Myths of Publishing: Anyone Can Self-publish, Part 3
Being an indie author requires more skills than “author”
Self-Publishing Odyssey: Part 4 Designing the Cover Image
Alastair Savage’s Self-Publishing Odyssey moves on to stage 4: Designing the cover.
Cover Layout for Beginners
How to use GIMP to create a professional looking SF cover.
Formatting for Createspace: The Cover
Cedar Sanderson gives an insider perspective to designing your cover and the Createspace templates.
Well-Covered
I’d get more into the topic, but I haven’t got time to plumb the depths of Amazon. Instead I recommend that you do. Look at the genre you picked for your story, and see what the bestsellers are (taking out authors like RR Martin and mega-bestsellers, who can sell on the author’s name alone) and look at their covers. Keep in mind that most ebooks will be viewed at a very small size of image initially, and design yours to look good at thumbnail, then full-size. Stick to the recommended proportions. A square cover image will scream amateur in the bookshop, unless it’s a children’s picture book…
The Art of Designing Covers
Today I am pleased to present a guest post by Eric Gustafson, an innovative artist and book cover designer. I am still learning so much about cover design, and as Eric has been one of the people who is teaching me (if he knows it or not!) I wanted you all to get the benefit […]
What Traditional Publishing Can Learn From Self-publishing
One of the first things you learn as a traditionally published author is that you have very little control over a great many things about your books. Cover design, format (hard cover, trade paperback, or mass market paperback), price, and even the title are not yours to dictate. These are decisions that greatly affect the […]
Covering the Topic
The biggest challenge to self-publishing, I found, was creating covers for my stories. Using the native Mac word processor Pages, formatting stories for epub version is a one-click process. Even doc files are easy to produce cleanly. From the things I am told, it’s harder to make a clean file using Word, and I know […]