Hi everyone today.
I want to talk to you about one of the biggest sins in self-publishing.
That's right. It is terrible self published book covers.
Now chances are, if you're self publishing, you might be going in alone.
You might be tempted to design your own book, cover using Photoshop,
using word art, using what you have on hand that let me stop you right there.
Unless you've trained as a graphic designer or have some skills in design,
I would highly recommend you hiring a professional to design your cover.
I'm Kat Clay. I'm an author, but I've also worked as a graphic designer.
So today I want to talk to you about the seven kind of deadly sins of self
publishing book cover design. So today I've mocked up a terrible,
so published book cover.
It's committing all the egregious sins of book cover design,
and I'm going to take you through each one, one by one.
The first sin is that it's way too busy.
There's a woman in a cloak in the snow. There's a saw,
there's a woman running away from her.
She must be an assassin is a castle in the sunshine.
We're not even sure what is going on here. And it's just,
I don't know where to look. So number one, it's too busy.
Number two is the typography. And you can probably see,
I have made an effort to make this atrocious. I am using impact,
which is meme font. I've got it in a really,
really bright cyan color that kind of blends in,
and it's a similar tone to the background. So it makes it really hard to read.
So the third problem I see a lot of in self published cover design
is the poor integration of multiple images. So there's multiple images here,
but you can tell they're all different photos.
Sometimes I even see someone's taken a photograph of someone's head because they
like the face and Photoshop it on someone else's body,
but the proportions are out of alignment.
So you need to really make sure that the photos integrate well.
And part of that is step four and five.
So step four is making sure you have images from the same light
sources and similar weather conditions as well.
So you can see on this girl's face,
you can see the light sources coming from the left and kind of up and above her.
And then on this sword here, the light source is coming from the right.
You can see right there,
this little bit of light there and sort of backlit.
So there's two images don't even work together. And this one kind of has a hazy,
soft light on it. Whereas the background is really strong summer daylight,
and same goes for the weather she's in the snow.
This looks like it's kind of sunny.
The fifth problem is that there's no uniform color scheme.
So there's nothing really tying all these images together.
And that will really help bring those kind of separate or disparate
images together in a book cover design is having that similar scheme
and I'll show you how to do that in a sec.
Now the sixth problem I haven't done on this because I've used images from
Unsplash,
which is a free public library for the purposes of illustrating this cover.
The six problem is that sometimes people use copyrighted images.
So they'll go to a Google search. And I have seen this on covers,
which have used famous people's photographs,
Photoshop them enough that they kind of look a little bit different,
but are still identifiable and use them on a book cover.
You can't do that.
You can't do a Google search and just get the images you find and put them on
your book cover.
And your graphic designer will help you license the images you need to.
The final seventh worst problem of all is that it
doesn't tell anyone about the book. I don't know what sort of book this is.
I mean, it doesn't make me want to buy it.
And that's the whole point is that if you want to sell a book and sell
something and have people buy it and enjoy it and get people to read it,
the cover has to do a lot of work there.
And if the cover's not pulling its weight and you're not going to sell any books
because people will judge the quality of the writing based on the cover.
And the problem with this is the cover looks atrocious.
So they will assume the writing is just as bad.
The first problem is that this cover is way too busy.
I don't know where to look. There's too much going on here.
It's easy to fix though. Cause what I'll do is take some elements off.
Already that's looking better,
but the problem is that neither of these elements actually work together.
It's kind of like the colors are different. The contrast values are different.
The lighting is different.
So I think I'm going to need to change that background image.
It's a nice image for a different kind of book,
but I'm going to go for a kind of Gothic romantic fantasy vibe.
I love these kinds of woman running away covers.
So I'll get something that's a little bit more, Oh look,
here's one I prepared earlier now and you can see that if we zoom
in here.
You can see she's not Photoshopped very well because she was actually on a
grassy background. So this green doesn't really work well together.
And it's quite a lot of work to just recolor this one image for this.
So I've actually found a similar image,
but it has similar coloration to this photo.
So just take that girl off and I've got another image which I think is
going to work a lot better. And it's this photo here.
It's got a better color similarity to the photo.
I'm going to show you how to Photoshop that out. Hopefully now,
so this is a little bit of a Photoshop tutorial, but I'll speed this up.
So you don't get bored.
I'm going to use the magnetic lasso tool to actually cut her out.
I'm going to select that layer and cut her out really quickly using this.
Now this is going to be a little bit atrocious,
but I'll show you why in a second. This is just to get us going.
All right. So getting her propped out there,
I'm going to leave then go to the select and mask tool.
So this is way better to be using for this.
She's looking pretty good. Well, cut out. Well defined
and then we'll just add that as the mask layer. Oh, look at that.
Except that she is giant, like she's looking like, you know,
this is a book about the Godzilla bride of the castle,
so we're just going to resize her to a reasonable size.
All right.
So the next thing I'm going to do is just kind of try and integrate that in
terms of the color and in terms of the overall look of the picture.
So we're going to go, I've got a snow layer already in built.
So I'm actually just kind of did this before.
So I want it to go for this kind of winter queen. Winter queen vibes.
So it's already looking kind of colder.
What we want to do is make sure that that's all United as an image.
So I'm actually going to chuck on a transparency layer or
color layer with this.
So all we'll do with that is we're actually going to do a layer.
We're going to blend that layer.
So think you want to do a bit of a color dodge on that.
And I think what's cool about this is that we can actually turn it down a little
bit. So it's looking a little bit like an Instagram filter right now.
What we can do is we just take that opacity down a bit.
So I'm going to do a kind of soft light contrast layer with the brush.
I'm going to make sure that the things that need to be focused on actually
getting focused on,
but it's not too intense.
So it doesn't look like I've drawn a big line around that.
So already that's kind of looking really addresses, still looking a bit bright.
So I'm just going to pop onto that layer.
And also rasterize that, do some
Photoshopping here. So it doesn't look. So it's looking a little bit painted,
but at least this will blend in a bit more. So I'm gonna do a
change the mode on that, you know,
supply rush and that already looking so much better. I mean,
this is getting more detail. This is the kind of work I would do on a paid job.
If I was, you know,
actually doing this for a real book cover I don't do book
covers at the moment, but because I've worked as a designer and a photographer,
these are kind of things that you learn to look out for.
So you gradually adding in that color that integrates it with
the photo on the background. So you can see here, this,
this is the edge that's really kind of bothering me.
It's that kind of really hard lacy edge there.
So what I'm actually going to get is the eraser tool.
So there's still heaps of work to be on her,
but I'm going to leave that for the time being to show you how to fix this a
little bit more.
So another one of things you can actually do in terms of the color is we're
going to just duplicate this layer
and I'm going to change that into a,
hopefully a hard line.
And what we want to do is start a rating from this layer.
So we want to actually have a really strong kind of feel,
but also unite it with the kind of color. So I might actually upgrade that to a,
more of a ready pink. Well, that's nice and cool.
Like I'm liking the winter princess vibe, right?
So I'm going to actually just take the eraser tool.
So I've mentioned these two layers here.
So what I'm going to do to add a little bit to this is to actually do a blur.
So it'll give us a little bit of depth of field on it. So
I'll show you, it is a blur gallery,
we'll do an iris blur and that'll allow you to kind of set the focus for the
image. So we're just about there with fixing this book cover, right?
And already it's looking way more dreamy, way more genre.
It's kind of fitting in, in the market where it should be.
So the last thing we're going to fix is the typography.
So we had the Queen of Al'catralia as our terrible title.
We have wonderful impact point. I mean, that is so terrible.
I'm going to call it Queen of Al'Catralia.
Now I've downloaded a font from envato elements and the snow effect is
also from Envato.
So your graphic designer might have a subscription or can license the right font
or your book,
but it's really important that you get a really good font that fits in the
genre. So I've downloaded one called Cloudy.
I could spell Cloudy Aurora and it's a really nice kind of looking fantasy style
script, right?
We want to make sure that it's really easy to read on Kindle devices,
on whatever device you're using so that people can see what it is at the
glance at the thing is too,
that a lot of people will just put text on there and then just put in a straight
colour. And that works for somethings,
but it's really important that your font has texture.
It has kind of impact as well as depth. And put,
you put the same effort into the image as you do the typography.
So I'm not going to do a whole long typography tutorial.
That would take way too long for this video,
but I'm just going to add a little bit of extra impact to it by adding a kind of
bevel effect into it. So I'm just going to double click on that.
And I think first up I'm going to put a color overlay on it.
So I want a color overlay of say,
I'd probably don't want a silver because I feel like it'll blend in too much,
but maybe golden yellow. You can see
a preview in that to see what it's going to kind of look like.
Okay. So that's looking a little hard to read about.
It's definitely looking a lot better. It's looking like gold.
It's looking like a fantasy novel.
Obviously there are better things you can do with this,
but it's already going to look a hundred percent better to anyone going to buy
your book. Wanted to put a texture on that. I mean,
it can play with that a little bit more kind of nice contour.
You want to do like something that's going to really stand out.
So that's looking pretty great there.
This is looking like a professional book. I mean,
there's heaps more that we could do with it. There's heaps more we could fix.
There's a lot more Photoshopping I could do,
but I'm really happy with that for an hour of work or a little bit of fixing
from the original, which was atrocious to this,
which I think looks pretty nice.
And I think tells you a lot about what sort of book this is.
It's kind of that Cinderella lost slipper fairy tale romance,
and could easily fit into the market.
So they were the seven worst book design mistakes and how
to fix them. Again I'd love it. If you enjoyed this video,
please hit subscribe and stay tuned for more writing videos.
Thank you so much for watching.