Here’s a look at how I made my book cover. It’s not a technical video, but a quick conceptual one that shows would-be book-cover-creators just how easy it can be to create your own book cover using Canva.
Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) has templates that allow the easy production of a book cover. However, KDP only allows one bio and pic on the cover. Since I wanted to put both Glenn’s bio and photo on the back jacket, I decided to make my own cover. I’m glad that I did.
Canva is an intuitive application with upload, templates (free and paid) options and drag and drop features, and a free try before you buy option. The cost of the annual fee to make size-specific designs is easily less than the cost of hiring a book cover artist AND you can do whatever you like and change your mind about the design with no penalties or extra costs.
Whether you use Canva or Kdp, I highly recommend adding your personally chosen images to make the cover unique to your work. I also prefer to use images that I have created so there are no copyright infringement issues.
Of course, designing your own cover only works if you know what you want your cover to look like, and you want to spend the time doing it.
Without further ado, here’s the video — set to part of Finding Ching Ha‘s theme song; See You Tomorrow, from a poem that a friend’s band set to music. (Thanks, Nicole!) I’ll be using the tune on my website, so I hope you like it.
To listen to the whole song, go to: https://findingchingha.com/
That’s so cool and the song too. You are so talented and creative. What can’t you do!