While indie authors are often advised to hire professional book cover designers, the truth is that sometimes budget does not allow for hiring a professional. In some cases, the author may not even have the budget to purchase a pre-made cover, or may prefer to do their own covers. In the world of self-publishing you can make that choice. However, whether you hire a pro, buy a pre-made, or design the cover yourself, you want it to be as good as it can possibly be. The following tips should help you in designing your new cover or redesigning your current cover.

1. Start with a beautiful image. This does not mean it has to be original artwork; the image can be a photograph. As long as the image is high resolution (300 dpi), visually appealing, and reflects the mood and tone of your story, it can work.

2. Use an image with a person. In any kind of marketing (and a book cover is indeed marketing) images with people in them always produce the best response. A very popular trend is having the person in the photograph with their back to the viewer as though leading the reader into the story.

3. There are many online sites where you can purchase photographs/images very reasonably, such as Getty Images, but there are also free sites such as Pixabay, Skitterphoto, and Unsplash that offer totally free, high quality images.

4. Whether you get your image from a paid site or a free site, you do run the risk of it being used by other designers, so try to find an image that can be cropped in several different ways so that your image will stand out. Also, when choosing the image, go with the large or the original size because even a high resolution picture will lose clarity if you have to enlarge it from a smaller size.

5. Keep things simple with fonts. Although it is tempting to use fancy fonts and all kinds of cool effects, you will likely come up with a better cover if you keep things simple. Try to keep it to one serif font and one sans serif font. For example, use the first font for title and author name and then the second font for subtitles, taglines, series names, or secondary text. If you use a novelty font (such as letters that appear to be dripping), use sparingly for just the title, using more subtle fonts for the remaining text. Otherwise, you lose the impact of using the novelty font.

6. Keep the color palette simple. As with the fonts, you want don’t want to go too overboard by using too many colors. Find a palette that is appropriate for your genre, but one that uses one maybe two strong colors and going neutral for the rest.

Designing your own cover can be fun and relatively easy as long as you don't over think it; and using these tips hopefully will assist you in designing the cover you want and that will appeal to readers.