YA Author Rendezvous

Written by
Sarah Wathen

Readers do judge books by their covers. Everyone knows that. But indie authors also know that this book publishing business can be expensive, hiring good artists and designers particularly so. Yes, we have to wear a lot of hats—author, marketer, social media guru. Some things you have to farm out, like editing (please, please, please don’t do that yourself). But you’re probably creative, since writing is an art form after all, so you may want to give cover design a try.

If you’d like to make your own book covers, the best place to start is by looking at some excellent ones to get your creative juices flowing and understanding how you might try a similar design technique.

Lately, I’ve been loving book covers that use fragments of photos. What is left out is the most important part of the image. It’s not so much a beautiful photograph that you see but the part of the beautiful photograph that is missing. You have to fill in the rest with your imagination—just like the best books.

This one above looks professional and artistic, yet an amateur with vision could do it. It may be difficult to stage a full scale model shot, but if you have an iPhone, a friend with pretty hands, black drapery, and a nice tarot card, you could pull something like this off.An areal photo of a landscape? Blah-di-blah. But print out that photo, fold it up like a map and re-shoot it on a white table? Three-dimensional and eye-catching!

The photograph above could’ve been a stock photo purchased online. Again, print that photo out and tear into it, then re-photograph with text.

Since I’m a painter, this one sparks my interest most. I simply can’t stop looking at the physicality of those brush strokes. They are so jarring, beautiful yet frustrating—blocking my view. I’m dying to read the book to find out what I’m missing! But again, print out a plain old boring seascape, apply paint, then photograph again with proper lighting.

This last one would be admittedly harder to pull off and was probably accomplished in Photoshop. Such gorgeous results, however. The fact is, if you are going to give cover design a shot, Adobe Photoshop is pretty essential to have. You’ll need it for the finishing touches and typography anyway. It’s an expensive program, but there are ways to ease the pain. I personally have an Adobe Creative Cloud account, by which I can access any Adobe program I want (and always have the very newest version) for $50 a month. The learning curve can seem steep, but anything you want to try can be Googled and you’ll find dozens of step-by-step tutorials on how to do it.

All of these covers rock because of the brain power that went into making them. Brainpower is something we authors usually have in spades. And who knows your book better than you do? There is nothing more satisfying than designing the perfect cover for your own book. Give it a try…but do it right! Do your research and learn from the best.