If You Have To Do It Yourself, Do It Right!

Good afternoon loyal subscribers and friends. I
hope you are well. We are preparing to get ready
for our family vacation to Washington, DC starting
this Saturday. We're excited. It's been a year
full of challenges on many levels, and we are
looking forward to focusing on fun with our
children.

Today I wanted to touch upon the topic of graphic
design and reveal some trade secrets of mine. You
know, people do judge a book or an ebook or a
digital product by its cover. They also judge your
site by its appearance. Experts agree you only
have a few seconds to grab their attention and
build credibility, and there's no doubt that
sharp, professional, compelling graphics are your
strongest ally.

So let's assume you've decided to purchase some
tools and create your graphics yourself. Where do
you start? Of course, you could buy templates and
clip-art and start there. Most people do. Of
course, since most people were not blessed with
the gift of graphic design, they wrongfully assume
that since the tools are available that they are
capable of doing it themselves.

Let me tell you folks, of the thousands of emails
I receive each year, most ask for my opinion of
their web site or ebook cover's look and feel, and
most look like they were designed by someone who
has no sense of design. Their home-made graphics
look so amateurish. In an attempt to save money,
they have actually damaged their ability to
generate future sales. Penny wise, pound foolish.
Whatever that means.

So, my advice to you is this: if you are intent
on doing it yourself, then do it wisely. You may
find that in the long-run it cost you more to do
it yourself than it would have to pay a professional
to do it right.

If you want to design an ebook cover, start
searching for other ebooks in your genre on Amazon
and study their cover designs. Make note of
colors, layout, fonts, size and position of title,
subtitle and author text. Look at how they use
graphic elements to enhance the look and feel of
the cover. Sketch out your proposed cover design
on a napkin.

Next assemble the elements. If you have a
graphics design tool, check your fonts for title
fonts -- big, bold and easily read as all caps. If
you have PhotoShop you can easily enhance simple
fonts to create eye-catching headlines or titles.

Check to see what you have in the way of
graphical support elements such as colored bars,
lines, circles, stars, badges, etc. There are many
graphics collection available online. Seek them
out to find exactly what you need.

Next, check for availability of royalty-free
photos. There are many online services that sell
great photos for a buck. Among the ones I use the
most, I recommend Fotolia which has a very good
search engine. Photos are available in a variety
of sizes, and it is free to join and create your
own account.

The last step is the most challenging: putting it
all together in your graphics program. After years
of putting off the purchase, I finally bought
PhotoShop 7.0 years ago. I have not upgraded. I
don't really need to as the older version was
available for under $100 and does more than I need
it to. Before that I used Paint Shop Pro which is
also an excellent product. Xara makes a number of
great low-cost graphics tools, too.

Once you have assembled it all I suggest playing
with placement of elements, enhancing the
background to make your title and images pop off
the page, and in different colored fonts. Play
with drop shadows and glow effects around text.
Eventually you will wind up with something that
doesn't look half bad.

Once your have created your 2D flat cover image,
you need to render it as a 3D image. You can spend
a lot of money on PhotoShop actions which look
real nice but some require you to own a more recent
version of PhotoShop and are limited in the number
of formats.

Here's my other well-kept secret. Quick 3D Cover
enables you to transform a 2D flat cover into
approximately 100 different 3D formats including
books, DVDs, CDs, spiral reports, business cards,
iPod screens, movie screens, envelopes, boxes, and
much, much more -- and for a fraction of the cost
of a set of PhotoShop actions.

Here's a list of reviews of recommended tools and
services:

Killer Text
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/multimedia/killertext2.htm

Killer Abstract Backgrounds
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/multimedia/killerabstractbackgrounds.htm

Web Graphics 2.0
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/multimedia/web20graphicspack.htm

Super Easy DIY Graphics
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/multimedia/supereasydiygraphics.htm

Fotolia
http://us.fotolia.com/partner/200909131

Quick 3D Cover
http://www.cooltoolawards.com/software/multimedia/quick3dcover.htm

And if you're throwing your hands up in despair,
drop me an email. I'll design your cover using
these very same tools, usually within 24 hours,
with minimal changes required, and for only
$49.95. Don't forget we do full site design and
sales copy, too.

Until next time,

Steven