and huge fonts. Unlike past designs, new ones feature colored fonts and sans serif lettering. Covers that show full-sized, full-color images are deliberately bold and arresting.
3. DIY Book Covers: Learn What Readers Want
Besides current fashions in book covers, your DIY book covers should also fit the expectations of readers. Readers in specific genres want to see covers they can identify quickly as fitting the books they want to read.
To get a sense of what’s current in those genres, head to the bookstore or library. Spend time studying the covers of book in your category, and keep these specific pointers in mind. Doing so will give you great ideas you can incorporate in your DIY book covers.
- Fantasy: Cover designs are as varied as the books’ content, but you can see consistency in colors and themes. Most fantasy book covers show a landscape of the fictional or historical setting, and typically show symbols or elements that appear in the plot.
- Thriller/suspense: These covers have unusual color combinations that appear unsettling to fit the book’s mood. They may have images that reflect the book’s plot and use the oversized font that’s popular now.
- Mystery: The type of mystery—private eye, police procedural, or cozy mystery—will set the tone for the cover. Choose writers who specialize in the type you’ve written, and follow their lead.
- Women’s fiction: Soft colors, flowers, and fonts that look like handwriting are common features of these designs. Today’s book covers might use softer pastels and colored fonts.
- Horror: You want to invoke a sense of dread right on the cover. Dark colors, splashes of blood red, and a hint of fangs or teeth are common in horror novels.
- Romance: This is one genre that has not changed much from its early days. Most covers still feature a beautiful woman or handsome man, or a good-looking couple, in period dress and an exciting location. While that standard scene is unchanged, note that styles in typography and color choices have changed.
- Nonfiction: Nonfiction book covers are equally important. To design yours, note that they follow the same trends as fiction books. Most use a single, large image on the page, and others use typography to create the image. As with the other genres, use the best-sellers in your category to inspire your cover ideas.
4. Find Gorgeous Cover Art for Your DIY Book Covers
Are you wondering where to find great-looking images? There are millions of pictures, illustrations, graphics, and photos available for use, and many are affordable or even free. Here are some places to find them.
- Pixabay: This easy-to-use site offers original artwork, photos, and graphics that fit any mood, theme, or subject. They are free to use for any reason, but creators ask that you credit them.
- Unsplash: You can get high-resolution pictures and graphics here with a free membership. You’ll also find professional-quality, high-resolution photographs here ready to be printed.
- Getty Images: If it’s a famous picture of a famous person, place, or event, it probably came from Getty. These are copyrighted, so you must pay a fee to use them. Rates start around $200 and can go up to $500 or more for top-trending pictures.
- iStock: This is a more affordable version of Getty that’s owned by the same agency. You’ll pay a small fee to use the image one time.
- StockSnap: Think of this as a free version of Getty or iStock. While there may be fewer photos, they are all free to use with no licensing fee.
- Period Images: If you need historical photos for any genre, you can find them here. The site covers every era, and photos are available for a small licensing fee.
5. Avoid Copyrighted Art in Your DIY Book Covers
When choosing images for your covers, be sure to use only those that are copyright-free or ones you’ve paid a licensing fee to use. The copyright holder—the artist who created the work or the agency who represents the artist—has the legal right to say when and where the image can be used.
If the picture is licensed under a creative commons license, comes from one of the above sites, or is in the public domain (which includes images published by the government), you are good to go. If it requires a license to use, keep the receipt showing that you paid to use it. If the copyright holder says it “requires attribution,” make sure you credit the artist or the agency who sold you the license.
Always use caution when searching for images online. Many images you find on the internet are copyrighted, and using them will get you in trouble. Ignorance of the law is no defense in this case, and the fines are steep.
6. Don’t Ignore the Back Cover
Always remember, the back cover is almost as important as the front cover. This is where you’ll put an author bio, author photo, and a blurb that describes the book’s basic plot. The blurb should invite readers to want to learn more without giving away too much detail. If your book has reviews or other endorsements, use snippets from them on the back cover.
We hope you found this information useful. As an independent printing company, Dazzle Printing is the perfect partner for first-time, independent writers. We’ll help you stay on budget with fast, affordable, expert printing of your book.
