A common question from writers with self-published books is: “What should my cover look like?” Unfortunately, most of the answers to that question are wrong.

Telling a writer what to put on their book cover is a lot like telling an actor what to wear when they’re doing a monologue. What’s best depends on your individual skills and personality, and it’s hard for someone else to tell you what will work for you. Making your own covers is also one of the best ways for a writer to learn about design, and to improve their general artistic skills if they have not already mastered them.

Accounting for these factors (and many more), I’ve written this article: Book Covers That Suck and How To Make Them Better.

This is a blog which provides tips to authors on how to make their book covers look better. This is a market that has been saturated with shoddy and poorly designed covers, which can result in a reader not picking up the book based on the cover alone. The writer of this blog is an artist and designer that works in the publishing industry and is a self-published author herself. She wanted to help other artists and authors understand how a professional book cover was made so they could make their own better.

Part of why this blog is so helpful for independent authors is because making a professional looking book cover involves more than just designing it well. It also involves knowing things like the different types of stock art which can be used, what fonts are available, what colors are going to be appealing to readers, etcetera. In addition to providing advice on all of these things, the writer also provides links to free stock images and fonts that can be used as well as templates for Photoshop, Illustrator, etcetera.

I was looking at the covers of some self-published books and I noticed something. They look kind of amateurish. The more I looked around, the more I saw it everywhere.

Why? It’s not like it’s hard to find someone who can make a decent book cover.

I decided to write this blog post because of my own frustration with this problem. I’ve been self-publishing for years, and I’ve designed book covers for myself and many other self-published authors. But there are still a lot of people out there making amateurish mistakes on their covers, costing them sales. You don’t have to be one of them.

I’m going to tell you how to create a professional-looking cover that will help your book sell better.

There is a lot of room for improvement in the world of book covers. Many indie publishers are completely unaware of the effect that their book cover has on whether a reader will pick up the book or not, and even established publishing companies often come up with lackluster designs.

This article is a guide to making better book covers, aimed at authors, publishers and designers. It offers advice on what makes an effective book cover and how to create one.

I want to talk about the importance of a cover. It is a very understated and often overlooked part of an eBook. However, it is also one of the most important aspects of marketing your book.

What makes a good cover? Why do some book covers suck? What tools can you use to make better book covers? Will the tools I have in Photoshop work for making book covers? These are just some of the questions I will try to answer in my post today.

     What makes a good cover? In my opinion, a good cover should be unique and eye-catching. It should not look like every other book out there on the market. This can be accomplished by having some kind of unique design or color scheme that draws attention to your book. Another thing that makes for a good cover is one that is simple and does not have too much going on at once. 

     Why do some book covers suck? I really don’t know what it is about them, but some covers just seem to look amateurish no matter how much money was spent on them. They seem to lack any kind of depth or purpose other than to attract attention in the sea of other books crowding the virtual shelves. Probably the biggest reason why some covers look amateurish is

I’ve been self-publishing since the late 1980s. I had my first book published in 1989 and have published over a dozen books since then. I’ve always been a hands-on publisher, doing my own covers and editing, so I’m often asked for advice on publishing by people who are just starting out.

I thought about what I wanted to pass along to new publishers, and realized that it should come with some examples. So here are some of my favorites–you’ve seen them before, but maybe you haven’t really looked at them closely enough to realize how they work. And I’ll show you why they work.

This is not an exhaustive list–there are many more great book covers out there, both old and new–but it’s a start.

I really like the idea of self-publishing. I love writing, it’s something I want to be able to do for the rest of my life. It’s only because of self-publishing that this is even possible. There’s no way I could find a publisher willing to print and distribute my works, most especially at the rates that I would be willing to work for.

Now, as a guy who loves reading a lot, I’m glad there are people who write books and have them published. It’s nice – for example – to have a copy of Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” on my shelf. But it’s not like I ever read that book completely through – hell, the back cover is falling off and it looks like it was printed in the seventies!

But there are some covers that just irritate me. If you’ve been reading my blog you might have seen my rant over at Cracked about book covers (here). What bothers me isn’t just what they look like or how they’re designed; it’s what they say about their creators and how they portray them and their books.

Here are some tips if you’re considering hiring an artist to do your cover art:

1) Know