Choosing Your Book Cover
Does your book have a new cover design and now you need to choose the one you’re going to use to self-publish your book? Whether you’re working with a cover designer, using a cover design service, or designing your own cover you could end up with the same dilemma: “which cover should I choose?”
3 Ways to generate Cover Designs
Working with a Cover Designer
When you work with a professional cover designer they’ll usually send you a small selection of mock up covers and it’s your job to choose which version you want to refine and perfect. My cover designer sends me three versions of a cover design using different art and fonts each each one so that I can decide which version I want her to continue working on.
Working with a Cover Designer Service
When you work with a cover design service like 99 Designs, a selection of cover designers will submit their mock ups and you decide which designer you want to work with. You can ask for tweaks or edits from a short list of cover designers before committing to work with your favorite designer, and then you work with them to create refined versions of your final cover.
Designing your own Cover
If you’re designing your own cover you may have strong feelings about one of the key elements in your cover design (font, image, layout, color scheme) but with so many colors and fonts available you can end up with multiple versions of the same cover and have difficulty choosing which version your prefer.
In each of these scenarios you’ll end up with different versions of your book cover. At the beginning of the process you’ll have to choose between completely different cover concepts, but as you proceed with the cover design process it is easy to get analysis-paralysis on the minutiae of each design element. If that happens, a good options is submit your cover to a free service called Help Me Choose A Cover.
Help Me Choose A Cover, Step-by-Step
Upload at least two, or a maximum of four sample covers on the Help Me Choose A Cover website:
Your covers will get their own Voting Page and visitors will be able to click on the cover their prefer or on the corresponding letter (e.g. A, B, C, or D)
Votes are displayed in a Results grid so you’ll be able to see which cover is getting the most favorable feedback. Voters can also leave a comment on the Voting page.
Now you have input from potential readers about which cover they prefer.
To help raise awareness to your Cover Design voting process you can promote it across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. This not only helps drive voting traffic to your voting page, but it helps to raise awareness of your upcoming book.
There are plenty of free tools available to help you to design a creative book cover, handsome of them offer pre-design elements and free graphics. You just have to make sure you have the right usage rights for a book cover.
Yes the more books you sell – the bigger licence you need. But I think the threshold is pretty high.
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