Why Make Your Own eBook Cover?

How to make an eBook Cover

Ebook covers, ebook cover 200—Uriel 1998 (Flickr.com)

If you’ve written an eBook, you need a great cover to show it off to the world. Because first impressions count – and your book’s cover is the first thing your potential customers will see. The quality of the cover can have a massive impact on your book’s success – or failure!

Your book’s cover is its ‘shop front’ – if it’s not attractive and engaging, and if it doesn’t look professional, people are much less likely to want to come in and look around.

Even if you’re giving your book away as a free download, it’s still worth showing it off in its Sunday best with a great looking cover. Because this will reflect well on you and your business. Plus, your customers will feel you’re really giving them something of value – so they’re going to have more trust and respect for you. Which can only be good for your future business prospects.

But what if you can’t afford to have a cover made by a professional? Or maybe you just don’t want the hassle of commissioning someone to make a cover for you – I know, from bitter experience, that this doesn’t always work out as planned!

If you want to make an eBook cover for yourself, there are a number of different options. In the video below, Ryan demonstrates how you can easily make your own professional looking cover using tools that are freely available online:

How to Make An eBook Cover in 8 Simple Steps

  • OPEN UP A FREE PHOTO EDITING PROGRAM: In the video above, Ryan uses Paint.net. There are several such photo editing programs freely available online – another excellent one, which I use myself, is GIMP. These are quick and easy to download – and FREE!
  • CREATE A NEW IMAGE:  Open up a new image and resize this to 400 pixels wide by 600 pixels high – this is so the image looks about the right size for a regular book cover.
  • DESIGN YOUR COVER: Ryan demonstrates how to do a very simple design in the above video. You could also just copy and paste an image onto your cover and add some text. When you’re designing your cover, remember that it needs to look good as a small thumbnail image. You’ll know what I mean if you go onto Amazon and search for eBooks – come to think of it, that’s also a great way to get some ideas for your cover design! Keep it nice and simple and don’t include lots of small text, because this just won’t show up well.
  • CREATE A NEW IMAGE FOR THE SIDE COVER: If you wish to continue the background of the main cover onto the side bar, first select a length of the main cover image and ‘copy’ it, as demonstrated in the video. Then open up another new image and resize this to 80 pixels wide by 600 pixels high. You can then paste the copied background image onto the side cover image.
  • ADD TITLE TEXT TO SIDE COVER: First, you need to rotate the image 90 degrees clockwise so that it’s horizontal on the screen. Then add the text for your book’s title – you can obviously select the font, size and colour and position this as you wish, for the best effect. Then rotate the image back to its original vertical position by turning it 90 degrees anti-clockwise.
  • SAVE BOTH IMAGES: Save the main cover and the side cover image to somewhere you can easily find them on your computer. Ryan suggests saving them as JPEG files, but you could also save them in PNG or GIF formats.
  • UPLOAD BOTH IMAGES TO 3D-PACK.COM: Head over to 3d-pack.com - this is a website with a tool that generates 3d box graphics instantly and free of charge. Simply select ‘book’ from the different image options available (you can also create images for CD or DVD boxes), then upload the main cover and side images for your eBook. Then simply click on the button to create your 3d box and – hey presto! A 3d image of your ebook cover will magically appear! You can rotate this until you have it at the desired angle, then just save it in whichever format you wish (JPEG, GIF or PNG).
  • SAVE THE IMAGE TO YOUR COMPUTER: All you have to do now is right click on the image and save it to your computer – and that’s it. You’ve done it! You’ve created your very own 3d cover.

This is a really easy way to create a professional looking 3d image for your eBook cover. What’s more, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’ve done it all yourself and it hasn’t cost you a dime!

If you have questions, comments or tips – particularly if you’ve any experience of creating your own eBook covers – I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment below. And if you’ve enjoyed this post, don’t forget to ‘like’ it and ‘share’ it with your friends!

Best wishes,

Sue Neal

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