Timothy Fish

Book Cover Design Wizardry: for the Self-publishing Author Timothy Fish

More books are being published than ever with about one million per year in the United States alone. More than half of those are published by self-publishers and small presses. As a self-publishing author, you are walking boldly into that competitive environment, but you need your book to stand out from the rest. The last thing you need is a generic book cover that looks like all the other self-published and small press books out there. But book covers are costly, some running into hundreds or thousands of dollars. You have a choice between accepting the generic cover design your self-publishing company offers or spend hundreds of dollars for something better. This book provides another option. Using graphic design software that is both high quality and free to you, this book will teach you techniques that you can use to design your own book cover. These techniques are demonstrated using more than 200 full color images to help you get past the learning curve so that you can design your own book covers and avoid the curse of the generic book cover. This book discusses both fiction and non-fiction covers. It explains how to create and use a template for placing text and graphics on the cover. You will learn about image placement, interesting things you can do with text and how to incorporate hand drawn graphics into the cover. You will learn how to generate a barcode for the back cover. As an added feature, this book includes a section on using three dimensional rendering software for book cover design.