How to Create an e-Book Cover for Free

I’ve heard of people spending up to a thousand dollars creating an ebook cover. In today’s economy, that doesn’t make sense.

If you are planning to sell your book on Amazon, for example, you will have to sell many hundreds of ebooks just to break even.

And since 90% of the books on Amazon end up selling less than forty copies (according to Guy Kawasaki), it’s a collosal waste of money.

What can you do? If you have the technical and esthetic ability to design your own cover using professional tools such as Adobe Ahotoshop, Indesign, Illustrator, then you don’t need advice from me.

I am one of those folks with practically no design skills whatsoever. And so I will recommend two free alternatives that work for me.

The first alternative for people with poor illustration and design skills is Canva. Canva has simple tools for creating covers and they are free as long as you don’t use the paid options. And even the paid options cost only a buck a piece.

At Ourboox (the platform I co-founded with Ran Shternin) the covers of our page-flipping interactive books are square, and Canva is great for creating square covers. Check out a brief ebook on the subject.

Here is one of many free ebook covers prepared for me on Canva by my associate Miki Peled. Trust me, they only take minutes to prepare.

The other option is to use Powerpoint. As I explained in an earlier piece, Powerpoint is great for designing pages and covers, in addition to slide shows (which fewer and fewer people are using these anyway). By customizing the size and orientation, you can create a lovely cover.

Once you’re done, you can save it as pdf or as a jpeg file. Presto! Book cover! I made this one myself. You can tell that I’m not the illustrator of the century. But, hey! It works for me. And it’s great for books you want to share with the world. Without spending a fortune.

Here is the process in more detail as it pertains to self-publishing on Ourboox.com.

And what about background photos for your cover? Make sure that you are not using a picture that belongs to someone else.

If you need a background photo for your book you are welcome to use one of mine from:

Of course, you can also use Pixabay.com

And of course, if you want professional help, but are on a limited budget, then someone from Fiverr might be able to lend a hand. Figuratively and literally speaking.

If you need inexpensive illustration, you can purchase line drawings (black and white, cheap), and then color them yourself! Here >>

One last tip.

Before you go out and spend money, make sure that your cover is THE final cover. The name of the book is finalized, you’ve spelled everything correctly.

If really sucks when you create a cover only to find that you need to make a new one.