At the moment I am preparing covers for my ebooks.
It was serendipitous that just as I was thinking about embarking on this an email came from Joel Friedlander, who has an excellent blog for advice for self publishers THE BOOK DESIGNER.
You just have to do a brilliant job of your book cover as well as the content, as it’s the portal to invite readers to notice your book. A lot of authors will hand this over to others, some will attempt it themselves and may do a great job or a terrible one (and not realise it). I love the artistry of cover pages and so am keenly adding this to my skill set. I have a massive collection of my own photographs and collages and am doing new ones all the time. I plan to offer to do covers for a fee for others when I have had a bit more experience with my own covers.
Joel put his subscribers in touch with an awesome contact, Ed Lewis who was offering templates in photoshop for a great price. It is so worthwhile subscribing to his blog.
Now that I have developed a lot of confidence in photoshop the templates Joel said Ed was offering looked worth my while. I am not just designing covers to save money but because I genuinely love design work and have a passion for it.
I still have to study the video tutorials for the finer details of how to make the most of the templates but with the knowledge I already have of photoshop, as well as a huge library of my own collages, images, and creativity and imagination I was able to do two rough cover ideas straight away. The one at the top of this blog needs a little more work, but I am almost there with it.
A big thank you to Joel for putting his subcribers in touch with Ed.
I am confident that I will be able to offer to do ebook covers for other writers soon – but first to master all the templates, and ins and outs .
What I love about the templates is the principles of good design and messaging that are in place to help you structure your cover sensibly (not too much or too little information). The templates are further sorted into genres, romance, spiritual, sport etc. You can use the templates to design books for others, but you cannot (and fair enough!) give the templates away.
Another site a friend has put me onto COPY BLOGGER which looks like it will be helpful when it comes to many questions about ebooks and marketing them.
Hmm now to sort out the royalties and distribution maze with ebooks – and make sure I do the best possible thing re tax and treaties, more on that later.
If you have any other suggestions re ebooking or cover design would love you to share your journey.
