Help! Book covers

[Barbara]

Anyone here designed their own book cover? If so, I have a few question I'd like to run by you if yer don't mind, like for example, I read somewhere that I might need the 'rights' to use a particular font on a book cover (??). Stuff like that.

 

[RK Wallis]

I had an artist friend graphic design but I bought the image they used. He never mentioned fonts. This was 5 years ago. It could be different now!

 

[CageSage]

Read this from Ingram re fonts (read all the way to the end for the legal bit, which also applies to covers), then think about using Canva for the cover once you have a pic. Ingram also have a book building tool, but I haven't used it (and I don't know about the fonts used with it). This discussion by The Book Designer is a bit old, but I don't think the info has changed much.
If you want to do some reading on Book Design, which includes discussion on fonts, I'd suggest Joel Friedlander, The Book Blueprint. There are others, but I like his style.

 

[Dorm Ant]

I designed the covers for some graphic novels. There are many fonts that come with graphic design packages, that anyone can use. There are also fonts you can download and buy. Or fonts you can download for free. Some are free for personal use, but licenced for commercial use. You can easily check when choosing a font. For example:

The Way of the Guinea Pig draft cover, designed using Affinity Publisher (an open source alternative to Adobe InDesign, that costs a one-off fee of £24), using a free font called Permanent Marker.



New Dawn Fades (I book I edited) used a font called Impact, that's widely used in pretty much all word processing and desk top publishing software, and free. This cover was designed by a friend.


ANIMUS used a font called Russian for the title, and a lot of the other text in the book was a font called Special Elite. Large blocks of text were done in Gil Sans (the London Underground font). All three are free to download and use.
dafont.com is a good site.

 

[Barbara]

Thank you very much @CageSage and @RG Worsey. Very useful stuff.

When it comes to photos, I found a pic on pixabay which apparently is free to use, no reference needed. I'm wondering if I need / ought to contact the photographer and tell him what it's being used for and also reference him anyway.

 

[Josephine]

Thank you very much @CageSage and @RG Worsey. Very useful stuff.

When it comes to photos, I found a pic on pixabay which apparently is free to use, no reference needed. I'm wondering if I need / ought to contact the photographer and tell him what it's being used for and also reference him anyway.

I think some of these free stock photo sites have an option to "buy a coffee" - that might be a nice thing to do?

Pedants' corner:
Gill Sans is the BBC font; Johnston is the London Underground font. Gill was a student of Johnston's and modelled GS on Johnston (or was at least inspired by).

 

[Dorm Ant]

I think some of these free stock photo sites have an option to "buy a coffee" - that might be a nice thing to do?

Pedants' corner:
Gill Sans is the BBC font; Johnston is the London Underground font. Gill was a student of Johnston's and modelled GS on Johnston (or was at least inspired by).

Nerd!

 

[Josephine]

Nerd!

I'm going to have to enter a guilty plea

 

[Robinne Weiss]

There's lots of useful advice available on the Indie Cover Project FB group. I mostly lurk there, and have learned so much about covers and cover design. I also pop my covers up there when I need feedback on what the designer has sent me (I struggle to even know what a good cover looks like--no way can I design my own--so I try to get feedback from others).

 

[Lizzie_Chantree]

I design some of my own book covers. I buy a license from a stock photography site, that allows me to use the image for books.