Book Cover Design

Your manuscript is polished to perfection and you’re ready to self-publish. Great. What about the book cover design? It’s a dilemma for many Indie authors. A lot of time and dollars can be spent finding a good graphic designer with the necessary insight to do your work...

This, I feel, is the most exciting technique to use. You can easily make the most nondescript images shine.

The image above shows the 4 steps I took to produce the picture for ‘India Frances Hope/Maid in Thailand’. I took a simple snapshot portrait and gave it an idios...

Similar process to Example A, only adding ‘Focal B&W’ and ‘Dark Edges’ on Picmonkey ‘Effects’.

STEP 1 (fig 1)

Download copy of original photograph in the edit suite at PhotoScape. Mask area of photograph needed and crop to size. (Ratio 2x3. Resize to 1600 pixels x 2400...

BOOK TITLE: India Frances Hope / Maid in Thailand.

GENRE: No particular genre. If anything at all it’s: ‘Quirky’

BLURB: “India Frances Hope writes of her experience growing up in Thailand under the influence of a difficult father. She tells with brutal innocent irony o...

Now here’s what I feel is a good tip: Don’t use fancy type faces. It’s amazing how quickly they become trendy. Your choice loses its ‘different’ feel and soon becomes dated. For book cover design, stick to classic fonts.

You can’t go wrong with these: (But by all means...

VARIATION ON PROJECT 1

Part of experimenting took me down the typographical route with project 1; same book, different approach. This example is more whimsical, airy fairy. (Reflecting the style of writing.)

STEP 1

Choose a stock picture of clouds. (I think this was on...

I’m always on the lookout for free images that I might want to use at some point in the future. This haunting picture is just such an example. I found it on a public domain website.

When I came to publish my first historical fiction, ‘Shadow of the Fatal Tree’, it perf...

BOOK TITLE: Frank Wall / Another September.

GENRE: Murder, mystery, action, adventure.

BLURB: “Many mistakes, few regrets, lessons learned and forgotten. Four men lie dead in a Bangkok morgue. Mike Dean thought he’d left the seedy underworld behind in the East End of L...

HOW TO CREATE A BRANDED SERIES.

An Indie author seeking to maximize their earning potential needs to consider the ‘series’ approach to publishing. Having multiple titles in a set genre is a well documented way to build an author following. Erotica is a classic example.

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AUTHOR Frank Wall has written all his adult life; mostly advertising copy and letters to creditors during his professional years. He is now a full time Indie author currently residing on the bank of The Mekong River in N.E. Thailand. Here he spends most of his time in...