Finding good images to use on the covers and interiors of your books
that you self-publish on Amazon can be a bit of a challenge. And in fact,
one of the most common questions I get is do I know of any sites that supply
images free of charge that can also be used commercially to create the
interiors and covers of our books? Well,
in this video I'm going to answer that very question by giving you my top 10
sites of free images. Now, before we do get to these sites,
there are a number of things we need to consider first of all. And that is,
we need to know whether images can be used commercially.
We need to know whether there's a limit to the number of products that can be
sold using these images.
And we also need to know whether these free images are also being listed on
stock photo sites like Shutterstock or Bigstockphoto, because if they are,
that's a big, no no. You don't want to be using those images.
But I'll show you how to find out that last factor
as we go through the video.
Now in terms of whether of the images can be used commercially. Well,
that information can be found when you go to a website on the
licensing page.
Now you usually find a link to it at the top of a page or quite often at the
bottom of the page. And you can see here, it says licensing agreement.
This is an important part of the business that you need to learn.
I know when you read some of these licensing agreements,
it can be quite confusing,
but it is something you need to learn or take legal advice on.
I'm not that person that you need to get legal advice from because I'm not a
lawyer.
You also need to make yourself familiar with the creative commons licenses.
You can go to creativecommons.org, where you can find about that.
When I started, I didn't know anything about this at all,
and had to learn all this as part of the business.
The reason you need to know about creative commons licensing is that some of the
images are listed under the creative commons
licensing. The number of products that you can sell again,
that will come under the licensing agreement and will be written down somewhere
in there if that's applicable. Okay, we've got that out of the way.
So let's get into these top 10 sites. Now,
the first site is Vecteezy and this is one of my favorite sites.
I've used so many images from here.
And the images that you can use for free have this little free badge that you
can see here. And when you click on an image,
it will also have licensing information there.
And that applies to all the sites.
When you do click on an image there will usually be a link somewhere around it,
which will give you additional licensing information.
Now I do know for Vecteezy that with the free images,
you can only sell a maximum of 50 products with each image.
But the way I look at it is this.
If you do use one of the free images and you sell 50 products,
well use that money to invest in the pro license.
I think it's currently around about $109 for the year. You can then
use that license to sell a limited number of products.
And I think it is good value. Again,
I've created a lot of my books using images from Vecteezy.
Now the next site is Pixabay.
This is a very common site that a lot of people use. It does have photographs,
illustrations, and vector graphics here. Now with these,
these are images that are often uploaded by people to the site.
Pixbay does,
or supposedly does check that these images are copyright free. However,
some images do fly under the radar and miss the checks and
they can be found listed on these stock photo sites.
And if you end up using those images,
those stock photo sites will then come after you, which is what you don't want.
So this is how I check these images. We'll click on this one here.
we'll click on free down. We then go over to Google image search.
Just a case of dragging that image that you've just downloaded into Google image
search, and then looking at the search results.
And what we're looking for is whether this particular image is listed on any of
these stock photo sites.
So I just scroll down and I'll go through the first three or four pages to see
if that's the case. Again, if it is, don't use that particular image.
But Pixabay is a great resource, the next site,
and I love this site and that is Rawpixel.
You go and click on the public domain button at the top here,
and you'll get all these images that are in the public domain.
And any of them are created by famous artists.
Now I did a video recently where I used a William Morris image to create
the interiors and covers of a coloring book.
I really do like these images and they are very good for merch as well.
So things like mugs and phone cases. Now,
what you've also got to be careful for with these in particular is whether they
are listed on the stock photo sites that I've just mentioned.
So you do need to check these because sometimes they are.
Next site is Unsplash. Now this is very similar to Pixabay,
but it's mainly just photographs. And again,
there's a whole range of photo us here and very good quality pictures.
Next site is Flickr. Many of you may be aware of this site.
A very popular site that people upload photographs to. Now here,
I've done a search for, for dog. Top left hand corner,
where it says any license I would recommend clicking on commercial and mods
allowed. That means, you can make modifications to the images as well.
Now, as I've mentioned before,
just double check with a Google reverse image search with these particular
images. And when you do click on each image,
it will have a link here where it'll tell you what creative commons license this
particular image is listed under. Now,
I tend not to use images myself from Flickr.
I know a lot do and have made great covers using them.
I tend to not to use images from here because it does seem to be a bit of a
minefield. Now, the next site, which is a subsite of Flickr,
and that is the biodiversity heritage library.
These have got over 319,000 photographs that you can use free of charge.
I love this particular part of Flickr and that's because they've got lots of
vintage images that you can use here.
And in fact I'll do a link or provide a link down below in the description of a
video I did where I used images from this site.
I converted them into vectors and then used those vectors to create vintage
style book covers which I think look great and sell really well.
Now these images are grouped and the common sorts of images that lot people use
are images of birds, butterflies, insects,
and also architectural images. You can also click on photostream here.
And then at the top do a search of all the,
the images on the biodiversity site, another site,
which again is a subsite or subset of subsite of Flickr.
And that is the British Library.
Here there's over one million photographs and similar vein to the
biodiversity site.
There's lots of albums or images that are all grouped together.
These are copyright free.
And also you can do a search by clicking on photo stream. Again,
a great resource of vintage type images, which are very popular.
Next site is Canva. Now I did a recent poll and the majority of people,
or a lot of people that answered the poll use Canva to create
their book covers. Now, here,
there are images that you can use for free.
And there's photographs and there's graphics. If you click on graphics,
you can see you've got all these images here. Now you will find,
there are some that have this little crown, when you hover over, it says pro.
To use those, you do need the pro version, which you have to pay for,
but all the images, other images are free. And here's a little pro tip.
You've got those three little buttons here or dots. If you click on that,
then click on information.
It will tell you about the licensing for those images.
And there's a whole range of photographs here as well that you can use.
You can also make yourself familiar with the licensing page on Canva,
which gives you all the information you need to know. Here it's very simple.
You don't even need to download these images to your computer.
You can just drag them across onto the book cover that you are making.
So that's very simple. Next site is Pexels. Again,
this is very similar to Pixabay and Unsplash.
And it's a lot of photographs here that you can use.
Click on license to get the licensing agreement.
And the last site is Freepik where you can get vectors, photos,
Photoshop images, and also icons.
And this has a huge range of lots of images that look very good
for creating book covers,
can be used in your interiors and also for creating merch as well.
If you also into that. So that's my top 10 sites.
There's something there in those sites for everybody.
And I'm sure you can find something there that you can use,
just make sure of the legality.
But don't get too sort of worried and stressed about it. Now,
if you are new to this book creation business,
creating no content and low content books and want to know how to create a book
and how to upload and publish it to Amazon,
then I've got this book tutorials playlist here,
which goes through all the different steps that you need to take.
Thank you very much for your time. It's very much appreciated.
Don't forget to hit the subscribe button. If you did enjoy the video,
give it a thumbs up. Until next time, goodbye.