What is the Cover Designer?
The Bookmundo cover designer is a free tool which you can use to create a professional-looking cover for your book in four easy steps. During the first three steps, you’ll be asked to build a cover by combining several templates. The last step lets you customise the result, though you can also edit different aspects of your cover as you go along.
If, on the other hand, you’re happy with the selections you’ve already made, you can simply skip the customization step. Also, just like with the publishing platform itself, you can move back and forth between all the steps at will, so don’t worry if you change your mind halfway through!
What’s the advantage of using the cover designer?
If you’re using Bookmundo to create and publish your book, there are a few advantages to using the cover designer:
- The cover dimensions are automatically created to fit your chosen book format. This means you’ll never have to worry about getting the size of your cover right.
- There are a bunch of copyright-free images to choose from, and you can of course upload your own as well.
- The wide range of cover templates, font sets, and colour combinations allows you to put together a professional-looking cover in a short time.
- It’s free to use
How to create your book cover using the cover designer
The process of designing your cover is divided into 4 steps. In the first three steps, you’ll be selecting a layout, a font, and a colour scheme. In the 4th and final step, you’ll be able to edit all of these components freely. If you’re happy with your cover as it is after completing the first 3 steps, you can of course save it as it is.
Step 1: Layout
The first thing you’ll see when starting the cover designer is a screen featuring a number of different layout options for your cover. Simply pick the one you’d like to work with and click next. Note that certain templates have slight limitations in terms of how extensively you can customise them, such as “Copenhagen” and “Melbourne”. You can also choose a completely empty template and arrange the layout of your cover from scratch.
The image on your cover is randomised, so if you dislike a photo or picture, simply click on your chosen template again to see a different version.
Step 2: Typography
Step 2 lets you select one of several typographic designs we’ve assembled for you. We’ve taken the liberty of assembling some font combinations that work well together, but you can of course make any tweaks you like; simply click the element you’d like to change and you’ll open up an editing menu. You can also wait until the last step to do this. In any case, you might want to read our article about selecting the right font for your book if you’re looking for some inspiration.
Step 3: Colour Palette
This step will let you choose a pre-selected colour scheme for your book, which can be useful to cycle through a number of different looks quickly, in case you’re still looking for inspiration. In the screenshot below, for example, we chose the Honey-Mustard theme in order to make the author name pop. Naturally, all these colours are fully customizable, and like with everything else, you can either do that right away by clicking on the part you’d like to change, or simply click next to move on to the customisation step.
Step 4: Do Your Thing
You should now have quite a decent cover for your book. If you’re happy with it, great – you’re ready to get on with the publishing of your book. If you’d still like to make some tweaks, that’s alright too, it’s what this final step is for!
You’ll notice that the preview of your cover is slightly larger in this step; this is to make it easier for you to click around and change what you need to change. The dotted lines around your cover represent the bleed – anything outside the dotted line will be trimmed off when the book goes to print, so be careful!
Other than that, there’s not all that much to say really – simply click on whatever it is you want to edit, and use the pop-up menu to make the changes you want. You can change the colour scheme, the font, the cover image, or the text itself; we won’t say the possibilities are endless, but there are quite a lot of them! Just drag, drop, experiment, and get creative! Once you’re happy with your cover, just click save (top right corner), and move on to the next step in the publishing process!
And That’s Our Cover Designer!
We hope this introductory guide has helped you understand the basic idea behind our cover designer tool. Our goal was to make it as easy and intuitive for you to use as possible, without compromising on the quality of your final cover. Think we did an okay job? Or do you find it completely useless? We’d love to hear your thoughts about it, either in the comment section below or in an email. Your feedback is really valuable to us, and we’ll use your ideas to further develop the cover designer, as well as the platform in general.
Before we begin, you might also be interested in reading our blog article about cover design for beginners; despite the title, it’s not just for beginners – it might also provide some useful tips and insights for a seasoned cover designer!