First of all, Kari Anders creates free ebook covers with a purchase of a Creatspace wrap! She's got many covers up to look at and they're really good!
Kari Anders is a book cover designer who works mostly with
self-published authors and small publishing houses. She worked in freelance
design for six years before attending graduate school, and now teaches design
and runs freeebookcovers.com. All
of Kari's covers are designed as CreateSpace Wraps for only $75, with the eBook
version included for free. Her site specializes in Pre-Made Book Covers, but
she also does interior design and custom covers.
She recently wrote a blog piece about designing your own book, which can be found here. I recommend taking a look if you're making your own cover, or need some other book advice! She also wrote a second blog piece about how to select the right image:
Designing Your Own Book Cover: How to
Select The Right Image
In Elements of a Book Cover that Sells,
I talk about creating a cover that speaks directly to your audience by using
the idea of a Single Story. In the following post, I expand on this idea by
giving helpful tips on finding the base layer for your cover: the image.
Your image should convey the mood of your story. If you’ve
written a fun-loving, silly, woman’s novel, your cover might be an illustration
of a lady in heels with a pink background. If your book explores the story of a
missing woman, it might have a dark background with a woman running away. If
it’s a love story, readers will expect a couple holding hands or kissing on the
cover. All these components convey the mood of the book and attract your
audience.
If the mood is not evident, you will miss potential readers.
When readers go searching for a new book, they usually know what type of book
they want to read. If nothing else, they know what types of book they have
enjoyed in the past. They will be attracted to images that remind them of
another book they’ve read. This relationship connects the reader to an emotion
they felt while reading that book. For instance, I had recently finished Where’d You Go Bernadette and was
looking for a new read. I saw the novel How to Write a Novel, with its blue
cover and illustrations and bought it. Why? It reminded me of Bernadette.
That’s it. I wasn’t even looking for a book like Bernadette; I just
subconscious equated the cover of Bernadette with a book I like.
Often authors spend energy on trying to get their cover
image to be unique, and to stand out from the crowd. While really, they should
have been doing the opposite.
You may have noticed that in all of the examples at the
beginning of this article, I suggest having images of people on the cover (the
woman in pink heels, the couple kissing, etc.). As an author, you may be
tempted to steer away from covers that give away too much detail that you’d
rather let the reader imagine. One of the reasons I believe readers like books
over their film adaptations, is because they get to bring the scene to life
using their own imagination. The same applies to the characters in a book.
Giving too much detail away can take away this experience from the readers. So
why do I suggest books with images of people? Simply, they sell better.
You many see that some covers don’t have the full person or
even just avoid their face on the cover. You might see only a woman’s legs or
feet, or you might see her face below the nose. This allows your readers to
still create the characters using their own imagination while still creating a book
cover that sells.
The other advantage of showing only a part of a character is
that it allows you to simplify your cover. If you are trying to convey too much
information to your readers, it will be busy and overwhelming and will distract
them from absorbing the story’s mood. Remember, you want to sell them a single
story. Don’t try to input double meanings, or symbols that the reader will only
understand once they’ve read the book. Symbolism is for your writing. You
aren’t trying to sell them on your cleverness with a book cover.
To convey the mood, keep it simple, and focus on a single
story, you want to be obvious with your images, but not necessarily literal.
You don’t want readers to have to guess or search for your cover is about. But
at the same time, it doesn’t need to be a specific scene from your story to
convey the mood, and being too literal can destroy the intrigue you want to
create. Let me show you what I mean:
Bad Cover: The problem with this cover is that it is too
literal. You can actually tell that this is a scene from the book. You might
read the book with the anticipation in your head of getting to that scene. But
readers are, in their own opinion, better imaginators than any author.
Therefore, you are certain to disappoint. There are too many details in this
cover that need to synchronize with the readers’ imagination. How many times
have you seen a book made into a movie and found something in the movie that
played out way better in your head?
Good Cover: The following cover could very well be the same
book. It’s obvious this story is also about a woman who is gone, missing or
taken (as the title suggests). You don’t have to decipher a code in the image
to get a sense for what the book is about. But at the same time, this cover
isn’t so literal. You get to conjure up an image as to what might be happening
because you aren’t force fed a scene.
Here’s a test: Once you have selected an image, forget your
story. Can you create a powerful title on the picture alone? Does that title do
your book justice? If not, keep looking.
The most common place authors and designers find images for
book covers is stock image sites. There are hundreds of thousands of images to
choose from, and they are usually between $10 and $25 per image. With a stock
image from Shutterstock.com
or iStock.com, you can sell between
250,000 and 500,000 books before you have to worry about purchasing additional
licensing. There are also sites you can find free stock images, but make sure
you read and fully understand the terms of copyright before using an image from
one of these sites. DO NOT use an unlicensed image from a Google images search,
even if you don’t think you are going to sell very many books, as this will
most certainly earn you a letter from an attorney asking you to remove it at
the least, and a lawsuit at the worst.
The advantages of using stock images are selection, price,
and availability. To find an image for a previous post, I used the search terms
“girl in front of a ship” and found 42 pages of results. That’s a pretty
specific request. Also, stock image sites are also regularly updated their
inventory, and they tag images by a number of categories, including model. So
if you find a model that you like, but the image isn’t quite right, you can
find other photos with the same model. This is very useful for a book series.
A drawback to using stock imaging is uniqueness. Stock sites
will sell an image infinite number of times, meaning that even though your
typography and location of the photo might be unique, another author might end
up with the same image on their cover. Professional publishing houses will
spend thousands hiring a photographer and models to get unique images for their
covers. However, this isn’t a possibility for most self-published authors. On
freeeebookcovers.com, I am building a collection of non-stock images from local
photographers I’ve worked with over the years. Check back soon for the launch
of Original Images, and happy writing!
