Cover Creation

Week six of the Tech Savvy Writer posts. Today, we're talking about cover creation.

If you're already thinking about the cover, remember that it really is best left to the professionals.

Some of us are visual creatures who just want to spark some ideas. We’ve spoken about Pixabay, and Unsplash before - and the images from those sites have the potential to be used in books as well.

Burst is another site where you can download free, high-resolution images.

You can use images from these stock sites in Canva to create your cover – but make sure you check the copyright and the way you can use them first. Canva is a great option for everything from business cards to book covers.

Once you have your beautiful cover, you can check out what your book will look like before you even hold it in you hands by using what’s called a mockup.

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Mockups:

Mockups are basically a virtual version of your book. In this case, mockups can give you an idea of what it will look like when you’re holding it. You can get mockups of almost anything you can think of. From books, to billboards, tshirts to posters. There is a mockup for everything – and they are most commonly used in advertising. I like to use the book mockups to see if the cover fits the way I think it will.

Bookbrush is a great site where you can create a mockup in your browser. Bookbrush takes your uploaded cover, and applies it to a predetermined book or ebook. You can register for free and use some of the options, but like lots of other sites, you have to pay to unlock the premium features. Prices start from $8.50 a month.

Covervault is the perfect option if you have access to Photoshop. It’s possible to use it with free photo imaging software like Gimp, but the result is nowhere near as good. Covervault has a wealth of freely downloadable templates for all shapes and sizes of books. The only real cost is Photoshop, which, admittedly, is not on the cheap side, but is well worth it if you use it quite a bit.

A bit of shameless self promotion using the Covervault mockups:

Stay tuned for next week, where I cover editing and beta reading tools.