Experimenting with cover art from iStockphoto. For a small fee you can download and use (royalty free) a photo or illustration for your book and/or ebook cover. Pretty cool, eh?
(In this case, the artwork to your left was featured as one of this week's free images and was created by an artist known as doodlemachine. Standard license agreement allows me to use it as a cover art illo.)
I'm excited about this service. I should really be able to spruce up my ebooks (my last cover for Flash Fiction Five Pack was horrible! It may still be up at Amazon but am changing it as we speak.). In theory, this will entice buyers (hint hint) who believe you can tell a book by its cover. (BTW, this collection of 5 Humor Shorts is available for only 99 cents at Smashwords and Amazon.)
Simple process too. I import the picture into PowerPoint (turn the slide to portrait) and add copy. Save as a jpeg. Upload to your various e-tailers. Easy peasy.
And a lot of indie published writers are doing it. Check out Raymund Eich's book covers (don't know him, so can't vouch for his novels but hey, his stuff looks professional). And I'm pretty sure Jeff Ambrose, writing as Mark Sled, did his own covers. At any rate, it's what's taking off in this new world of publishing - DIY covers. And not bad quality either.
If you are a DIY'er, how do you go about creating great covers?
Lyn, I'm glad to hear my covers look professional. My workflow is similar to yours, except I use Scribus (open source, free, for Linux, but I think there are Win and/or Mac versions too) for layout. I have a template cover, import an image and enter the title, and then export to jpeg and upload.
ReplyDeleteFor cover imagery, I've used bigstockphoto.com and dreamstime.com (about $5-10 for one royalty-free image), Wikimedia Commons, and my or my wife's camera. Sf writers have a very good royalty-free image source: NASA. (the US government does not enforce its copyrights in work done by any of its agencies).
Thanks Raymund for stopping by. Good point about NASA - I've used their images before as well. And I'm not really artsy so I like the simplicity of all this.
ReplyDelete