Cover Dreams 2022 [JUDGING]

How to Make a Good Cover

To help you on your way in this contest, we've written down what we believe makes a good cover or blurb. This chapter explains what we'd like to see in a cover. The next chapter will go in depth about blurbs.

Ⅰ) Why are covers so important? Covers are essentially a "first impression" of your book that readers may use as a deciding factor (among a few other basic factors) to read your book or not. And within this first impression, there are a few things our covers can convey — a general idea of what to expect in the plot, the overall tone/emotions of the book that you want to capture, the main genre our book falls in, etc.

Ⅱ) How do I make an "effective" cover? Sure, there are basics to take into consideration like style, font, etc. but those are all technical things that come into play when you actually begin making your cover. Before tackling any of that, you need to ask yourself, what do I want readers to see when they look at this cover? For instance, starting with an appealing image that makes your cover pop — it's important to nail your audience with an image that grabs their attention.

Ideally, your image would be something symbolic to the plot. Perhaps, an object, a place/scenery, or something else along those lines. Maybe you want to use a photograph of a person that can introduce readers to the protagonist(s), or a photograph of a couple even. You could even draw something yourself if you're artistic. Then, there's color. The colors of our image (and/or the cover in general) can resonate with the mood of the book too. Dark colors, light colors, specific colors, and so on — something else to keep in mind.

After you've chosen an image, or have at least gotten an idea of what kind of image you'd like to use, it's time to revisit the technical things. The style of your cover can be simple, fancy, colorful, or whatever else you think best suits your book. But like the colors you use, the font can also set a specific mood. There are a plethora of fonts to choose from when making a cover — to the point, it can honestly get overwhelming. It helps to look at examples of other covers within your genre, comparing their similarities and their differences.

It's important to think through both a writer and a reader's perspective when making your cover for the best results; and even if you can't get the best results yet, effort and progress are what matters most.

Ⅲ) Copyrighted Images!? It's important that when you're picking an image to use for your cover, that you make sure to steer clear of any potential legal issues too. Luckily, there are a bunch of sites that cater to both royalty-free copyrighted images and copyrighted images you have to pay for, for your use. Here are the few that we recommend: Unsplash, Shutterstock, Pixabay, and Pexel.

Ⅳ) What sites and/or apps can I use to make covers? Here are a few of the sites/apps that we personally use or have used to make my own! Canvas, Picsart, Adobe Photoshop, Visme, and Pixlr. A bonus app that we use is AddText (it's only available for Android devices) for a lot of our fonts.