Tari Akpodiete made this awesome chart of cover design resources.  Click the image to view the PDF in Dropbox, then zoom in to see all the links and content.   Follow Tari on Twitter Want to split a castle with me? At least once a year I spend a few weeks at an exclusive writing retreat in a European castle... …

I see a lot of authors asking for feedback between a few cover design choices. This always has mixed results, since people on Facebook don’t know anything about book cover design, they probably aren’t your target market, they probably aren’t ideal readers of your genre, and they aren’t designers. So what inevitably happens is, authors think, “The results are pretty …

All rules are meant to be broken, and I won’t swear that I never use these fonts (I even included some in my genre-based lists of fonts you CAN use). But you can only break the rules if you learn them first. If you’re not a designer, steering clear of these overused (and gag-worthy) fonts is the safer bet. I …

I talk SO MUCH about book cover design, but I thought it would be easier to just see all the important stuff in one simple book cover design checklist. So before you publish (or if you see someone’s hideous cover and want to gentle encourage them to make a better one) please share and use this graphic. If you don’t …

I noticed something interesting in the book store last night. I’m pretty familiar with YA books, because that’s my genre and I stalk them on Amazon. So I know which ones have hundreds of 5 star reviews and which ones have under 100 reviews and a four star average. I’d been assuming that most people buy their books online, which …

UPDATE: I wrote a long post with best stock photos for book cover design HERE. This video was just to show you how to browse Google for “similar” images, and also checking to make sure that nobody else is already using them for a cover. It’s a great way to find new images, get book cover ideas, and check to …

Today I saw that Hugh Howey had posted an article on book cover design. “That’s cool,” I think. Hugh Howey is one of the most successful self-publishing authors in the world. He started out with pretty unprofessional book covers that embody the design tastes of most indie authors (they focus on scenes and symbolism and details, instead of being simple …

Today I saw this post about Richard Prince taking other people’s Instagram photos without permission or warning and selling them in a New York art gallery for $90,000 each. It’s not his first offence: he’s previously taken photos from magazines or from other photographers and changed them just a little bit (like cutting out and swapping them figures). He’s been …

I’m finishing up a Udemy course on book cover design and uploading some videos to YouTube. My videos aren’t very professional or well done, and I don’t have a lot of followers, but at least my cover designs don’t suck. This video from AuthorHouse, on the other hand, uses dozens of very ugly, unprofessional book cover designs as examples of “Good” …

I was chatting with friends at the London Book Fair when one of them reminded me of a presentation on book cover design; which I felt duty bound to attend. Frankly, I wasn’t expecting much, since I consider the cover design strategies I recommend for indie authors to be avant garde and not mainstream. But Damien Horner (@Damienhorner) delivered a 5 minute …