Writing a book isn’t easy, but selling a book is often much more difficult. You need to get your book noticed, and in many cases, people will see the cover before they know what the book is about. If you’re a writer, you may not be a great designer or artist – what you need are premade book covers for sale.
You can find free book covers online, buy book covers online, or find templates that help you create ideal covers. Of course, there’s the built-in cover designer for the Kindle publishing system, but there are a limited number of designs available. Even with the addition of a new photo, you can often identify the books that have used this service.
This doesn’t make the book any less worthy, but it can reduce the number of people who click to see more about your book – they’ve seen the cover before, so they might think the content is recycled too.
A final alternative is to get a book cover designed by a professional, which can help you stand out from other similar books.
Where to Find Book Covers for Sale
If you want to buy book covers, the easiest method is to get someone to design them specifically for your book. Sites like 99designs allow you to specify just what you need and multiple designers can get to work on the job – you just pick which one you like the most.
Alternatively, you can use sites like Fiverr to get in touch with freelancers who offer a similar service. Prices start at $5 and even though the price can be low, you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover…Fiverr often delivers excellent results.
Poster My Wall offers a Kindle book cover designer with a basic free option and a more useful subscription model. Design Wizard is another site offering a similar service.
How To Create Book Covers For Free
You can always use Photoshop or GIMP to create images for your kindle book covers – or any other software that allows you to save images as JPG files. There are a few things to keep in mind.
According to the cover image guidelines provided by Amazon, images should be 1000 pixels wide for every 1600 pixels tall. This is roughly what you would imagine a paperback cover to look like. Other sizes can be used, but they don’t always scale properly in the search results, although it is rare that they look REALLY bad!
With that in mind, you can use online design site Canva to create book covers. The standard “Book Cover” template size in Canva is 1410×2250 pixels, which is a scale of just over 1:1.59 compared to Amazon’s recommended 1:1.6.
Even the free version of Canva gives you access to lots of templates, designs, fonts, and stock photos, so it’s a very good place to start.
Already Got a Book Cover File?
Make it look like a real paperback or hardback! Using the templates from Covervault, you simply need to insert the cover art into the Photoshop PSD files, and your book will quickly become a realistic-looking image of a physical book. Give it a try!