The best way to get people notice your book, is to have a great book cover that stands out and invites readers to take a closer look at your book. But how to get the book cover of your dreams without spending tons of cash? Well I will offer you a few options where to get the cover and what to look for and ask for, when hiring someone to do your cover. Oh I forgot to mention that: YOU HAVE TO HIRE A PROFESSIONAL, this is the face of your book so it has to be pretty.

Here are 3 different approaches to getting a great book cover:

• 99 Designs – here you can post a contest and have multiple designers work on your book cover. This way for sure you will have many options to choose from. The down side is that it is pretty expensive, book covers start at 300$ there. But if this is ok with your budget then go for it. This will be the less time consuming way and you have money back guarantee. Usually there is a little extra hidden cost, about stock photos here, so keep that in mind as well.

• Second option is to hire a professional freelance designer from elance.com – this option will require some time to pick the best candidate to do your book cover, but usually the designer will provide everything needed for the cover and you can negotiate a few option for the design as well. You can get all that for around 100$ at a very pro level. The down side is that it will take more time to choose the right designer for your cover. Here is my page on elance where you can hire me to create an unique book cover for your ebook – PROFESSIONAL BOOK COVERS

• The cheapest way is to go for fiverr.com – there you can get a cover from 5$ (usually a little bit more, with stock photos). A good strategy about fiverr is to have a few people work on your cover, this way you can make your own little contest for around 30$. However, don’t expect miracles, imagine how much work and effort you will put into something for 5$, yeah not much, so if your budget allows it, I recommend one of the top 2 options.

Build a Vision for Your Cover

Now that you know from where to get your cover, it is time to learn for what to look for in a book cover. First of all it is very important that your cover is relevant to the category of your book, yes it is good to stand out, but it still has to be relevant, you can’t put a cover suitable for a romance onto a how to book, it just won’t work. On the web 2 things attract readers – bold colours and huge fonts. Keep your titles short, so they can be well displayed from a very small thumbnail. Also it is very important to take a look at the competition, at the ones that are doing well and at the ones that are not, learn from them and build the vision for your cover. Ones you have a vision it is time to collaborate with a designer to make it real.

Communicate well

Give as much information to the book cover designer as possible. This will speed the process and make things easier for both sides. And cheaper for you if you are paying for hours worked. Another important thing to consider is finding the balance between listening to the designer’s opinion and following your vision. I am not going o lie, this is extremely hard. For two reasons. First of all the designer probably has designed thousands or at least hundreds of covers, so maybe they know better about some things, on the other hand no one knows your book better than you. So build your idea, but be flexible while still staying true to the original concept/message of the cover.

Final Thoughts

In a conclusion I want tell you what to expect from your great cover. Why it is important? Great cover will bring more traffic to your book’s page. It will attract more readers to take a closer look at your book. Will this automatically lead to more sales, surely. But what you should be trying to improve is your convert rate. And this is something that a cover itself can’t do. That’s why you should not only focus on the cover be sign, but pay extra attention to your description, sample of your book and your author page on amazon. But I will discuss these things in the next article.