How to Make a CreateSpace Book Cover Using Photoshop or Gimp

So you've written a book. Who hasn't? We've all been there, right? You bought a brand new copy of Writer's Market circa 1980. You sent your cleverly worded query letter and/or manuscript to all the major publishers. They all turned you down without even reading either the query letter or the manuscript. You realized you needed an agent. You bought several different books listing successful agents. You sent the same material to all the best agents. They all turned you down, too. You pulled strings. You asked people who had been published to vouch for you. As a result, one or two agents who were looking for something else actually did look at your manuscript. They told you that it was no good.

You published the book yourself, and then you watched as the copies you had already paid for and whose spines you had glued together by hand began to gather dust. You decided that self-publishing was a waste of time and energy, and with your next book you would wait until a major publisher contacted you. None ever did.

Meanwhile, about thirty years have passed since you started doing this, and all the major publishers are going belly up. So are the bookstores that would never carry any of your self-published books.

But guess what? There's something called Amazon.com, and that's where you buy all your books now, because you can't leave the house. And Amazon will publish your books under the CreateSpace label, with no cost whatever to you. It's called Print-on-Demand. So you decide, what do I have to lose? I have this manuscript just sitting in memory.

And then you realize you don't know what to do with that weird cover template they made you download. It's a real bummer!

Fortunately, there's this other new fangled thing called YouTube where you can watch music videos, all your favorite shows from thirty years ago, and where your children now go in order to learn everything they know about life. And some fellow on YouTube has posted a neat set of tutorials about how to edit that cover template from CreateSpace.

You can sit back and relax and watch the videos and they will teach you all you need to know.

Unfortunately for you, you may not have access to Adobe Photoshop. So even though that was a great tutorial, you still don't know what to do. I mean, springing for a new piece of software could set you back quite a bit, considering that you are only making a dollar a day on Hubpages. But not to worry! There's some freeware that's just as good as Photoshop. It's called Gimp, and you can download it here.

Now all you need is a tutorial telling you how to use Gimp!

Armed with all this information, you will doubtless create a beautiful original cover for your book in no time at all. Good luck!

Copyright 2010 Aya Katz