DIY Book Covers
This is not a blog about whether you should hire a cover designer or do it yourself, but how to go about if you choose the DIY route. Your objective is to produce something that looks professional and well-designed, which does not necessarily mean going overboard with flashy design and fonts.
The process is somewhat simpler if you just want an ebook cover rather than a wrap-around paperback cover. I will assume you are going to distribute via Amazon, but the process for other platforms or distributors will be much the same. Amazon offer pre-made covers on their site, but nobody recommends that you actually use them.
First you need a concept. Then you need some artwork that will fit Amazon's recommended 1.6: 1 aspect ratio (ebook) with minimum dimensions of 1000 x 625 pixels. Covers with white or pale backgrounds will not display well, unless given a dark border. It should further be suitable for having your titling superimposed on it. If your artwork is busy with contrasting areas of light and dark, or areas of contrasting colour, you may have trouble finding any font colour that will stand out when superimposed on it without bits of it being hard to read. You need areas of relatively uniform colour to form a good background for text.
If you can't produce some artwork yourself, one way of proceeding is to look online where you can find paid-for and free to use artwork on sites such as pixabay.com. Huge numbers of images are available which can be searched by category. You may be thinking that some other author might use the same image, and in principle you are right, but the chances that somebody else will use the same image AND that a shopper will pull it up alongside yours are very low. Even if you get a free image, it would be polite to credit the artist inside your book.
Now you have one or more likely images, you can pull them into Photoshop and see how they look when cropped to that 1.6: 1 aspect ratio. Photoshop has rulers that will help you trim it. If the image simply won't fit you can consider adding top and bottom borders, which might be good places for placing some text.
Amazon have a minimum recommended size (in pixels) for an ebook cover. If the image you have selected is on the small side, you can increase its size in images/resize. So long as you don't radically enlarge it, nobody will know, especially not when it is displayed on screen in a postage stamp size.
Once you have your ebook cover properly sized, you can build up a layered image. Each line of text will generate a layer, as will any supplementary images or wingdings that you add. This is quite a powerful tool. You can return to each element, move it around, change its shape, change its colour, or change the font. Be sure to save your draft work as a Photoshop .psd file, NOT as anything else which will lock the changes in place. You can re-open the .psd and make any changes you wish. You could even delete the background image and insert another.
What you put on the cover, ie the image, titling and fonts, is down to your artistic judgement. It needs to look okay in various sizes of reproduction - large in your publicity, postage stamp sized in a search on Amazon with a small screen device, and at least the title and your author name should be readable at a small scale. You can upload the image in various formats.
Paperbacks:
Creating a paperback cover image is a more complex procedure. Again, Amazon offer a premade cover, which is not recommended. You can download a template (sized for your book's no. of pages), which is marked out with various boundaries or tolerances indicating areas for cropping, text areas, spine, barcode, and rear cover text. It is essential that your artwork conforms to these markings otherwise the final result will look bad. Note that this is a large template, about 4000px high, so your background image should be at least this high and wide enough to span the whole template including trim areas. If it isn't, you can expand it in image/resize so long as you don't radically enlarge it.
You need to decide what is to go on the spine and the back cover. Many covers have a background image (or colour) that wraps all the way around, but you need to be careful that the superimposed text is going to contrast well and be readable. As with ebook covers, you have the option of adding top and bottom margins. You could also add a very wide left-hand margin as background for the spine and rear cover. When working to the deadline of a book-signing event, this is what I did for the cover of my "Half an Empire" paperback. I re-used the same art as for the ebook, and to get it in the correct ratio for an 8x5 cover I added top and bottom borders in a matching dark colour. Commercially published paperbacks can be found with a single colour for the spine and back. Others have an image wrapped around the front, spine and rear cover.
If you can't find a suitable wrap-around image, there are other things you can try, asides from flipping the image L-R. For the "Witch's Box" cover, I took a sliver of the front image, flipped it and stretched it radically in width before re-attaching it in Photoshop. Result, a seamless spine and back treatment in matching colours. Or you could make a wide asymmetric border in a suitable colour to extend over the spine and back cover. With my 'Dark Tides' the result was seamless and gave a useful black background for text. If there isn't a seamless merge you have to hope that the printers place the join of colours on the cover fold. It is useful to have a pocket calculator and notepaper on hand to work out any image size calculations.
When inserting the background image, if it is left a little oversize, you can use the Move tool to adjust its position for best effect. Position the template in front of the background image, so you can set it to part-transparent for aligning elements of the text.
Be aware that the print-on-demand service may not get the alignment perfectly right, so bear in mind the likely effect of any small offset. I have two print-on-demand copies of an anthology in which one of my stories appears, supplied separately, and on one the spine text is centred and on the other it isn't.
When you are satisfied with your artwork, set the template to fully transparent, and save a copy of the artwork as a Photoshop .pdf file. Be sure to save the .psd version as you might need it for edits.
Note there is no barcode. Amazon will add it. Upload the .pdf when Amazon ask for it in the publication sequence. It should pass their checks and your online proofing. I strongly recommend that you order a proof copy before publishing and examine it carefully, inside and out. It is remarkable what one notices from a hard copy that is not noticeable when proofing onscreen.
Once you publish, your cover is not set in stone. An advantage of the Amazon process is that if after a while you are not happy with the cover, you can edit the original and re-upload without an interruption of sales, or even decide to ditch it and commission a replacement from a cover designer.
Some skill in using image-processing software will be required, and it will be an advantage if you use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements regularly for various tasks. I have found that every time I come to design a cover, I have forgotten much of what I figured out before.đ If there is something you want to do, but can't figure out how (e.g. adding borders of various sizes) you can usually find an answer by searching online. As well as Layers, you may have occasion to use quite a number of Photoshop tools, and it wouldn't hurt to try out all the filters and effects on a sample image to see what they do. But simple is often best. Other image editing software is available e.g. the free GIMP.