Writer to Artist: Cover Art for Your Kindle Ebooks

I’ve had some wonderful feedback on my eight-hour ebook program. Smart writers are doing amazing things.

Several writers asked about cover art.

You have two options: you can hire it done — professionally designed covers cost somewhere between $200 and $1000 — or you can do it yourself.

If you’re on a budget, and want to do it yourself, that’s fine. You can always change the cover later, once your ebook is selling.

Here’s an excellent tutorial, by David Barron: Cover Art:

“I’ve finished up a new story featuring Alan (the main character from “Moving In, Moving On”) called “The Language of Ice Cubes”, so I’m going to need an ebook cover. Here’s how I do it.”

David Barron uses the GIMP image editor, which is free and open source, so you can use it on the PC and Mac.

David Wisehart has an excellent ecover tutorial too, How to Create a Book Cover for Your Kindle Ebook.

So there are three steps:

1. Find an image. This must be an image you took yourself, or an image you downloaded which is royalty free.

Make sure that you can use the image as an ecover. My favorite royalty-free image library is Dreamstime. You’ll get a great image for a few dollars. You’re looking for an image which is larger than 500 x 800, and which has space for your title and name.

2. Find fonts on your computer, or elsewhere.

3. Resize the image to 500 x 800 and edit it. Save the file for the Web. (GIMP will optimize the image for the Web.)

All done!