If you’re self-publishing, the choice of cover is 100% down to you! You can even make your own cover, but if you don’t have a flair for design and good technical skills, it’s probably wise to outsource design.
It’s trickier to make a cover design for printed books, as you’ll need to do a back cover and a spine. Some print-on-demand services automate this with “wizards” where you can upload an image and add text, but if you’re using Ingram Spark, you’ll need to design everything manually to exact specifications. Without Photoshop or professional design software, this can be challenging.
One of the most critical things is to ensure that your book cover looks good in the smaller thumbnail size which Amazon displays. Fonts and font size can be a particular issue here.
Professionally designed book covers cost a few bucks for a pre-made cover, to hundreds and even thousands of dollars for something custom-designed. These are some of the companies offering pre-made and custom-designed covers.
GoOnWrite |
GoOnWrite has hundreds of pre-made covers to browse, in a wide range of genres and styles. They also sell covers for book series, and can also make single covers into a series on request. They’re very responsive and easy to deal with. | USD$30 |
Book Cover Zone |
Book Cover Zone offers a wide range of pre-made covers for fiction and non-fiction, and also does custom design. | USD$69 |
The Book Cover Designer |
The Book Cover Designer has over 10,000 pre-made covers available for purchase, from many different designers. The site allows search which can help find what you’re looking for. Prices vary. | USD$15-$600 |
Damonza |
Damonza offers custom designed and pre-made book covers, and includes minor alterations in the price. They also offer other publishing related services such as editing and formatting. | USD$195 for pre-made covers |
We’d love to build a list of talented book cover designers in Australia, so please drop us a line if you are one yourself, or have worked with someone great!