When an indie author self-publishes an ebook, cover art is one of the most overlooked components. Traditional print book covers draw many parallels with billboards and conventional marketing strategies to appeal to casual readers. When you walk into a bookstore and there are thousands of books present, they start to all blur together. Bright colorful images and racy cover art are increasingly becoming more bold to grab people’s attention and hopefully prompt an impulse buy. Self-Published authors are often on a shoestring budget, and competing against the big six publishers with really great art is a hard task. Contracting out the cover art, hiring models, and getting the fonts just right is often out of reach for a small time author. Amazon is seeking to make the process easier for indie authors to make great cover art with KDP.
Amazon is currently running a beta test for a new cover art generator. You will be able to choose from a gallery list of templates and customize it to your specific tastes. After you’ve selected your image, you can choose from one of ten base designs, which can then be further customized with various layouts as well as font and color schemes. In case you can’t find an image you’re satisfied with, Amazon has included some basic designs that don’t incorporate an image from your computer or the stock image gallery.
What this new tool does is it basically allows indie-authors to make passable cover art, without having any prior graphic editing experience. Many authors are just writers and not artists, so this program is surprisingly necessary. Having horrible cover art severely degrades your product and great cover art is one of the most important components with impulse buys.
Right now the KDP Cover Creator is only available for US authors and can be found when you are creating a new title from your KDP Dashboard. If you are an existing author, I encourage you to check it out if you want to add a little flair to your next title.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.