How to use Photoshop to make your own book cover

Geoff Cowie Jun 17

How to use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to produce your own book cover.

DIY Book Covers

This is not a blog about whether you should hire a cover designer or do it yourself, but how to go about if you choose the DIY route. Your objective is to produce something that looks professional and well-designed, which does not necessarily mean going overboard with flashy design and fonts.

The process is somewhat simpler if you just want an ebook cover rather than a wrap-around paperback cover. I will assume you are going to distribute via Amazon, but the process for other platforms or distributors will be much the same. Amazon offer pre-made covers on their site, but nobody recommends that you actually use them.

First you need a concept. Then you need some artwork that will fit Amazon's recommended 1.6: 1 aspect ratio (ebook) with minimum dimensions of 1000 x 625 pixels. Covers with white or pale backgrounds will not display well, unless given a dark border. It should further be suitable for having your titling superimposed on it. If your artwork is busy with contrasting areas of light and dark, or areas of contrasting colour, you may have trouble finding any font colour that will stand out when superimposed on it without bits of it being hard to read. You need areas of relatively uniform colour to form a good background for text.

If you can't produce some artwork yourself, one way of proceeding is to look online where you can find paid-for and free to use artwork on sites such as pixabay.com. Huge numbers of images are available which can be searched by category. You may be thinking that some other author might use the same image, and in principle you are right, but the chances that somebody else will use the same image AND that a shopper will pull it up alongside yours are very low. Even if you get a free image, it would be polite to credit the artist inside your book.

Now you have one or more likely images, you can pull them into Photoshop and see how they look when cropped to that 1.6: 1 aspect ratio. Photoshop has rulers that will help you trim it. If the image simply won't fit you can consider adding top and bottom borders, which might be good places for placing some text.

Amazon have a minimum recommended size (in pixels) for an ebook cover. If the image you have selected is on the small side, you can increase its size in images/resize. So long as you don't radically enlarge it, nobody will know, especially not when it is displayed on screen in a postage stamp size.

Once you have your ebook cover properly sized, you can build up a layered image. Each line of text will generate a layer, as will any supplementary images or wingdings that you add. This is quite a powerful tool. You can return to each element, move it around, change its shape, change its colour, or change the font. Be sure to save your draft work as a Photoshop .psd file, NOT as anything else which will lock the changes in place. You can re-open the .psd and make any changes you wish. You could even delete the background image and insert another.

What you put on the cover, ie the image, titling and fonts, is down to your artistic judgement. It needs to look okay in various sizes of reproduction - large in your publicity, postage stamp sized in a search on Amazon with a small screen device, and at least the title and your author name should be readable at a small scale. You can upload the image in various formats.

Paperbacks:

Creating a paperback cover image is a more complex procedure. Again, Amazon offer a premade cover, which is not recommended. You can download a template (sized for your book's no. of pages), which is marked out with various boundaries or tolerances indicating areas for cropping, text areas, spine, barcode, and rear cover text. It is essential that your artwork conforms to these markings otherwise the final result will look bad. Note that this is a large template, about 4000px high, so your background image should be at least this high and wide enough to span the whole template including trim areas. If it isn't, you can expand it in image/resize so long as you don't radically enlarge it.

You need to decide what is to go on the spine and the back cover. Many covers have a background image (or colour) that wraps all the way around, but you need to be careful that the superimposed text is going to contrast well and be readable. As with ebook covers, you have the option of adding top and bottom margins. You could also add a very wide left-hand margin as background for the spine and rear cover. When working to the deadline of a book-signing event, this is what I did for the cover of my "Half an Empire" paperback. I re-used the same art as for the ebook, and to get it in the correct ratio for an 8x5 cover I added top and bottom borders in a matching dark colour. Commercially published paperbacks can be found with a single colour for the spine and back. Others have an image wrapped around the front, spine and rear cover.

If you can't find a suitable wrap-around image, there are other things you can try, asides from flipping the image L-R. For the "Witch's Box" cover, I took a sliver of the front image, flipped it and stretched it radically in width before re-attaching it in Photoshop. Result, a seamless spine and back treatment in matching colours. Or you could make a wide asymmetric border in a suitable colour to extend over the spine and back cover. With my 'Dark Tides' the result was seamless and gave a useful black background for text. If there isn't a seamless merge you have to hope that the printers place the join of colours on the cover fold. It is useful to have a pocket calculator and notepaper on hand to work out any image size calculations.

When inserting the background image, if it is left a little oversize, you can use the Move tool to adjust its position for best effect. Position the template in front of the background image, so you can set it to part-transparent for aligning elements of the text.

Be aware that the print-on-demand service may not get the alignment perfectly right, so bear in mind the likely effect of any small offset. I have two print-on-demand copies of an anthology in which one of my stories appears, supplied separately, and on one the spine text is centred and on the other it isn't.

When you are satisfied with your artwork, set the template to fully transparent, and save a copy of the artwork as a Photoshop .pdf file. Be sure to save the .psd version as you might need it for edits.

Note there is no barcode. Amazon will add it. Upload the .pdf when Amazon ask for it in the publication sequence. It should pass their checks and your online proofing. I strongly recommend that you order a proof copy before publishing and examine it carefully, inside and out. It is remarkable what one notices from a hard copy that is not noticeable when proofing onscreen.

Once you publish, your cover is not set in stone. An advantage of the Amazon process is that if after a while you are not happy with the cover, you can edit the original and re-upload without an interruption of sales, or even decide to ditch it and commission a replacement from a cover designer.

Some skill in using image-processing software will be required, and it will be an advantage if you use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements regularly for various tasks. I have found that every time I come to design a cover, I have forgotten much of what I figured out before.😒 If there is something you want to do, but can't figure out how (e.g. adding borders of various sizes) you can usually find an answer by searching online. As well as Layers, you may have occasion to use quite a number of Photoshop tools, and it wouldn't hurt to try out all the filters and effects on a sample image to see what they do. But simple is often best. Other image editing software is available e.g. the free GIMP.

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19+ Comments

Tlenigma

I’ve tried this before on many occasions. Not many positive replies to it.

Jun-17 at 02:28

Elliestorm

I know how to use photoshop (have used it for over 20 years) and I would still hire a professional.

the fact is photoshop is one of those pieces of software that you need to taught to use, like drafting software or accounting software or 3D modelling software, to get the most out of it and to make it look not amateur. You need to understand the concepts behind the tools as well as how to use them and have some artistic skill.

That is a far far far bigger topic than a few words can compress it into and yes you can teach yourself but ultimately for most people it will be less headaches and less pain to pay a professional or buy a premade of etsy or something.

Jun-17 at 08:53

Vidyut

Use Canva. Less versatile, but less easy to mess up too. Lots of templates and font/colour combos to make stuff simpler.

Photoshop has a lot more options, but that’s also a lot of things to get wrong if you don’t know.

Jun-17 at 09:13

Marisaw

The article suggests using Pixabay. I would suggest buying an image from a proper supplier like DepositPhotos to avoid any risk of copyright infringement, for something as important as a cover.

I think one fundamental thing that’s missing from this article is that you really need some artistic sensibility to design your own cover.

Jun-17 at 10:49

Jacksavage

This… it doesnt actually cost that much to have someone who knows what they are doing to make a cover for you.

Don’t underestimare the power of a great cover. It is your first lure to reel an audience in. It should be a bloody good hook into the story, seen at a glance.

There is an author on here. I saw her book cover, professionally done, and now I dont read fantasy, yet the cover almost enticed me into wanting to read it. Bottom line - it looks stylish and professional and thus appealing and a promise that the writing will be of a similar standard. Excellence in everything, from the cover to the burb to the actual writing. That is the goal, cos that’s what sells.

Jun-17 at 11:01

Rxd01

I’d agree with Vidyut, Photoshop seems s bit overkill for comping a predone cover image and your title text.

Jun-17 at 12:11

Nicolaysen

I realize this isn’t aimed at “professional vs DIY” so I don’t want to derail that. I do just want to say, covers sell your book. If you CAN afford a professional designer or even a premade that gets you excited, DO. Out of respect to Geoff and his goals for the post, that’s all I’ll say on that.

For those doing DIY in an effort to mitigate cost (and not because you’re a professional designer), I’d like to add some additional tips when it comes to designing the cover yourself.

GIMP is a great FREE substitute for photoshop. There’s a steeper learning curve, but YouTube videos come in clutch. Overall, it works really well and is totally free to download. It’s what I use for all my stuff, because Photoshop is hella expensive now. I love the flexibility offered and the ability to export to PDFs, which is needed specifically for uploading covers.

GIMP uses the fonts on your computer — so it allows you to use a wide range of free commercial fonts from my favorite font site. If you are searching/leave the “commercial only” tab, just make sure the font box says “100% free” in the top right corner before you download.

FONTS MATTER.

When you consider imagery, pull a small but meaningful element from your story. A piece of jewelry, a weapon, a pair of sunglasses, a cup of coffee, bananas, a flower, headphones, whatever. Something that means something in your story. That will automatically feel cohesive with the story. Just be very careful with anything that could have a copyright/specific brand recognition (like: don’t use Raybans, use dollar store sunglasses in the same style)

Remember: you can turn this imagery into line art or something stylized. GIMP has features that help you make it “line art” or “cartoonify” that do not use AI. Which, another tangent is AI in covers. You do NOT have to use AI to create a cover. Whether you agree with using AI or not is irrelevant, because READERS IN THE MARKET (the people who might buy your book) are actively saying “we don’t want AI covers” and boycotting books with AI covers. Save yourself the headache and the heartache of the boycott list.

Simple is better! Look at new releases in your genre, find the simplest ones, and stick with those. Scour Amazon’s top-seller list to find the best well-performing SIMPLE covers in your genre, and focus on replicating those styles.

EXAMPLES
Specifically ones where you can replicate the overall style somewhat easily with patience and hard work.

The ACOTAR covers are a simple, readable font over lovely line art.
ACOTAR

In romance, text over/around flowers has been really popular as of late. Colleen Hoover’s covers are great examples. Things We Never Got Over was self published and picked up by Bloom, and it’s just simple daisies.
lucy score

James by Percival Everett is a satire/literary fiction – and this is a genre that often does cool, bold things with text. In this case, we have simple line art in part of the J.
JAMES

This thriller Listen for the Lie is just a headset cord snaked around a simple red cover with nice text. They did a darkened vignette for the edges (which you can do in GIMP), which ties it together nicely. A lot of thrillers follow the trend where it’s one item and a bold color.

The Hunting Wives is a cover that I still think about regularly and it’s lipsticks and a bullet.

This YA romantic thriller If He Had Been With Me is just two lollipops, text, and a vignette. Millions of copies have sold. And there are plenty of great examples of simple covers, even like Twilight and Crave.

While more complex, I’m obsessed with The Deep Sky’s cover. Something in a similar vein would be totally doable with patience and GIMP textures. It’s a simple sky background and loose shapes with color and blending and shading. Starry background, rainbow for line art, white text, anyone??

Nonfiction is often text-only. In Atomic Habits, they did a really cool “digital style” for the font that could be achieved within gimp textures for those patient enough, and the free font site likely has something appropriate as well.

Edit to add: Yellowface — this was my favorite LitFic I read last year and I can’t believe I forgot to put it here but it’s the perfect example of a simple cover. It’s yellow with eyes and white text, and it really works. It’s bold and bright on the shelf, the human features draw the eye in immediately because humans look for facial features, and… perfection, just perfection. All of it. Love it.
yellowface

Edit to add from a top 2023 list: The Berry Pickers is general fiction. This style can be replicated by opening a photo in GIMP, using the stylistic features to convert to painterly, probably a darkening filter to even out the tone, then using white text. The berries are a specific and meaningful element of this story that make sense. It’s only two colors, blue and green, which keep it very simple even though the image itself is complex.
berry pickers

Edit to add from a top 2023 list: Let Us Descend is a great example that could be achieved somewhat easily with GIMP as well, specifically using the fuzzy selector on an item and making the outside of it transparent and then filling the item with textures. Plain background, simple text, collage within line art.

Edit to add: The Latecomer (another general fiction) is such a simple cover but so poignant to the story. Four siblings, three who are triplets and then one who is born 20 years later, all from IVF—hence the test tubes the flowers are sitting in. And again, just very simple design with minimal color range. Anyone doing general fiction, check out Celadon’s website for more ideas.

Cover design is all about pulling the right elements from the story and playing with them in a meaningful and eye-catching way. That’s what you’re really paying the professionals for—it’s not just the image itself. Good cover artists take time to get to know you and your story and your vibes and your themes and your target audience, THEN give you a couple sketches of ideas they think reflect the work, THEN start work on the design that feels right for you based on the sketch you pick.

You can always do your own cover now and “re-cover” later, turning the re-cover into a big “re-release” where the old cover is retired (thus artificial scarcity, which increases demand).

Jun-17 at 14:37

Glitterpen

This is very true. Many artists and photographers love reading (we’re drawn to creative things). As an artist myself, I want to see human-made covers.

Beautiful examples, btw!

Jun-17 at 15:14