The Guide Book on Writing FanFiction

Making the Cover

Okay, so you've got your story all set up. But there's just one thing that is missing and that is the cover of the story. You can't make a book without the cover, plain and simple.

The cover is another important fact to have, because you not only want to get the reader's interest. You want your cover to be eye-catching to the reader, because a picture can say a lot of things before the reader has even read the story.

So how do we even start making a cover?

Well here are some tips that can help you on making a cover.

*Create a Pinterest account and make different boards with your favorite animes. I actually use Pinterest a lot in many ways. I actually download the pictures I choose from my board and edited them to create my cover. When you have a lot of pictures of your favorite anime, you might find something along the way that can be an inspiration for your cover.

*Make sure that it goes with the story. In my story called Blood and Fire, it took me a while to make it. But I had to make sure that the cover clearly sends a message that this book is a crossover. One of my followers had the same idea, when she made the cover for Humanity's KeyBlade Wielder. In fact she's the one who taught me how to make a cover. So when you make the cover make sure that it goes with the story.

*Avoid the plague pictures such as nudity, racist, and violence. You don't want readers to think that your story is really dirty when they see the cover before they even read it. So avoid the obvious ones that will make it seem dirty otherwise you run a risk of getting reported and you don't want that.

*Don't just create one cover, create several. I actually have several covers for different stories. Mostly because I was experimenting them and once I was done. I chose the one that would be perfect for it.

So now that you know the key points, here's another question for you. What programs or apps to use and how many to make a cover?

I use five different apps to make a single cover. Why so many? Because every app does a different task, that another app can't.

Now, I don't mind showing the apps that I use. I will tell you in the description of each app to see if you can use this on the iPad, or Android. I mostly use my iPad mini, to use the apps and make my cover.

InstaSize Editor (Apple/Android): This one has good filters, along with good fonts to use and good tools to crop and edit your photo. But, it does lack a good blend style. So I mainly use this one for filtering, or special effects to it.

PicsArt (Apple/Android): This one is as good as InstaSize, except that it has a really good tool to blend two pictures together. And there are collages that you can use to make your cover really pop and I love the fonts they use and you can even blend in colors in the fonts to make the words of your story title catching to the reader.

BlendPic (Apple/Android): I absolutely love this app because it does very well with blending in photos. The downside with this one is you can only blend in two pictures and not three. Sometimes the app can cut off a part of a photo that you want in the cover. So I use this one only to blend in two pictures together and that's it.

Piclay (Apple/Android): Like the two other apps before. This one is another photo editor, but it has different effects and filters than the other ones. Along with different font styles.

Graphic (Apple only): Now unlike the other ones, this one has tools that are pacifically for drawing only. However, this app as a better tool to use for cropping and layering. This app helped me a lot when I made the cover for Blood and Fire. The cover alone as 23 layers total and that is a lot. However, it was well worth it because it turned out to be one of my favorite covers.

Now those are the apps I use mainly. I know there are better apps out there to make good covers. But, if you want to get a good start at making a cover. I would recommend these. You can use them for different things to make a single cover.

In fact I use about three out of the five to make a single cover. I also put the time into it, so that my readers will actually notice this cool cover before they get into the story.

So remember that creating a good cover that's both eye-catching and is related to the story. Will get your reader's attention.