DIY Book Covers

I spent about a year learning how to upload my own creative writing to Amazon and one day I realized I was finally ready to get my hands dirty and join the revolution myself.

There was one problem though. I had everything ready to go, but the book covers.

I happened upon a group I discovered at Meetup.com and it was mainly about how to put you book on Amazon. The consensus was you needed about w $500 dollars to pay an illustrator to get a book cover done..

The book cover seems to be most important aspect to self-publishing your e-book. It’s one of the main deciding factors on whether someone will buy it.

I was short on cash, so I spent some time scratching my head about this problem.

I decided, since I didn’t have a novel done, I’d put some short stories up that I’d finished. They were only fifteen to twenty pages each, but it would help me get my feet wet with the KDP Select program on Amazon. (You can check out my short stories on Amazon by clicking here!).

First I used KDP Select’s own eBook cover creator. It was real easy to use and the covers I made, in the early stages, didn’t look too bad.

But low and behold I discovered something totally better ! I found Derek Murphy’s website www.diybookcovers.com, and downloaded free templates.

Who’s this Derek Murphy character? you’re probably wondering.

Well, he’s a book cover designer and author among many other things. On his website he says :

“I believe the purpose of our lives is to create something unique that entertains, instructs, challenges or helps others. . . More specifically, I help authors and artists produce, promote, and sell more books and paintings.”

Derek has made gorgeous covers for literally hundreds of self-published, indie authors, but when you read about him on his website the most interesting thing he says is that he wants to buy a castle one day. Cool!

So I started working with the free templates in Microsoft Word software. I have Microsoft 2007, so this or higher is recommended.

If you’re used to using Microsoft Word you will have no problem working on the templates. If you need help learning Microsoft Word 2007 you should watch Derek’s videos or search Google and YouTube for instructions. You can read my article about how to use Google and YouTube here.

Once inside the template I added my own image and then typed in my title and name on top.

Then I was done!

That’s how helpful Derek’s videos were. I also suggest you check out his books for sale on Amazon.