I’m thinking of raising my prices again, and looking around to check the “going rate” for book cover design. On my book covers site I make a big deal of pointing out that my covers are cheaper than createspace’s $1049 Custom Cover Premier Plus. But I just checked and that cover design option has disappeared. They used to have an even more expensive illustrated …

I wrote recently about how and why book cover designs should be clichés, most of the time, because you always want to fit into a genre and appeal to the style conventions that are being used: you want people to recognize what your book is about. No, they won’t say, “Gee that looks interesting, but I have no idea what …

So here’s an interesting problem: self-publishing is exploding globally. People want to publish quickly and cheaply. Formatting can be automated to some extent. But getting a high quality book cover is still really hard. There are some free or paid online tools to help you do it better. I put out my DIY Book Covers in MS Word templates to …

I’m not a fan of contracts (or anything binding, or closing doors, or other A-personality stuff). I avoid extra, non-essential work if I can help it. And since I know I will always over deliver, contracts seem like overkill to me. But of course some clients will want them, and there’s no reason not to use one if either party …

I recently gave this blog a facelift, and since I’ll be publishing four books this year under the umbrella of my personal brand Creativindie, I needed a logo for my book covers. I hadn’t worried about this for the ebooks, but I’m getting organized and putting out some high quality paperbacks as well. Most books have a small publishing imprint …

Using the right fonts on your book cover helps tell the reader what genre your book fits into and elicits an emotional response. You want it to look great, but also be appropriate, fit in well with the cover design, and (probably) be just a little more interesting than a standard font. So I’ve put together some cheat-sheets of the …

This month I was asked to be a guest judge on the Author’s Database 2013 indie book cover design contest. It was an interesting experience, both in seeing the quality of what’s out there, and becoming more familiar with my own guidelines for quality cover design. There was a wide variety, and I was supposed to choose a first, second …

Something interesting I thought I would bring up, because I encounter it often in my work with indie and self-publishing authors. If you do a search for “best cover designs”, you’ll routinely see covers that designers love – like on this page. And they are very clever, very clean and simple, usually “flat” or “retro” styled, because it’s cool to be …

Note: I almost deleted this post because I’m not sure whether I agree with myself. Cover design reveals are fine if you have a large audience and you don’t make a big deal out of it, or when you reveal in conjunction with a book launch – like “here is the cover for my new book, which is available now!” …

I’ve been designing covers for a few years, and I often have to confront cover design myths perpetuated by indie-publishing gurus and thought leaders. There’s a lot of advice out there for indie authors, and some of it is contradictory, which has the unfortunate effect of allowing indie authors to accept the advice they like and agree with, and ignore …