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Creating ebook cover art
- For starters, let me tell you what I am not going to cover in this section - how to become a graphics designer!
- What I will cover is an approach and a resource to help the bevy of graphically challenged writers out there!
- Assuming you do not have the talent, tools or time to create your own unique cover art then read on - here is a way to still have a great, LEGAL, cover!
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(a not so good cover design)
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Available Now!
(click image for more)
...ending totally caught me by surprise. ...done reading I was sad - because I wanted to keep reading more!
J T Taylor, Associate Youth Minister
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Copyrights
- Speaking of legal, there is this little thing called the copyright. Copyrights automatically exist for ALL original works of art, including photos!
- If you plan on selling an ebook with a cover you MUST HAVE legal permission (you need royalty free unless you plan on compensating the art creators as part of each sale of your book) for any art you use that you did not create.
- This applies whether you sell your book or give it away. If you plan to sell your ebook, make sure you watch all copyrights closely.
- Oh, and in case you didn't know, all those neat clipart galleries you have? They are under copyright too and most licenses do NOT allow the royalty free distribution like you need for your book cover!
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What to do?
- Not to worry. If you want engaging cover art, then all you need to know is one thing.
- Now you are going to have to PAY ($$$) but for a buck or three you can get the material you need for a professional cover - that's right, my cover art cost me $4!
- This is where all of the art for the Dangerous Dreams covers and marketing material came from. Sweeet.
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[from Patrick at istockphoto, "iStockphoto is the graphics industry's dirty little secret. Marrying super-low cost content for designers WITH revenue for independent/hobby artists, iStockphoto is nearing 100,000 files of online content and
averages over 35gigabytes of downloads every day!"]
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From art to cover:
- The simplest way to make a nice cover is to select a piece of art that can be the background for your book cover.
- This is how I did most of the free ebook covers on this site.
- Using any number of programs (even good old MS Paint), you can resize and/or trim the image to the size you want for your cover. (virtually EVERY image program ever created supports this).
- Again, using MS Paint or whatever, you can add the text on top of the image (Title and Author) and bingo - you have a professional cover!
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Can you believe...
{some of the wierd ways I use non-graphic programs to do graphics???}
- I have MS OFFICE and I have found ways to use some of its programs in ways I'm sure they were never intended to be used!
STOP!!! Before you graphically talented types start pulling your hair out at what you read here, remember - it's the end result that counts and many of us writers... well, we WRITE - that's what we do and we find ways to AVOID learning graphics stuff where possible, especially a REAL graphics program!
- ADDING TEXT:
MS WORD - Simply insert a picture then set the format of the picture to allow text to lay on top of it, and can use word to do the text! Also, with the image in Word, you can stretch and/or resize it however you like!
MS POWERPOINT - If you have PowerPoint, it is very easy to setup text how ever you want it! This is my preferred way of adding text. Again, just insert and size the image then add the text!
- CHANGING IMAGE SETTINGS:
MS PHOTO EDITOR - Using balance, you can radically change how an image looks - making it much lighter, darker or even changing the overall color balance!
MS POWERPOINT & MS WORD - In both of these programs, you can change the brightness and contrast of an image (right click format) to affect fade or brighten the image.
- THE MAGIC TRANSPARENCY SETTING:
MS PHOTO EDITOR - The file type "png" supports transparency. This can be really cool if you have a smaller image you want on top of a larger image and you don't want any border to show. I use transparency a lot. Oh, the "gif" format does support transparency also but the "png" format seems to be more trouble free and higher quality.
- MULTIPLE IMAGES:
MS POWERPOINT & MS WORD - With both of these programs you can layer images, using the order setting in format. This is very useful if you have a background image that you want to put other, smaller images on top of.
- PRINT SCREEN:
Using the offbeat tricks I describe here leaves one major issue. How do you save the work as an image file?
Well, with PowerPoint you can select the group of objects making up your cover, right click and save them as an image. But the resulting size is not always what you might expect it to be!
So another trick is to use the "print screen" key to print to the clipboard (assuming you have it set to copy to clipboard rather than dump to a real printer!) With this technique you get a WYSIWYG copy of your cover you can paste and trim in MS Paint or MS Photo Editor.
And for some reason, I find that I can resize images in Word and Powerpoint (OR change the zoom of the screen) then with Print Screen, get a cleaner resized image! (what a hack!!!) So I use this technique quite often.
- FINAL NOTE:
IMAGE COPIES - Finally, make sure you keep copies of the image art you are using as you go through the steps of desiging your cover. ALWAYS keep a copy of the highest resolution for each image. Once you modify, shrink, crop or save an image as a different file type there is a very high probability that you will lose some of the resolution for that image. If you don't save these copies, once you make changes you will permanently lose the original quality and resolution of your images! (which is a real bummer if you decide to try a different design)
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