Following on from my previous post.
Designing your ebook cover
Remember the four “P’s” of Marketing:
Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement.
But I think there is a fifth “P” and that is Packaging.
Presentation is very important in marketing nowadays so try to make your product unique and stand out from the competition. Unleash the inner graphical designer! Because it doesn’t matter how well written your ebook is, or how valuable the information contained within it is, if your package is poorly presented.
You only get one chance to make a first impression, and believe me; people do judge a book by its cover.
“Your cover matters. Way more than you think.” — Seth Godin”
Tips for designing your ebook cover
1. If you have are lucky to have Photoshop on your computer, there are many tutorials that will help you create a great looking ebook cover. Please be aware that you do not need to use the full version of Photoshop, so if you are thinking of purchasing it (and it is very expensive) you could just buy Photoshop Elements which is a fraction of the price and contains all the tools you need to distort your images and produce a cover.
2. Another option is to use an ecover generator such as professionalecovertemplates.com or Ecover Generator Software. With these you can create an unlimited amount of ebook covers. Some people recommend that you get your first cover made by a professional because you can then edit the source Photoshop file for future ecovers using your choice of ecover software. As there are numerous ecover generator products on the market, pick the one that best fits your needs and budget.
3. A third option is to consider hiring a graphic designer to design your cover. If you don’t know anybody personally, you can find graphic designers at freelance sites such as Elance.com, Guru.com, oDesk.com and RentACoder.com. You could hire a graphic designer to design your entire ebook if you wished!
Once you have created a graphic for your ebook cover you can have it converted to a three-dimensional (3-D) image by using Photoshop or one of the various ebook cover software available.
4. I’ve also created an ebook (including the cover page) using MS Word 2007. To insert a cover page using this version of Word you simply go to the Insert menu and select “Cover Page”. You’re presented with a series of pre-formatted templates. Choose one, click on it, and it’s automatically inserted at the start of your document. You can edit it to your heart’s content. Easy!
Next time we will look at compiling your ebook…
