How to Create Your Own Amazon Best-Selling Book Cover

When you set out to write a book one of the first questions authors have is,

“Should I have a cover made now or after the book is written?”

and

“Should I design my own or hire a professional?”

Today I’ll talk about both of these.

When to Design a Cover

I choose to design my cover the moment I have a title and subtitle.

Why?

Because my title, subtitle, and cover put together make a promise to the reader.

I want to look at that promise to the reader of what I’m going to be delivering to them the entire time I’m writing.

Also, the visualization has a powerful motivator to get you going because you want others to hold your book in your hand!

You can always change it at a later date but starting with some cover at the beginning works really good for me.

Should You Hire a Professional Designer?

I believe with great tools like Canva and a little patience you can create a solid cover.

I’ve hired 99 Designs in the past to do covers and I ended up spending $400 on a cover that was mediocre.

I do 80% of all my covers.

If you have a LARGE audience and business that is producing a lot of profit, then by all means hire a professional.

But if you are like most authors your business is just getting started and may not be profitable enough to sink $400-$1500 into a book cover.

How to Create Your Own Amazon Best-Selling Cover

Most of my Amazon Best-Selling books I designed the cover myself

But don’t think I’m some creation whiz… I’m not.

Here is how you can do it yourself for your non-fiction book cover.

1. Find 3 covers you like the look and feel of on Amazon

2. Be sure they have THOUSANDS of reviews

3. Download the images to your computer

4. Upload them to Canva.com

5. Recreate the covers you like in Canva (using the original as the background to model)

6. Swap out text and colors for your text and colors

7. Make it your own by moving stuff around to feel “right”

You are using best-selling covers as inspiration of good design, so you don’t have to know it intuitively.

For example, I did this cover for a friend of my Jeff, yesterday, and I used the covers on the left to help me create the covers on the right for Jeff’s new book.

These aren’t straight copies of the original inspiration… but you can see similar design qualities to them.

And that’s it!