The major problem we have as self-publishers on Amazon is that we've only got
about one to two seconds to catch a customer's attention as they scroll through
the listings on Amazon or more likely on their mobile phone.
And this is where the book cover comes in.
It's the equivalent of a headline on a newspaper, a magazine cover,
or sales page. It's designed to hook the customer,
get them to then read the title, reviews, price of your book,
hopefully click on it. And then ultimately, hopefully, click that buy button.
But it's the book cover that is the first step in this process.
And the problem is,
with many of the book covers I get asked to look at is that they're dull,
unattractive, uninviting.
The colors they've used means that text is not readable.
And also the colors used are not in keeping with the target audience or the
niche.
So I'm going to let you watch over my shoulder as I use some
basic design principles and in particular color,
which is probably the most important aspect of a book cover design.
And I'm going to show you how I choose colors using a very simple and free tool.
And I like to keep my books very simple. In fact,
I was thinking about this the other day,
and about 90% of my books only have two colors
on the front cover. And one of those colors is usually black or white.
I find simple tends to win over all these different
complex design ideas that just don't look right on the computer screen
or more importantly, on the small screen of a phone.
So the first step is to look at what colors are ready
being used in the niche you're thinking about publishing. For example,
if we have a look here at kids, handwriting books,
we can see there's lots of blues, yellows, pastel type colors being used.
Now when designing a book,
you can either take the approach of don't really want to reinvent the wheel.
So want to use similar color schemes.
Or you could go completely the opposite way, which is a bit more risky,
but can work. And that is to create something totally opposite,
which just stands out from all the other books that are listed there.
Some more examples, obviously things like Christmas. We've got colors of red,
green, white. Halloween, orange, and black.
And the book we're going to be looking at today making is just a basic maths
notebook. And here we can see a lot of blues, whites,
someone was being very successful using red, again, blue and white.
So that just gives me an idea.
There's no particular theme in these types of books,
although blue and white seems to be a common color. So,
step two is picking the right colors for our books. Now,
as a general rule,
I use one main color and that's the color I use for the background.
And then I'll often use a different accent color.
Now this accent color could be used for the text.
It could be used for images on the book cover.
So the free tool that I use is a color wheel,
and you can find one of these on Canva and I'll leave a link to it down below in
the description. And when you look at this,
it's quite interesting on a computer, the three primary colors,
this is the colors that every other color is made up of is red, green, and blue.
When these primary colors are combined, you get the secondary colors,
which are yellow, cyan and magenta.
And when the secondary colors are combined with the primary colors,
we get our tertiary colors, which are chartreuse green, spring green, azure,
violet, rose and orange. Now in general for book colors,
my personal choices that I tend to use the lighter colors.
So things like orange, yellow cyan,
azure tend to work very well. But also red is a good color.
It stands out very well on the listings on Amazon,
but you could choose any of these colors that you like. Now,
the advantage of choosing the color wheel is that it will give you this second
color, which is called the complimentary color.
And I find this works very well as the accent color that I just
mentioned earlier. So for this book,
we're going to go for a color along the lines of a cyan.
And we can see here that the complimentary color given is in the
sort of region of red. Now,
you don't need to use the exact complimentary colors,
but something along the lines of those that are given.
So we're going to go over to Affinity Designer,
and I'm going to use these two colors here.
This is not a tutorial on Affinity Designer.
This is more a tutorial on some basic use of colors and design
principles.
So what I'm going to show you is not gonna be in depth on Affinity Designer,
because what I'm gonna show you, you can use, whether you're using Canva,
Affinity Designer, Adobe Illustrator, PowerPoint,
Inkscape, or even Keynote. It's just the design principles we're looking at,
not the actual technicalities of how I'm building the book.
So our stage three is to put the colors together and some images and some
text to actually create our book. So here,
I've got the page set up to the dimensions of our cover
template, which is 17.52 inches by 11.25 inches. Next,
we need to draw using the rectangle tool,
a rectangle to create the cover of our book.
Going to change a stroke to invisible.
And we've got the color set up already to our cyan color. Now,
what I like to do is mark the center of our cover.
So I'm just going to reduce the opacity of our rectangle.
And I'm just going to draw another rectangle along these dotted lines,
which is the spine of our book. And I'm going to color that black.
Increase the opacity and increase the opacity of our cover.
And I'm just going to lock our cover in place. So next we need to add some text.
So we're just going to write here math.
Always pains me because I'm British and we say maths and not the American math.
Going to double click on our text and change the font.
And I'm going to change this toura. This is one of my favorite fonts,
and we're going to have this in bold, then using the move tool,
just move this to around the center of our cover.
Holding down option, I'm just going to drag downwards,
which will copy our text and write in notebook,
change to our move tool. And then I'm just going to move this into position.
Now I can align these two blocks of text by just holding down shift,
selecting them both at the top here,
clicking on the align tool and just align horizontally.
Now in the bottom third of the book,
I'm going to put in a box here with some details about the book.
So I've got one that I created earlier,
which I'm just going to paste into position.
And Affinity Designer will kindly align this with the text.
One of these text boxes is optional,
but you find a lot of notebooks on Amazon do have these,
and it just adds that extra element to the cover.
And I think it makes it look quite professional. Next,
we need some images. As I mentioned earlier,
a lot of people will go and find icons or basic clip art and just put these
randomly on the cover. And it doesn't look nice at all,
but I'm going to show you how I transform a basic icon image into something that
looks what I think quite good. So over on Vecteezy,
I just put in maths icon and I've found this one here,
which I've downloaded to my computer and dragged that across into Affinity
Designer, which we can see here. And it's going to take this one here.
I'm just going to draw bound in box around it,
command C orcontrol C to copy and go to my book,
cover command V or control V to paste.
I'm just going to move that into position, holding down shift,
reduce the size.
Now we've got these little dots here that we just need to highlight and delete.
Okay, now this, as you can see the icon on its own,
doesn't look particularly inspiring.
So I'm just going to draw another banding box around that.
I'm going to hit command G control G to group all the layers together.
Then at the top right here,
I'm going to click on the stroke button and make the stroke white.
And I'm going to add a brush design to our stroke,
which I'm going to choose this one here, 128,
and I'm going to reduce the thickness of the stroke down to 10.
Just to enlarge that so we can see a bit better what's going on. Now,
I'm going to right click on the layer of our graph and click on duplicate.
And then on the top layer, I'm going to go to the color tab,
hit the stroke button, and I'm going to change the color of the stroke,
on this layer, to the color of our accent.
So I'm just going to double click on that. Copy, go to our RGB hex box,
and just paste that into position. Hit enter.
And now you can see that has changed color,
and I'm going to enlarge that for you so you can see that a bit better.
And what I'm going to do, just using the arrow keys,
just move to the right and down so that we have this sort of offset.
And you can see now it looks a bit more interesting. Now on the right,
I'm just going to group those two layers together, command G or control G.
And now we can reduce the size of this and change the angle of it.
So what I'm going to do is do that with some more of these icons here
and arrange them on the front book cover.
So now we have something that looks like this,
which I think you'll agree already looks pretty good. Now,
in terms of the text on the book cover, if you're going to use a light color,
like as we've got here, cyan, azure, orange, yellow,
my advice would just be to use a plain black text.
Don't get too fancy about this because what we want is the text to stand out
on the cover so that people can still read what the book is,
even on the small images on the mobile phone.
And so if alternatively, if you are using a dark color, maybe a dark blue,
dark red, dark green
use white text so that it does stand out on the page. Now here,
we could say our book cover is finished,
but I want to add a couple of little extras in which I think will transform the
design of this cover. Now,
what I want to do is just block off this back cover here because it's
distracting.
So I'm going to draw a rectangle over this back cover through the middle of the
spine and make it the same color as our sort of gray background here.
And it will look like this.
So this is what our book cover is actually going to look like on Amazon.
So now we can see down the middle here,
we've got this black border and a lot of people do ask me
about this.
And what I'm going to do is just hold down shift and command or shift and
control and just drag to the right. And you can see,
we can increase the thickness of this,
and it will also increase the thickness of it on the back cover. Now,
a lot of people ask me, why do I do this? Well,
if you do have a look at books on Amazon,
you'll notice that a lot of them do have this border along the
spine of the book.
Particularly if we look at these graph paper or maths notebooks.
And you can see here, we've got a purple border, black border.
And I think that's because traditionally, a lot of notebooks, journals,
these types of books when sold in physical stores were made in such a way that
they had this reinforcement band along the spine of the book.
And it just gives a book,
a bit of extra interest and it makes it look like a traditional notebook.
Now you'll notice once we've done this is that all the components of our book
are no longer in the center of our colored area.
So what we would need to do is just put a bounding box around all our
components. Using the arrow keys, or just drag.
You can move this across to the middle. Now,
what we want to make sure is that all our components are within the
margins on the book cover template.
So what we can do is go to our background layer, reduce the opacity,
and there,
we can now see that we've got our template underneath and we can see everything
is within that pink border. So we're all good to go. Now,
I think we can add one extra thing to our notebook to make it look a bit more
interesting. Because if we notice here, on Amazon,
a lot of these notebooks do have a graph paper background.
And I think this is quite useful because customers looking at the book,
if they see that graph paper, they know straight away,
it's a graph paper book and obviously they can read it also on the front with
the title.
We don't want to leave the customer in any doubt or with any confusion.
I know this is very basic,
but these are just basic rules that I think a lot of people who are creating
books, particularly when starting out,
if they were to follow would make a huge improvement on the designs of their
books.
So I'm going to add a layer of graph paper and straight away that looks even
better. Now in our text box at the bottom here,
we could add in a solid background color and we could have this the same color
as our background to our book. So it looks a bit more solid like that. So again,
the choice would be yours. It's a personal choice.
Now I just want to show the effect of using the accent color on our text.
So we're just going to highlight our text and change the color.
Now that looks okay,
but I don't think it stands out as not as much contrast as before.
What we could do is do something a little bit extra. We could take that text,
right hand side, duplicate the layer. And on the bottom layer,
we could make that text black. And then using our arrow keys,
move it up and across just to create an outline of our
text. So you see, straight away, that looks a little bit better. However,
I'm going to go back to how it was in black, which I think looks a lot better.
I wouldn't go over complicating things. It's basic.
It tells a customer what it is.
And I think it would stand out on the pages of Amazon. Now,
particularly when you're starting out creating books,
you're not going to be able to do everything perfect.
And you're going to have failures, but I don't see them as failures.
I've got about 300 books that have never made a sale and I don't
consider them as failures. I.
Consider them as data because they're now telling me
what isn't working on, Amazon,
what customers don't want or what Amazon doesn't want to list high up on the
rankings. And as you go along, you're going to take these data points.
You're going to improve each book as you go along.
What's not going to happen is you're gonna create three books finish and go, oh,
this hasn't worked because I haven't made any sales.
This is a continual learning process.
It can actually be harder to make things very simple and bold,
like I've just showed you. But it is a learning process.
And it's gonna take time and it's gonna require you to create many
different types of book covers. Learn what looks good.
Learn what's starting to make sales and as you improve,
hopefully your business will also improve. Now,
if you want to go into more depth on designing different
types of book covers, creating books, creating interiors,
then I've got this book playlist here. I hope you found that useful.
Thank you very much for your time. It is very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and give it a thumbs up.
And until next time goodbye.