Recently one of my authors told me what she planned to put on her cover. My mind boggled. Instead of telling her her error I headed over to Canva to show her.
There is only so much text a cover can support.
Now we have slid down the rabbit hole of title brainstorming. It is a potentially endless task. At least when I named my child I had resources: books, website, social security lists.
This cover is my very favorite, with a cherry on top. The title is inspired by a line in one of her stories. Of course, this title is practically the opposite of my family motto. My grandmother pretty much only ate ice cream the last year of her life. Heck, she was 84. Why not?
The nice thing about naming a series of short stories is you already have lots of titles to choose from. This cover was inspired by a story called “The Alien.” It is a fun, eye-catching design but it doesn’t match the mood of the other stories. Pass.
I made that. Really. Canva has tons of drag-and-drop templates and they are wonderful. You can adjust colors, change the font and add your own pictures to make it yours. But there is something about building art from a blank canvas. Dang, I am proud of me. My husband normally calls my crafts, “Nice, for a third grader.”
This was a totally free template. I actually found it the invitations section, but they have plenty of example e-book covers as well. The “pay-per” elements cost between $1-10, far less than a designer. I would still recommend a professional custom design for your cover, but Canva is a powerful tool for mock-ups and marketing materials.
Have you enjoyed my art project? It think I'm all the way up to 6th grade now.