Self-publishing School Part 7: Cover Art

Oh, cover art, how I love and loathe thee. One moment I'm tearing out my hair because of image resolutions, bleed areas, design elements, fonts and spines and measurements and ISBNs and your endless cornucopia of technical considerations. The next I'm weeping like a child because of your undeniable utility and the success it brings.

Good cover art is absolutely essential to marketing, and it is also the biggest struggle I've faced as a self-publisher. Lack of knowledge and impatience were my greatest enemies in the beginning, but after a lot of trial and error I've finally developed a system that works.

There are four main approaches you can take when creating cover art:

1. Hire someone to do it for you
2. Buy a pre-made cover and customize it
3. Use a cover-building tool
4. Create a cover from scratch

Hiring works well if you have the funds (or expect to profit from your work). My early books were all given away for free, so I couldn't justify the $100 - $300 cost for a custom print cover design. (E-books are a little cheaper, because only the front cover is needed.) The best part about this solution, which I have used a few times, is that you get to customize and make revisions as needed until the cover is exactly to your liking. If you work with an experienced cover designer, the results are incomparable.

There are several sites that feature pre-made cover templates. These tend to be cheaper than a completely custom design, because the options for customization are limited and fonts and colors are generally pre-selected. You do still get a unique cover for your book (someone else can't buy the same design after you've made your purchase), and the cost can be closer to $50 or $75. I've used sites that provide tools that allow me to do my own template editing, and I've also used sites that allowed me to select my cover and provide title and author information, then they e-mailed the final cover to me later. Generally, cover templates are for front covers only (spine and back cover additions cost extra, if they are available at all).

Both Lulu and CreateSpace provide cover building tools. The CreateSpace tool can give you a very professional look, but you will most likely want to provide your own stock photograph for the templates that require it (the free options provided aren't very exciting or unique). The Lulu tool presents several decidedly unglamorous choices, but it does allow you to use an image-only template, giving you the opportunity to create front and back cover files separately and drop them onto the template for a custom look without the complexities of creating a cover from scratch. Both sites will not print spine text unless your book is a certain minimum length (80 pages for Lulu, 100 for CreateSpace).

Creating a cover from scratch gives you complete control over the process, which can be good or bad depending on your graphic design skills. Calculating the appropriate cover pixel size can be challenging (templates are provided by Lulu and CreateSpace, but CreateSpace doesn't provide them for all trim sizes). Getting the spine text, bleed area and live graphic elements in all the right places can also be challenging. I use SketchBook Pro to create my covers, because it allows me to specify my canvas size. It doesn't provide a PDF exporter (both Lulu and CreateSpace want full-size covers in PDF format), but there are converters available on the Internet if you need them. Photoshop is an even better option, if you have the software and the skill to use it. Lulu requires you to place your ISBN bar code on the back cover, but CreateSpace will place it there automatically for you (be sure to leave some space for it on the bottom right corner).

The effort involved in creating a great cover is worth the sacrifice required, but I sincerely hope your experience with cover art is better than mine has been.