Free eBook Covers – How to Create Your Own for Free with GIMP – Part 1 of 2
If you want to create an ebook cover yourself, without buying ebook cover creation software or Photoshop, or paying a graphic designer to do it for you, read on. I do not promise to make you an artist! I’m not claiming any artistic talent, just the technical knowledge you’ll need to create your ecover!
1. Download and install GIMP, a free, open source image manipulation program. If you have time, you can have a lot of fun knowing what you can do with it. If you’re short on time, be careful not to get distracted from the task at hand – follow these steps to finish your eBook cover! So, you can play 😉
Just Google GIMP and you will find the download page easily.
2. Get a free template ebook cover by googling ‘free ebook cover’. The one I use in this tutorial is probably the first site you come across on ebooktemplatesource.com.
There are three types of covers to choose from: for this tutorial I’ll use the first type, called ‘cover01’
Download and save this to your hard drive. Then extract all the files to a convenient folder.
You will use the file called ‘cover01.psd’ later in the Gimp software.
3. Start Gimp.
4.First we need to create the front of your cover. This is the part you have to design yourself to fit your own e-book. I’ll show you how to make a simple one here and then you can go and play with it when you have time.
After that, we need to paste it on the cover we have already downloaded to make your e-book cover and save it properly for you to use in your e-books.
5.Click File – New
6.Set Width and Height to 500 pixels each and click OK.
7.You should now have the Gimp window and a new Image window open. Go to the image window, select Layer – New Layer. A new layer window will open. Give your new layer a name, for example Cover, and click OK.
8.In the main Gimp window, you should have a list of the layers so far; Cover and Background. Click on the Front Cover layer to make sure it’s the one you’re working on.
Now select Tools – Selection Tools – Rectangle Selection
Click anywhere in your image window and drag to create a rectangle that represents the front of your eBook.
9.Now we are going to color your cover. Once you start playing around with Gimp, you can do all sorts of fun things here. For now, we’re going to create what’s called a gradient, meaning the page will have a color that gradually blends from the foreground color to the background color.
Choose your foreground and background colors by clicking the little colored boxes in the main Gimp window.
Go to Tools – Paint Tools – Blend Tool
Click anywhere in the middle of your rectangle near the top and drag down and release. Your page will be filled with the chosen colors.
Play around clicking and dragging to and from different places and with the foreground and background colors until you get something you like.
10.At this point you can insert your photo or text. For now we’ll keep it simple and just add text.
Click Tools→Text.
Click on your cover where you want the text to start. A text editor will open. Write your text in this editor. To change the color, font, size, etc. your text, click Dialogs – Tool Options. A dialog will open in the main Gimp window where you can click on the properties of your text and play with it.
11. Add text where you need it. Each block of text will be added as a new layer so you can edit it at any time by clicking Tools – Text and then clicking the text you want to change.
12. Now you have the basics of your cover!
Next, we need to attach this to our ebook template.