Cover Design and Creation: Anna and the Rock Dragons

Some people ask me how I come up with my covers, but I think the hardest part of any cover is coming up with the illustration. After that, the basic cover design is relatively simple. You just have to remember the following things:

• The illustration tends to draw more attention if it contains a face or human figure.
• The illustration is the first thing that will catch a potential reader’s eye.
• The illustration should alert the reader to the genre.
• Text needs to let the reader know what the book is called and who wrote it.
• Text must be readable fro
• All elements of the cover have to work together to draw the eye.
• m a distance – or in a thumbnail.
• Text should be easy to read.
• Text should harmonise rather than dominate the cover, but it conveys the most important information, so it should draw slightly more attention than the illustration.

With these thoughts in mind, and with the illustration already chosen, I created a new image in GIMP. I made it 1875 pixels wide and 2850 pixels high, as those dimensions seem to suit the cover dimensions for a variety of platforms, and are easily adjusted to suit others. I then set the resolution at 300 pixels, as that is the minimum acceptable for most platforms. Finally, I decided I would use a black background for the cover and used the bucket-fill tool to turn the background black.

Once those basics were taken care of, I opened and resized the base illustration in a different window before saving it for import.

I imported the resized illustration, where it formed a new layer. I then enlarged the illustration layer to fit the background.

 

Once I was happy with how the image fit the background, I looked at the branding I had used for the Carlie Simonsen Chapter Books, and added the title and author name using the same texts.

Looking at it, I decided I wanted to differentiate Carlie’s young adults from her tween-to-young-adult chapter books, and the best way to do that was to change the script, so it looked less ‘younger audience’. This involved clicking on the Tool Options for the writing Tool.

You will notice there is a ‘Text’ box next to the Font box. If you click on the ‘Text’ box, you will get a drop-down list illustrating and naming the fonts available, and you can get a vague idea of what the text will look like before selecting it.

The main key, however, is to experiment with different fonts for the author…

… and then adjust the font size to suit.

And then you do the same for the title font, adjusting the positioning until you are happy with how it looks.

Once I’m happy with the look of the base cover, I then adjust it for the platforms with different requirements. Most, such as DriveThru and Ominlit, only need minor adjustments to size, but others, such as CreateSpace, require a slight rearrangement of elements.

Base Cover for Anna and the Rock Dragons

CreateSpace Large-Print Cover

CreateSpace Normal Print Cover