Mini Cover Tutorial

4. General Rule(s) of Thumb for All Covers

Just as I gave you some tips for fonts and titles, I should give you a few tricks for the covers themselves. Picture this as your introductory course to cover graphics. Book Covers 101.

I don't know what I'm talking about I should not be teaching you.

Anywho!

1.) Make sure your covers matches the mood of the story as best as it can. Is it a story focusing mainly on mystery and chaos? Try darker photos or blur/glitch photography. If your story is chaotic, DON'T put a million different things on your cover to make it chaotic as well. It'd be best to use some kind of distorted, simple photography instead.

2.) Simplicity is the key to brilliance, guys. Keep it light.

3.) Stay away from collages. Those are normally...amateur at best.

4.) Try to have a simple base color. I usually use white, but you could go with black or a lightly textured dark gray.

5.) When googling imagrs, put tumblr in the search bar unless you're looking for transparents. I.e. if you're looking for a city backgroind, instead of looking up "city," search "city tumblr."

Also, a few things about covers.

1.) the ratio is 512 x 800 for book covers. (yes it can be reduced if the numbers are too big) Be sure to have your base this size/crop your images to this size if you want it to fit.

2.) on phonto, there is a handy dandy little tool that allows you to center your text. (image below) USE IT.

2.5) ...unless you don't need to.

3.) I understand that, especially in terms of fanfiction, it is difficult to find the image you want. (Especially in terms of human bill, where there is no canon art.) BEWARE COPYRIGHT. I'm not here to tell you how wrong/right it is to use others art-and please, no debate, believe me i have some morals- but keep in mind that, if you do use somebody else's human bill, the cover is yours, but the art IS NOT. If you are told by the original artist to take it down, take it down and make something else. Be sure to apologize, and always be civil. Always give credit where you can. Just be careful about this, okay?

that last one is super important, just fyi.