alex_beecroft

With the self publishing boom showing no sign of going away, I thought it might be a useful thing to do a tutorial on the making of simple book cover art. Like everything, making cover art can be as easy or as hard as you choose to make it, and while getting a professional cover artist in may be the ideal, paying for professional cover art may not be possible. If that’s the case, you can still do a pretty good job yourself with some free programmes and a tenner or so spent at the stock photo sites.

First of all, go to http://www.gimp.org/ and download The GIMP. (This stands for “GNU Image Manipulation Program” and has nothing to do with leatherwear unless you want it to.) The Gimp is almost as powerful as Photoshop, more than capable of allowing you to make highly professional book covers, yet totally free.

It’s also offputtingly complicated and has no user manual, but who cares about that, right?

So, today let’s make a cover for a book which you are going to upload to Smashwords. Smashwords likes its book covers to be 800 pixels tall by 500 pixels wide. If you want to make a cover for Amazon, you’ll need to check what dimensions they recommend and use those instead.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.