Self Publishing: Creating your Book Cover

With ShopMyBook it's possible to create your own cover. You can print a hardcover or softcover in various formats and we will bind your book into a professional product. A lot of enthusiast book readers can be influenced to buy a book with an attractive cover. There is an element of truth in the idiom “Don’t judge a book by its cover” as it concerns common people and situations. Strange enough in the literary world it might be vice versa. Walking around in your local book shop you discover a wide range of books on the shelves, too much to take a look at all of them. How do you have to compete to all this ? As long as your cover is attractive enough your book can be an eye catcher. Hereafter some hints to make your book as attractive as possible for a larger readership :

A front page title readable from 2m distance has more opportunities to be sold
Don’t choose too many fonts in your book including main and subtitles.
If the subject of your book aims at a female readership, you’d better choose lively, fresh colours (pink, purple, white, …). Men prefer darker, richer colours.
Don’t choose a background overshadowing your title. Contrasting colours are preferred, are more readable.

Having a black cover as background, you’d better prefer another colour then dark blue for the title. Choose the font and the colour so that they attract the attention of the reader.

The ShopMyBook book publishing wizard enables you to create your own cover. If you want to put a picture of yourself on the cover, upload it choosing the button “Choose picture author”. Uploading a picture is the same as uploading the text file of your book, click on “browse” and select the file (pictures need to be saved in jpeg or bitmap format). As soon as it is selected, click on the button “Upload”. A green pop-up will tell you that the file is saved in the system. At the end you’ll see that the picture of the author appears besides the biography and the summary at the back of the book. Having installed the picture of the author you can go to “Picture front cover” where it is possible to design the cover choosing a text and a picture. A personal illustration can be uploaded as described above. A green pop-up will lighten. Make sure that your own illustration is saved and formatted the same way as your book is (8 ½” x 11” or 6” x 9”). Different sizes leads to a deformed cover. You don’t have personal illustrations available, ShopMyBook offers you a large number of standard pictures. So you select the button “choose a picture for front page cover”. You also have the other possibility “no illustration front page cover”. As soon as you are satisfied with the picture, you can choose the back ground colour. Move the mouse over the colours to choose the one you like. This colour will be used for the front and back side of your book, so also around the title. Take into account the dominant colours of the illustrations on the front and back cover.

Under the section “Dustcover layout” you have the possibility to choose a hard cover or a soft cover/paperback for your book. Due to higher manufacturing costs hard covers are most of the time more expensive than soft covers. The remaining steps in this section refer to the environment, the place, the font and colour of the title. Choose the best place for your title taking into account the hints we gave you above. It is recommended to choose a colour contrasting to the illustrations and the one of the cover. Opt for a font from 20 points on.

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