Step 1 - Overview and Picking a Book Title

The recent rise of self publishing has created a growing need for book covers. While I would always encourage authors to hire a professional designer whenever possible, that's not always possible – often for financial reasons.

So I've started this blog as a way to demonstrate some simple, practical tips for non-designers who are designing their own covers (or, possibly, covers for others). I'm going to build a book cover step-by-step, highlighting relevant design principles along the way.

Having worked as a designer for over twenty years, I use Adobe Creative Cloud like almost every other designer (I had to mention that so you'd trust me a little). However, since those programs are somewhat expensive and have a steep learning curve, I'm going to use only free resources.

For my first step, I'm going to create a random book title and a concept to go along with it. I've used the Book Title Generator (which I just discovered), selected "Mystery" as the genre, and the title it's given me is:

Broken By the Black Smoke
(yes, the site gave me a few choices - I picked this one because having "By the" in the title will be helpful when it comes to typography)

For a fake author's name, I just found the Psuedonym Generator (who knew these things existed?) and it came up with:

Joyann Michaelsen

Sounds vaguely Scandinavian, doesn't it?

So that's what we're working with - a mystery novel titled "Broken By the Black Smoke" written by Joyann Michaelsen. Next post we'll start looking for images.