- One thing, a really just, I love this.
This is amazing.
Look at how the text is.
I think that's fantastic.
You can kind of see like a slight,
almost sunburst in the background.
About a month ago I did a 24 hour writing challenge
to where actually I was gonna write a book
within 24 hours live here on this channel.
And of course we were successful in doing that.
Now we're at the process,
We've already gone through the editing and the proofreading
and the formatting, and we are ready
to get a book cover design.
And I reached out to the fine folks over there at Fiverr
And I told them the situation, "I said, Hey, look,
I need a good book cover design.
Can we tap in to five of your different types of sellers?"
Of course they have new sellers,
they have level one sellers, they have level two sellers,
top rated sellers in Fiverr pros.
And that specific order it's going from the absolute newbie
to the absolute experienced on the platform.
Would these designers be able to capture my vision.
Would they be able to understand where I'm going
with my brand as far as self-publishing with Dale
and the very first book that we'll be launching
called "Amazon Keywords for Books."
Of course the sponsor of this video is Fiverr,
but I want to let you know ahead of time
They didn't coerce me at all into picking out specific gigs.
I wanted to find some people that had some good reviews,
have a great history and have a decent price point
that I could kind of afford and you could afford as well.
Now, what I needed from them was going to be as a minimum.
I needed to have an ebook cover as well as a print cover.
Ideally wanted to see an audio book cover as well
and any other bells and whistles like 3D images
or social media things.
That was just kind of a little bit of a bonus.
All I was concerned about was getting
the three different iterations
since I will be publishing all three versions here
in the next month and a half.
So I needed to communicate my needs
to each one of these sellers.
And part of that needs I needed to provide a folder
with all of the metadata and that's gonna include of course,
title, subtitle, series name, author name, the book blurb,
my headshot or the author bio,
my book logo that I use here on this channel.
You'll see it over my shoulder here
and then I also needed to let them know
what my brand is like here and self-publishing
with Dale here on YouTube.
So they can get some inspiration about
what exactly it is that I do.
What's the flavor that I kind of go for.
And then last but not least, I went digging into my niche.
I tried to find some of
the best performing self-publishing books in the market
as a way to kind of model my ebooks and my print books
and just the book cover design in general.
I didn't want anything copied.
I just wanted to kind of draw inspiration
from some of those.
Okay, it's time to spend some money.
(whooshing air)
We're starting out with a new seller, Agnes Selena.
She actually has a premium gig of $30
which includes one design concept, back and spine designs
and 3D Mockup.
Now, it doesn't appear to have the ACX version
and the Kindle version.
All I need to do is just get the front cover.
That's not gonna be a deal breaker for me.
So let's go ahead and place the order, $30.
Let's jump forward over into the second gig that we have.
Pro_ebookcovers, Angie actually has been on Fiverr
for a very, very, very long time.
I actually got my first book covers done by her
and my mentor actually had introduced me
to her gigs quite some time ago
and so I thought let's go ahead and give her a shot
at the premium gig.
We get the high-res 2D cover, a source file,
which means that I can go ahead and edit it later on
if I want to, 3D model and it's print ready
with unlimited revisions.
She says two days delivery,
which is pretty stellar at about $40.
(bell ring)
All right, Bing bang boom.
Next one up on the list is actually
a level two seller, hubspot_pro.
And I just went ahead, scroll through the gig,
has some great covers,
has some excellent feedback.
Did 479 total gigs so far,
four orders currently in the queue.
I'm gonna order the premium
which is gonna include the front,
back and spine print ready file
and with unlimited revisions.
This one is set at about $70.
So almost twice as much as Angie's.
So it'd be interesting to kind of see
if he kind of measures up.
I was looking through
even some of the negative reviews on him
and there was only two negative reviews
and it seemed like a lack of communication.
He was super cool about it to the people
even though they were throwing shade on him.
All right, confirm and pay.
Okay, so, our very next gig here is done by agnesam
and is a level one seller.
This is actually the next most expensive gig at $75.
So just about five bucks, more.
Some beautiful covers on here.
This is what I really like about agnessam,
for the premium gig you get one design concept,
back and spine designs, jacket cover,
jacket covers really big especially if you're looking
to say print a hard back with
the jacket over on something like Lulu or IngramSpark,
and then here's the cool one, ACX, that's really awesome.
I'm real excited about this one.
So here we go, go ahead and process this one.
All right, let's go to the very next level.
Now, this one is actually what's considered a Fiverr Pro.
Now the fiber pros are hand vetted
by the folks over at Fiverr for being the cream of the crop,
the best of the best, prepare yourself,
this is the most expensive of all of the ones
and it's probably the most I've ever spent
on a cover before.
So this one is actually by marmarko.
This is actually the unique premium design unlimited
is $800, yes, brace yourselves.
And at the more cheaper gig, you're looking at 350,
but the experience that Marco brings to the table
is very extensive, he talks a lot about his background
20 years working in
the highest-circulating daily newspapers,
learning to manage the pressure of short deadlines.
So a lot of you might be kind of going, Oh,
that's a lot of money,
but the quality of work that he does speaks for itself.
I was just far and away blown away by all this stuff.
But I would like to see what he can actually do.
And especially for $800
I'm hoping he can be able to deliver.
So here we go, man, it gets me nervous just spending
this much money here but the deal has been done.
I just spent $800 on a cover.
So now I'm just gonna sit back and wait
and as each one of these orders come in
I will try to capture some of the process
and share it with you as we go along
and then we're gonna do a big cover reveal
at the very end so you get to see
which one you think is the best
and vote for the one that you would like
to see me use as a cover.
(air whooshing)
And the gigs are all set.
We're gonna start it out with the new seller, Agnes Selena.
And this was the more cheaper gig at $30.
Actually, I really loved this, first of all,
she incorporated my book logo into the design there.
She went and she color picked some of the colors
from over on Amazon so it kind of matched up.
I really liked the attention to detail
to where there's like the key,
as well as the lock kind of insinuating that,
you know, unlocking there.
And then you see that shopping cart almost representing like
your books being checked out at a breakneck pace.
I really do enjoy this and you can see this
is the ebook cover.
If we just kind of scroll through,
you see here's the 3D cover design,
here is the actual print cover design.
I really like how the back cover here,
it has almost like a sunburst ingredient
style quality to it.
And we kind of had to tweak a little bit of that,
add copy on the back cover
because the blurb was a little long admittedly.
And so we went through and the two of us worked together
on parsing out some of the stuff that didn't make sense.
This is fantastic selection and really for the price
of $30, it's a steal and actually I just looked in
just the other day and I hate to say this.
I was saying to her, wow, you know,
this is an incredible deal and a really one heck of a steal.
Go figured, she increased her gig
by about $10 in the premium.
So about $40 still, I think it's really absolutely worth it.
She was a gem and just awesome to work with.
Okay, so the next one is gonna be the level one seller
in Agnes Sam, and actually another one
just a lot of fun to work with.
You can see that she really wanted to kind of capture
what she saw over here on the YouTube channel.
Some of the same color scheme that, you know,
we went through.
we had to kind of volley some back and forth each other
for this one right here, it's cut and dry.
It's, it's pretty, pretty basic.
I'm not saying that in a bad regard
if we were to just make this just a little bit smaller,
you will find that it's just as a thumbnail.
It's still incredibly readable.
So that's gonna be the big thing,
but at about $70 it's not too bad.
Let's go through the other assets.
You actually have the book cover design here.
She was able to use the entire hard copy.
She also provided, this was kind of an extra thing
and a little bit of a miscommunication.
She will do IngramSpark book jackets,
dust jackets, or she will do Katy Perry paperbacks.
It was one or the other
and there was a huge miss communication
on both our behalves and so she just kind of,
as a compliment, she went ahead and set me up.
She had no idea she was gonna be on this video.
So, sorry Agnes, here we are.
So she gave me this, she said,
though it probably wouldn't be up to specs
when I would use it for a dust jacket cover.
So it's a great example
to kind of share with you folks here.
You can see that the left panel shows my bio
and the far right panel shows the actual description again
and last but not least,
we have of course the audio book cover.
This one right here is really nice.
It encapsulates everything that we did with the other one.
I would have liked to have seen her do much more
than just add a little bit more on either side,
maybe get it to where she made more use of this area
and made it a bit more unique, but this was definitely work.
Okay. So the next one is actually the level two seller.
This one ran me $70.
I found a little bit of disconnect here.
Working with hubspot_pro there was just a lot
of volleying back and forth to each other,
but you know,
I'm looking at this right now
and I guess I'm just not surprised.
I really, it just, it seems like it's there.
I gave some good ideas that gave some examples.
And originally this had started out with
the keyword section.
It would just the same font as the other stuff
And he had used the keywords thing down here
and something separate and I said,
"Hey, why don't we kind of work that in here."
I had to send this back numerous times for the back cover.
You know it's good.
It's decent hubspot_pro all right job
and he actually gives you two different types of covers.
So I at least have a couple of things to choose from.
I like this one a little bit better.
Not only for the color scheme, it kind of pops for me
but also just like the keyword
and the magnifying glass here.
So there was just a little bit
more imagination used on this.
I had given them the beta copy of the print interior,
all of the designers.
So it was very clear he definitely thumb through it
and wanted to kind of embody what he found inside there.
The one thing that I was just kind of underwhelmed about was
he was supposed to deliver some source files.
I never got those, I need to probably double back around.
So in any event, you know, hubspot_pro did okay for $70.
I'm pretty happy he did two covers.
I think with the unlimited revisions
it feels almost like he just rushes through it
with the hope that he can kind of meet the deadline
and you know, maybe you'll just be satisfied with it.
Now this is okay, it's great.
Would I go for it again, possibly,
but I think maybe ahead of time, I might get very,
very specific on the exact things that I need
because it just seems like when I kind of left him to,
you know, creatively in charge, it was almost like,
he just was like, well, here you go what do you think?
And unfortunately, this is an okay cover
but I mean, what do you think?
Okay. So the next step is gonna be a top rated seller.
She also happens to be a level two seller.
This is Angie with pro_ebookcovers
and I've used her services before
and I'm definitely not shocked by some of the stuff
that she's able to deliver and you can actually see here
she really maximizes the most out of the space.
She found just a great graphic assets.
I love how she kind of did the same thing as the first order
in that she, you know, showed a little bit
of this like sunburst type thing here, you know,
and picked a little bit of the colors from Amazon.
So there's that familiarity to the Amazon brand
without having to use any of their trademark properties.
And I love the graphics that she put here.
So this is the most creative use of the space
that I've seen so far.
And for $40, you gotta think about this top rated seller,
a level two seller.
Let's compare it over to the level one
and the level two sellers.
And she's almost half as much for getting the ebook cover
as well as the print cover.
So you can actually see she drops in a 3D cover.
She actually gives you the choice
of which ones you want to select from.
And then of course you can see here
on the actual print cover here, she did a fantastic job.
We kind of had to, again, volley back and forth
with each other based on some of the needs.
You know, so for instance,
she decided to put the author bio in there.
We had to tweak that just a little bit.
Otherwise I really like the color scheme,
how she was able to do things
and the front cover is, it's an Angie type cover.
I see a lot of her covers over on Amazon's platform.
And I almost instantly recognize her.
In fact, I think there's many people out there
that are trying to duplicate Angie style
and you can kind of usually see it
where there's the series name at the top
and the author name at the very bottom.
You've got the graphic asset followed by it
framed in with the title and subtitle.
So Angie did a fantastic job.
I'm not sure what do you think so far?
This one, if I had to do it over again
I would have probably added in the extra $10
to get the audio book cover done at the same time.
And now it comes from the main event.
The gig that costs $800 working with an experienced pro.
And that is marmarko78, I just call him Marko.
Marko and I gotten to know each other.
And we spent a lot of time kind of chatting back and forth.
He really brought actually some additional tips
and some insights on how we can kind of tweak
the interior as well.
So that was refreshing and a lot of fun.
One thing, a really just, I love this.
This is amazing.
Look at how the text is, look at how he has this layout.
He maximized the most out of the space.
I mean, so let's zoom in.
You can see actually here, even like through,
in like this matrix style background with like the numbers
and such, I think that's fantastic.
You can kind of see like a slight
almost sunburst in the background
instead of just sticking with my logo like it is,
where it has like the two different blue colors,
or sometimes the white colors I've used.
He went ahead and color pick with Amazon,
you can kind of see that it really matched that theme.
I really, I'm over the moon with this design.
You can actually see the print cover.
This is cool.
I gave him some different head shots because he really,
he was like, "Hey, do you have some different ones, some,
some higher quality ones."
And I was like, "Yeah, sure."
I went ahead and I showed him some
and he put me in here pointing at the barcode
that will end up going there.
That is absolute brilliance.
I absolutely love how he took the ad copy
even though it was a lot for other people.
It wasn't so much for him.
He was able to make it work.
He split it up into two different columns.
He took the bullet points and showcased it right there.
He even took the self-publishing with Dale logo,
changed it up and if you can notice,
look at this in the background,
he's got that matrix style thing, you know,
kind of referring to the algorithm.
I think it's phenomenal.
And then you can actually see where he actually wraps text
along where I'm at here.
That is freaking cool.
I just absolutely love this.
So let's go look at his other assets.
We've got the 3D book cover.
Okay, great. This is nice. I like that.
So I can use this for advertising.
You can see it's got the book jacket here
and here he actually shows the dust jacket.
So this dust jacket actually is ready to rock and roll.
So if I want to use this over on something like IngramSpark
or Lulu I can go ahead and do that.
Again you can see on the left hand side
this is just so cool to see this and how he was able
to utilize the space so wisely.
And you can see even over here
he has the description put on over here
but you're thinking that's it, Dale, right?
No, no, no.
He wasn't done just yet.
In fact, actually he had other assets he was gonna give me
and he does five different social media assets.
That means graphic design.
So here's ones for, first of all it started out with YouTube
and I'll be using this when I get ready to launch the book.
this is gonna go on my channel art.
So the nice thing is when you actually ended up
zooming in on it, this is what will appear.
So you actually see me pointing out that
and it'll cut off my pretty mug but that's okay
I'll probably sell more books without it, nonetheless.
But you can see that this is cool.
And when you go over it
he actually shows to where it's actually framed out.
See, that's, what's gonna show when it comes up on YouTube,
he created one as well over for Twitter.
I like this Twitter one. This is fantastic.
Again, he kind of framed it out in a perfect way
so I can actually share this over on Twitter.
Now this one's a lot of fun.
This is a three by three Instagram set.
Now it looks pixelated, but keep in mind
this is gonna be on Instagram.
So it's obviously gonna be shrunk down
but it's gonna form one gigantic image like this.
That is so cool, man.
I mean, this is brilliant.
You know, I'll be able to fire it off,
pick it up today when it goes live.
So this is awesome, I freaking love this and crack me up.
And then last but not least
he actually created a profile picture
for self publishing with Dale as well as he went over
and created a Facebook banner here.
So he went above and beyond the call of duty.
So when you're spending the $800
he's fully invested in it and he made doubly sure
before he even put the gig through for approval,
that I was super, super, super, super, super happy with it.
So I'm gonna say like, just reacting to this raw.
I absolutely loved this.
So here's how I ranked the designers.
I hate to pick some favorites
but I'm gonna tell you what my favorites are
in order of top to bottom here.
What do you think about this list?
How would you rank them big thanks over to Fiverr.
I really appreciate that and in fact, actually,
if you want to take out a look at this curated list
of sellers that I have over Fiverr
there's a link inside the description down below
or you can visit dalelinks.com/fiverrcovers.
Remember, Fiverr actually has two Rs.
Hey, while we're here,
want a free copy of "Amazon Keywords for Books."
Good news is, if you're subscribed to this channel
and you stay tuned, I'm actually going to be
showing you behind the scenes look at how I wrote a book
in 24 hours.
Some of the struggles that I went through
and all of those things in between
and all you're gonna be able to do is just stay tuned
to this channel, to get a free copy,
that's all you need to do.
And also while we're talking about it
let me send you on over to this very next video
were actually I work with Fiverr again.
And I showed you how to self-publish a book
from beginning to end.
So that's research all the way to publishing
and all the things in between.
So I will see you in this very next video.
And the nice thing is, I spent less than $1000,
less than $1000.
so unlike this one I spent way less than that.