Chapter 3: Cover Design

Welcome to Broke Author!

Come along with me as I revise and post an updated edition of my book, Self-Publishing for the Broke Author, one chapter at a time. You’ll also find extra advice on editing, book design and production, self-publishing and book marketing, with a view towards getting it all done without going broke.

Click here for the Introduction.

Chapter One

Chapter Two Part 1 | Part 2

Your book’s cover is probably the single-most important element of your book — even more important than editing. Why? Because while shoddy editing might earn you some bad reviews, a shoddy cover can tank your sales from the very beginning. A great cover, on the other hand, can practically sell your book for you.

If you have some money and can only spend it on one aspect of book production, this is where you should spend it. And if you don’t have money, you can try the same bartering tactics described in the previous chapter. But if you’re stuck designing your own cover and you don’t know Photoshop from Illustrator or a brush from a vector, don’t panic. That doesn’t mean your book is automatically doomed to have a terrible cover. You’ve still got some pretty great options. To find out what they are, keep reading.

Before we explore your options, there are a few things you need to know. For one thing, you may need multiple versions of your cover, depending on your publishing plans. Hardbacks, paperbacks, ebooks and audiobook covers will each have different size dimensions and layout requirements. And if you publish a hardback with a dust jacket, you (or someone you hire) will need to design both the book’s hard cover, called a case wrap, and the dust jacket.

Let’s keep it simple and say you only want to do an ebook and paperback. The simplest (and most affordable, if you’re spending money on cover design) option would be to design your ebook cover — making sure it’s high-resolution enough to look good in print, and that all the important elements, such as title and author name, are placed where they won’t get trimmed off — and then use that for your paperback, along with your self-publishing platform’s book cover template for the back and spine. You can then simply scale down the front cover image for your ebook.

But if you don’t like the generic look of a back and spine created via template, you’ll need to create what’s called a wrap-around cover that includes the back and spine. If you’re doing this yourself, you can generate a template on your self-publishing platform of choice that will have all of the correct dimensions and lines informing you where the important elements of your cover art need to go. This is a PDF or a JPEG image that you can import into your graphic design program so you can set up your grid and build your design on top of it. The process is pretty much the same with hardcover books, too.

However, in order to generate template with the correct spine width, you’ve first got to know the exact page count that your book will be. This is the case whether you design the cover yourself or you hire a cover designer. Ebook covers can be created at any time during your book’s journey, but print covers must wait until the interior of the book is completely finished, edited and formatted.

It’s also important to get the resolution right. For print book covers, your images will need to be high resolution. That means they need to be rendered at a minimum of 300 pixels per inch (ppi) or dots per inch (dpi). Ebook covers should be standard web resolution, which is 72 ppi/dpi; otherwise, the data size of your image files will be too large and they’ll be rejected by the publishing platform.

If all of that made your eyes glaze over, don’t worry. Unless you’re a professional graphic designer, chances are you’ll either be shelling out to hire someone to do all of this for you, or you’ll be using Canva, which will take care of the resolution for you. Simply download your final cover image as a printable PDF, and you’ll be good to go.

But for the sake of being thorough, let’s go over all of the options.

● If you can swing it, hire a pro. You can find talented cover designers who charge surprisingly low fees. Check places like Reedsy’s marketplace and Fiverr, as well as Google. Be sure to check reviews and testimonials, and ask to see a portfolio of their previous work if they don’t make one readily available.

● Buy a pre-made book cover. Many professional cover designers offer a selection of pre-made covers that they will personalize with your title and author name and sell you for a reasonable fee, usually starting around $50. It can be a challenge to find a pre-made cover that’s a good fit for your particular book, and an even bigger challenge if you’ll be doing a trilogy or a series. But if you strike gold, this can be a great way to get a beautiful professional cover for your book. Also, most pre-made cover artists also do custom covers, so that’s another good place to start your search for a designer.

● Buy a Canva Pro subscription. As of this writing, this runs $12 a month or $120 for a full year, and it will give you access to all of their premium tools and resources, including a vast library of stock photos, graphics, and professionally-designed templates — including ebook cover templates.

● Use the free version of Canva. While I used to design my own covers using Photoshop, I now use Canva almost exclusively, and for years I did just fine with the free version. Canva offers a rich selection of beautiful, customizable e-book cover templates for just about every genre that you can tweak to your liking. Just be sure not to use the templates for your book right out of the box — change up the fonts and images to create something unique to your book. And if you absolutely must use a premium graphic, you don’t have to upgrade to a subscription — you can purchase them a la carte. I’ve created a few covers this way, spending only a few dollars each for professional-looking covers with premium graphics. Whether you’re writing fiction or non-fiction, this app can help you design a great cover at little-to-no cost.

● Design your own cover in Gimp, a free, open source image editing program that is very much like Photoshop. This software has a learning curve, but you can find dozens of online tutorials to help you learn not only how to use it, but specifically how to use it to design your book cover images.

● Use free graphics in your cover designs. Unsplash, Pixabay, Wikimedia Commons, and Flickr are good places to look for free-to-use images. Just be sure to check the free license on each image to make sure it’s licensed for commercial use. The National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago each also have sections on their websites where you can download free public domain images. And Canva has its own collection of free images to choose from. Of course, the drawback with using free images is that it’s likely a lot of other people are using them, as well. But with some creativity, you can still make your cover look unique.

● While my disclaimer from Chapter One on using generative AI also applies here, I would be remiss if I didn’t include it as an option for obtaining unique, professional-looking, free to low-cost images for your book covers. While it’s not free to use, Adobe Firefly is an AI image generator that was trained on legally obtained images from Adobe’s own library, with subscription plans starting at, as of this writing, $9.99 a month.

Another option is to roll out different versions of your book as you can afford to put top-notch covers on them. For example, you could wait until you’ve got more cash flow to publish a paperback and only publish an ebook to start out. One of the wonderful benefits of self-publishing is that there is no limit to how many updates and iterations of your book you can produce, and there is no rule saying that your paperback has to come out at the same time as your ebook. In fact, waiting to launch your paperback until after your ebook has started gaining traction can be a great strategy for drawing more attention to your book and introducing it to an entirely new set of readers. So if you can only afford an ebook cover for the time being, that’s not only not the end of the world — it’s actually a clever marketing strategy.

If you decide to design and create your own cover, then I definitely recommend checking out The Book Designer blog for plenty of free advice on what to do and what not to do when it comes to designing a cover that will help and not hinder your book sales. Either way, whether you pay for your cover with cash money, sweat equity or a combination of both, your book can boast a fantastic cover that won’t break your book sales without breaking the bank.

Take time to answer the questions at the end of each chapter to help you develop your budget publishing strategy. You can either grab a notebook and write them down, or head here to download a free set of worksheets.

1. How much money, if any, can I afford to invest in professional cover design?
   

2. Based on the above, which option(s) best fit my budget?

   1. A professional freelance designer

   2. Hiring a designer on Fiverr

   3. Purchasing a pre-made cover

   4. Designing my own cover
      

3. Do I know any graphic designers who might be willing to barter their services?
   

4. If so, what could I offer them in return?
   

5. How comfortable am I with the idea of creating my own cover?
   

6. How comfortable am I with learning how to use Canva or Gimp?
   

7. Do I need a paperback cover at this time? If so, do I need a full wraparound cover?

8. What other types of covers will I need?

Thanks for reading! And if you’re in need of a budget-friendly editor, look no further. I offer editing and proofreading services at affordable rates and I’m happy to do partial critiques and edits and work with you at a pace that suits your available budget.

Have your own tips for low- or no-cost ways to get your book edited? Share them in the comments.

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