Ebook Cover Art

Even though they are not supposed to, people do judge a book by its cover. Having an interesting, eye-catching cover is important.

I made the cover for The Sext Crime using a stock photo for the phone. Then I added effects and inserted the text. Tools used:

123rf.com -- stock photo site. Paid $100 for the extended license (web and print) for the artwork for the phone. It costs $75 if you want just e-rights.

Paint.net -- free paint software. Easy to do basic stuff--resizing, adding texts, adding effects. 

If you or someone you know has Adobe Photoshop and the rest of Adobe's Creative Suite, then you could use those excellent tools to create a cover.

Tip: A cover must look good at a pretty small size--the size used on retailers' online sites and on blogs.

If you don't want to make your own cover, there are artists who will. Author Joe Konrath uses Carl Graves for his covers. Carl charges between $200 and $400 for book covers, depending on the amount of work involved.

BookBaby offers cover design services. A basic design costs $99--you supply the image. The deluxe option costs $199--they provide the image and create a cover from scratch. They have an in-house team of graphic artists with marketing backgrounds who do the work. You will need to fill out a design form, so they know what you are looking for visually.

Elves On Shelves will create ebook covers for as low as $129.

Other sources for cover creators: your friends, your social network, and Craigslist. I hired someone from Craigslist to create a cover for my first Covert Youth Agency book for $100. If you follow the link, you'll notice that the text looks pixelated--the graphic didn't shrink well. I've debated changing the cover, but some book bloggers I trust told me to keep it. And that everyone has widely varying opinions on covers. 

Regardless of which way you choose to get a cover, you will want to have high quality images that you can resize through your paint program of choice. Here are some guidelines from Amazon about covers:

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) accepts two types of files for cover images:

• JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
• TIFF (Tagged Image File Format)

Amazon KDP applies additional compression to images when displaying them on its website. For best results, images should be uploaded with minimal compression.

Dimensions - Minimum 500 x Maximum 1280 pixels

Recommendations for the size of your cover art:

• Minimum of 500 pixels, horizontally
• Maximum of 1280 pixels, vertically

Save at 72 dots per inch (dpi) for optimal viewing on the web.

600x800 pixels is a common size. You can play around with the dimensions depending on how wide or skinny you want your ebook image to look. The ebook cover on this page for The Sext Crime was saved at 587x800 pixels, and reduced to 179x245 for the website.