Firstly, I needed an editing software that wasn’t incredibly complex, and that didn’t cost as much money as buying a book cover did. I tried a few, though landed on a site called PicMonkey. It was easy to use, I received a 30 day free trial (the cover took two days to complete) and the process was more straightforward than Photoshop was. It was also basically free. One box ticked.
The next issue was obtaining images that weren’t bound with copyright. This is something I didn’t know much about when coming into cover designs, and thankfully, I found yet another loophole. Now, you cannot go ahead and download any image of the internet and make it your book cover. This will get you sued! So hold up, and listen carefully.
You need to find yourself some stock photos that don’t have a massive price tag on them. Shuttershock is one site, full of amazing
What's in a cover?
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Shuttershock is one site, full of amazing images (probably the best you’re going to get on the market) though with the exception that again, there was lots of money for a membership to access such photos. I wasn’t about that type of life.
I hunted through the web again, not wanting to spend a dime, and found Pexels. They’re free, easily downloadable (no sign up nor bank details needed) and there’s thousands of images to pick from. It would do nicely.
After finding my editing software and my book cover image, I now needed to know how big a book was. What were the dimensions for a paperback? What were the dimensions for an ebook? Google came in handy, once more.
KDP offers this great service for paperback users which calculates your page count, cover size and shade, and produces you with a perfect template to customise your cover on. (https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/cover-templates)
This is what I used, and it worked a treat! Getting me just the right dimensions for my paperback when designing.