"Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader - not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon."

~E. L. Doctorow~

xoxo

This isn't a necessity, but it's one of the more fun things about writing a book. Personally, when I get a new book idea, the first thing I do after writing the idea down is making a book cover for it. It's fun and I think it can actually be very important in the long run.

As most of you probably already know, Canva is where it's at. They have some beautiful free book templates all for the taking and it's where every design-related thing for my books comes from. Again, because I'm extra and like to explain things thoroughly, I'm going to show you how to use Canva.

Once you've made an account, you'll be led to a page that will look a little like this (make sure you're in Canva 2.0):

From there, you can either go down to the 'create a design,' press browse all, scroll all the way down to the bottom to the 'personal' section and find the book covers, or use an easier way. Simply search 'book covers' in the search bar, and it'll come up with a single option.

You click on that and voila, you have every single book cover Canva offers in one place.
A tip, you do not have to make sure your book cover has a little 'free' tag on it. As long as you change the image, you can use any template you want. Though, of course, if you're rich unlike me and can afford to go premium, you can even keep the image. If that's you, I'm jealous.

So how do you change the image? You simply download a picture or use a picture you already have, drag it onto the web page and it'll take you to the 'uploads' section where you can drag and drop your image. Then you simply drag your chosen image onto the template and it'll replace its image with yours. If you don't have any of your own images, Canva does offer some free background images (which are actually pretty cool if you look through them) in this little button:

If you want to completely create your own book cover without a template, that is also possible. You have a variety of options to choose from on the side of your screen.

You can drag anything you want onto your empty book cover. Explore it. Go crazy.

Now for a little lesson in the actual design aspect of a book cover. A few mistakes I've seen in the past are things like no titles, the wrong title, no author, too much stuff going on, etc. I have a few simple rules when I create a cover.

It must have the title.
It must have the author's name (or their pen name).
It must be simple.
It must be eye-catching.

I know, how can a cover be both 'simple' and 'eye-catching?' Well, I'll show you.

Take the cover of this book, for example.

It's simple. Not too cluttered, has the 'main attraction' of the cover where there's no other writing, right? All in all, I'd say that it's pretty decent. 

Now take this cover of the same book:

It hurts a little to look at it, but bear with me.

I think the main thing that makes a book cover a good book cover is how you market the 'main attraction.' In this case, it's the flowers. I wanted flowers on my book cover, but putting them everywhere was just an utter mess. The best idea? Choose an image that won't distract too much from the title and other writing on the cover, but make sure it's enough to catch someone's eye. Colour is good for this, but be sparing with it. 

It seems like common sense, but I've seen worse.

Repeat it after me.
Simple but eye-catching.

xoxo Naomi