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.
Find 3 covers you like the look and feel of on Amazon
Be sure they have THOUSANDS of reviews
Download the images to your computer
Upload them to Canva.com
Recreate the covers you like in Canva (using the original as the background to model)
Swap out text and colors for your text and colors
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!
Hey Chris, this is an awesome post! I love your knowledge on book covers because even though I have canva, it can get daunting if you don’t think of yourself as a creative. The tips you outlined in here, like curating some Amazon covers that speak to you and using those as inspiration is a genius idea. Plus, I love this cool niche you created with the mini books. I’m thinking about making those as well. Thank you so much for posting this! Your newsletter is awesome by the way! Just subscribed! :)
What I've started doing is creating 5-10 of them, then choosing my 4 favorites and having my community and audience vote on them and provide feedback, it's been a great process so far.
That said, I have a "flagship" book I want to publish next year and that one I'll hire a professional for.