How to Make a Book Cover
for authors who can't draw good and stuff
You don’t need to be good at art, good at photoshop, or good at anything really, to make a cover for your book.
I’m going to share with you how to make a cover for free or cheap.
Canva is a free phone app
Adobe Express (AE) is a free phone app
Procreate Pocket is a free phone app
Draft2Digital will turn your ebook cover into a paperback cover with one click
Procreate on iPad is $12.99
You can get a cheap art stylus on Amazon for $10
Canva and Adobe Express both have AI features and AI assets, but you don’t have to use them. You should not use them. You can filter them out (some are still mislabeled, but they do a pretty good job) and also filter by free assets in AE.
Canva has all the best fonts. I often create covers in other apps, then put them in Canva to slap a title on them.
Adobe Express is great for the “remove background” tool, filters, and blend effects
Procreate & Procreate Pocket is where you can go to draw things, but as you will see from my tutorials, you don’t have to be good at drawing to use these apps to your advantage
Please Note:
These tutorials are mostly only on Tiktok because unlike other apps, Tiktok doesn’t tell me I have to stop at 3 minutes and such. If you do not have a tiktok, I will post a couple links at the bottom to the few that I’ve posted elsewhere.
I spend no more than an hour on each of these covers. They are instructional. I usually don’t bother trying to find the perfect font cause I don’t use the covers—half the time I just handwrite (poorly) the title on there. If you actually spend some time on your cover, which you should, you could make a pretty fabulous one in just a few days.
I use my own photos for a lot of these. Why? I am not AI. I spend an absurd amount of time verifying whether or not things are AI on a daily basis, and I just don’t feel like doing this when trying to make these tutorials. I know the poses/expressions I want for these examples, so I just do them myself. I am a terrible photographer using my iphone, as you will soon learn. It makes no difference in the final product.
These tutorials are a mix of photobashing, smudging, tracing, and filters.
I don’t narrate/explain the process in every single video, mostly, I am showing the many things you can do, but using the same process each time.
This first round of examples are all ones that I did for free using my finger, Procreate Pocket, and Adobe Express. An image gallery, followed by links:
Sepia, me crouching, faux illustrated, fully explained, narrated
This one ^ has the fullest explanation and I recommend watching it before the others.
Tree, faux illustrated, partial talking, mostly music
The Very Confused Sorceress, Taking a Bad Photo and Making it an Elf Cover, Fully Explained/Narrated
Me as a Man, Fully Explained/Narrated
Four-Armed-Me, Fully Explained/Narrated
Next up is a couple of timelapses of the very cheap covers. This is mostly tracing with a bit of photobashing. These were done using Procreate on the iPad ($12.99) and a cheap art-stylus off Amazon ($10):
Greenish Hair & Purple Skin, Fully Explained/Narrated
Someone Requested a Hat on the Western
Turning Your Friend Into An Alien
Hare on the Mountain, Fully Narrated
Making Yourself Look Like a Different Person, Fully Narrated
As you can see from these, you don’t need to know how to draw. Photobashing (making collages with images essentially), removing backgrounds, blending/screening, the smudge tool, and tracing can all help you create an illustrated-looking cover in less than an hour.
DO NOT TRACE ART OR PHOTOS THAT DO NOT BELONG TO YOU OR THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE THE APPROPRIATE LICENSE FOR.
And to throw in a sassy little bit of controversy, I’ll link to my discord, where I mostly just compile my list of AI-using authors (hope to never see you on it!) but I and others also offer up some free no-AI covers and free no-AI assets. This invite link expires every seven days, if it is expired when you click it, comment and I’ll send a fresh one and update this article.
Making your own cover instead of using AI shows readers and other creatives that you respect the arts. That you don’t support how AI was trained. That you don’t support the immense bill put on regular people to pay for AI’s energy infrastructure. That you don’t support the tens of thousands of acres deforested for solar farms exclusively to power AI data centers. That you don’t support the idea that a generated derivative of the works of others can be called art.
It is hard to quantify how much any given author loves the work they create. But how much time, effort, and money they invest in it can be indicative of how passionate they are about their work.
How much do I love my books? I stopped getting haircuts and started cutting my hair at home. I stopped buying physical copies of books cause ebooks are cheaper. I sold close to a hundred books from my personal library on facebook marketplace and Ebay. I sold all my crafting supplies (I used to make resin jewelry). I made sure that I could pay my artist. And it wasn’t because I just had money sitting around. I don’t.
I know an author who spent 4 years working to illustrate her book cover. Kylee Aagard. 600 layers. She is so talented and her cover is gorgeous. I actually would have probably never picked up her book if she hadn’t made a post about the time/effort it took her to make that cover. But she did, and all I could think was that if she was willing to invest all that time and effort into the cover, then surely she invested as much if not more into the prose (confirming now that she did, it’s an awesome book).
People invest in things that they believe in, in things that they’re passionate about. When you use an AI cover, it says to me (and many readers) that you aren’t willing to sacrifice either time or money for your book. You are not willing to learn anything, even an easy thing, for your book.
You disregarded creativity and passion, and chose to dress your book in a polyester knockoff made by kids in a sweatshop when presenting it to the entire world on the runway.
Then you get upset when others in the industry don’t want to associate with you. And trust me, they don’t. You will be barred from various contests, many reviewers have anti-AI policies, other authors will refuse to share your book or help with cover reveals etc.
How you dress your book is a reflection of you and your book. And once you’ve started down that AI path, it’s hard to dig yourself back out. I know an author who hired several artists, but their art all came under scrutiny because the author was constantly displaying their art next to AI images in reels and posts without differentiating which were AI and which were by an artist. Now she whines on TikTok about how everyone thinks her covers are AI. Like girl, that’s what happens when you mix a rotten apple into your apple sauce. No one wants to eat any of it, it’s all spoiled.
And artists know this. Many of them will not work with authors who use AI to market, used AI in the past, or send AI mockups for them to paint. And I don’t blame them, because you’re fixing to ruin their reputation by doing things like that.
So before you open ChatGPT and ask it to generate 2k versions of “guy with a sword looking at mountains,” just know that 1. you have other options, and 2. you will end up shunned and stuck in the AI-author crowd, who love to give each other AI-written reviews and AI-generated “fan art” and reply to each other’s AI-written posts with AI-written responses.
Forgot, here are a couple non-TikTok links to tutorials:
