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Designing a book cover on a budget

Updated: Sep 25, 2023



So, you’ve written a book and want to self-publish it. First of all, congratulations! You’ve joined just one per cent of the population who have written a book!


Now comes the next stage of the process. If you have a traditional book deal, then your publisher will take care of the book cover and will send you design options for you to comment on. However, if you choose to self-publish, then your cover design will rest entirely on your shoulders.


You may think to yourself, my book is amazing and people will read it no matter what is on the cover. Unfortunately, the old saying of don’t judge a book by its cover hasn't transferred to the readers of the world. I know for a fact that I am far more likely to pick up a book that has an eye-catching and professional cover compared to one that looks dull, boring and amateurish.


Luckily, there are many ways that you can design a cover that looks just as professional and eye-catching as any traditional book. How you choose to go about it will depend on how much money you want to spend, and how much time you have to work on it yourself.



Option 1:

The first option is to pay someone to design your book cover for you. This is the easiest method, and the results can look really professional. When I was starting to think about my book cover, I considered going down this route. The only downside to this method is the expense. If you pay too cheaply then you can get a cover that doesn’t look great. If you pay top price for a designer, it can cost hundreds or thousands of pounds. There are of course designers in between these two extremes, but you’ll need to decide how much you are willing to spend on the design in advance. I contacted a few designers and looked at their example book covers, and while they were nice, I didn’t think they were right for my book, so I decided to try the process of designing a cover myself.


Option 2:

So having decided to design my book cover myself, I quickly panicked and realised that I knew nothing about design software. I had always enjoyed art at school, but that was the extent of my artistic experiences. I also knew that I didn’t want to pay loads of money for fancy design software that I might not be able to use.


I therefore turned to my good old friend YouTube to find out how I could do this for free. Below are the main software and websites I used to design my book covers.


Important Note: I publish my books through Amazon and Ingramspark. Both websites are free to publish on and they have book templates for you to use when designing book covers. You can select what size of book you want (I chose 5.06 x 7.81 inches which is the industry average for fiction books) and how many pages your novel will be. All you do is enter the information into the calculator and both websites will generate a book cover template that you can use. I used Amazon for my paperback version and Ingramspark for my Jacketed Hardcover version. I just wanted to mention these templates as they will crop up in the sections below…


PowerPoint:

Step 1: On PowerPoint, you can edit the size of the slides to any dimensions you want (see picture below). You can change the width and height to the exact dimensions of the book, including the front, spine and back cover (these dimensions can be found on the template generated from Amazon or Ingramspark).

You can then paste the book cover template onto the PowerPoint page, making sure the outer margins match up to the outline of the slide perfectly (you may need to crop the template picture).



Step 2: Click on Insert and Shapes and select a rectangle. Make the rectangle transparent and give it a bright-coloured border. You can then stretch this rectangle to cover the outlines of the template. Copy the rectangle and cover each outline on the template. Once all lines have been covered, you can select all the rectangles and group them together (right-click and select Group). You can then open a new slide and paste the bright-coloured rectangles onto the blank slide.


Step 3: Now comes the fun bit. You can begin to design your cover, knowing exactly how much room you have and the locations of where everything needs to be. You can use free stock images from websites such as Shutterstock and Pexels. Sometimes you can sign up for a free trial and access some great photos and images that you can use for your cover (just remember to cancel the trial before you start paying).

Canva:

Now PowerPoint is a great beginner's step, being a nice and simple software to work on. However, when it comes time to print your book, the images on PowerPoint will come out quite grainy and pixelated. Therefore, I recommend using Canva. This website has a free version which is fantastic, and I’d recommend you use the free version while working on your design. Once you’re happy with your cover and you want to print it, you can sign up for a free 1-month trial and access their premium version which allows for high-definition downloads. The premium version also has more stock images and photos that you can use for your design.


Step 1: For Canva, you can edit the document size just like PowerPoint (editing the size can only be done on the premium version though). You can make it the same size as your cover template and just paste the template you made on PowerPoint into Canva.


Step 2: Get designing, using all the available templates on the site. Canva has lots of book cover designs that you can edit and use as inspiration if you’re struggling to come up with one on your own.


Step 3: Once you’ve finished your design, you can simply download the image and upload it onto Amazon and Ingramspark.

If you want to make your title a little more detailed or specific, then there is another software I would recommend…


Photopea

Photopea is a free website that is very similar to Adobe Photoshop. You can edit and create some incredible designs on this software. It is a bit more complicated to use than Canva and PowerPoint, but it just took me a few YouTube tutorial videos to get the hang of it (there are loads available to watch online). I used it to design the title of SOLAR, as I just didn’t like the text options on Canva.



Conclusion:

These are just a few tips that may help you as you try and design your book cover. It took me a long time to reach the final version of my book. See below a time-lapse of the different covers I designed.



My final tip is to take inspiration from everything you see. For SOLAR, I took the shapes from a NASA space poster, the title font from a TV show I liked and the colour theme from another book I saw on a shelf. Just keep trying and eventually, everything will click into place!

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