Authors are poor. This is proverbial. A recent survey showed that only 35% of published authors make a full-time living from their writing, and that’s just the housed authors. We indies, by comparison, are positively poverty-stricken. This means that many of us cannot afford even a fiver for Fiverr, much less hundreds of dollars/shekels/pounds for designers or fancy software. This post is intended to provide a few suggestions for those of you who may be in that boat and have to do everything for yourself on a budget of nil.
DISCLAIMER: Please note that I have NO affiliation with any of the sites or products I mention below. Opinions expressed are purely my own, and you’re welcome cordially to disagree. This is intended as an “idiot’s guide” and, since it is written by an idiot, it is entirely authentic.
You can see examples of my covers etc elsewhere on this website. I am a design guru in the same way that Attilla The Hun was an international peace campaigner, and the response of many of you will be: I can do WAY better than that. Good. That’s the idea. Go for it, and I’ll be the first to applaud when you succeed.
Wordprocessing
Not all of us like Microsoft WORD, or want to pay for it. If you’re in that group, you might want to look at OpenOffice. This is a free-to-download Microsoft Office alternative, produced by a co-operative of like-minded programmers. You can find it here:
I used OpenOffice for my first three YA novels, back in the day, and it’s fine. It’s 99% compatible with WORD*, and does pretty much everything that WORD does. The menu structures occasionally feel like they were designed by committee (because they were), and I recall that adding page numbers to a document was a process roughly akin to adding an extra bedroom to a space shuttle, but that WAS a couple of versions ago.
I will confess that I myself have now chewed on the projectile and invested £40 Sterling in a copy of Scrivener. But if you need a free, fully-functioned WP app, then OpenOffice ain’t half bad.
* There was an annoying bug when converting between Word and OO, in which Word would convert your quote marks to the Spanish format if you subsequently edited it, but I’m advised that that has now been cleared up…
Free Images
Good cover design starts with a good image; and there’s the rub. There are millions of images on the Net – but most of them belong to somebody. No-one wants to infringe copyright, or steal another artist’s work; but not all of us can afford to pay for the rights. Moreover, a lot of so-called “Public Domain” image sites aren’t. They have a few PD images to draw you in – and then a million Shutterstock pics which, of course, require paying for.
However, there are some decent PD collections out there. Here are three which I’ve found useful:
All of these sites yielded cover images for me, back in the days when I was writing YA/Romantic fiction.
It’s also worth knowing – and not just for Sci-Fi authors - that most NASA images are in the public domain. NASA don’t just take stunning pictures of Space – they also take stunning pictures of the Earth; and most of these are free to use. Check out their website. You just have to be a little careful with pictures taken from the International Space Station: if these were taken by a non-NASA astronaut, then copyright will reside with their “home” space agency, such as the European Space Agency (ESA). ESA images, like Europe itself, are not free-to-use.
Many other US Government agencies apparently adopt a similar policy to NASA: go search. Sadly, the British Government does not. “Crown Copyright” means just that.
Finally, the cover image for one of my books, The Falling Fire was taken by my friend Dez, and posted on Facebook. This can be a surprisingly rich source of material, even if you don’t have photographer friends. Sometimes a rubbish picture can make a better cover than a great one. Watch those feeds, guys. Make sure you ask permission, of course, and give due credit. I also gave Dez a free copy of the book, which he says he’s going to read any day now :-)
Image Editing Software
So you have a great image; but a simple photo won’t usually hack it for a book cover. It’ll need cropping, maybe filtering, re-colouring or otherwise manipulating before it can be used. You could spend half a week’s wages on Photoshop – or you could download the GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP.
If you come from the North of England, as I do, then the acronym is a little unfortunate* – but the software isn’t. It is a fully-featured photo editor, and it is entirely free. Note that this is a serious piece of software, so there is a learning-curve.
However, it will handle most basic image transformations comfortably: recolourisation, brightness and contrast adjustment, lighting effects etc are all grist to the mill. There are also a series of very cool filters, which can, for instance, make your photo look like an oil painting or a cartoon. It's wise to be cautious when experimenting with these; if you over-do it, the results can be, well, hideous. But it will definitely repay a little exploration and a bit of time spent on experimentation.
*A ‘Gimp’, where I come from, from is a foolish or socially inadequate person. Sorry.
Cover Design and Lettering
GIMP has one drawback – it’s rubbish at handling text. Or maybe I'm rubbish at making GIMP handle text. Whatever.
I produced half-decent results in this area by using Microsoft Paint (believe it or not) – but then I found WWW.CANVA.COM.
Canva is just great – it’s a web-based design program, which lets you upload an image into a standard template (it has templates for facebook posts, facebook covers and e-book and physical book covers, among others). You can then add lettering as you wish. There’s a generous collection of free fonts; but there are also “premium” design elements, which will cost you the princely sum of one US dollar per use. You can then download the finished product as a PNG or JPG file. If you register as a user (recommended), the website will store all your images in a personal directory, so you can re-visit them at any time.
I’ve used the GIMP/Canva combo for all my most recent book covers – front and back covers included - and also for my facebook adverts. I also know authors who use Canva for “roughing out” their covers before going somewhere more sophisticated to do final production. It can be a quick way to get an idea of how a cover will look, even if you don’t use it to produce the finished product.
Website Design
This is an area which scares the wossname out of a lot of authors, me included. My first attempt at a website, using GoDaddy, quite frankly sucked, and it cost me any two limbs of my choice at renewal time.
My friend Mia, who is in a rock band (www.mohawkradio.co.uk, check ‘em out, they’re awesome), then kicked me in the direction of www.WIX.COM. Because I always listen to the advice of my female friends, particularly if they look like Mia when posing with a pair of shotguns, I went and had a look. This website (as the discreet advertising will tell you) was designed using WIX.
It offers a huge selection of free templates, which provide the basic design and layout of your site (there’s one specifically for authors, which I used): you can then edit all the elements, or drop your own content into the site to personalise it. The number of design elements available is substantial, and you can access them from a simple on-screen menu. You edit or change any element on the page, just by clicking on it. This blog, for example, was added to my site with only three mouse-clicks, and the first draft of the whole site was done and up and running during the course of a single rainy Sunday afternoon. Total cost: a bottle of cheap cider, to enhance the creative wossname. The site itself is free.
It’s worth noting that Wix.com also has an immense library of quality images, which are, again, totally free-to-use.
As with all website design resources, you can upgrade for a price, but the free version, frankly, provides all the power most of us will need. The main downside to the free version is that you don’t get a Dot-com domain – hence the somewhat convoluted URL for this site – and you DO get the WIX advertising, which is only fair enough, in my view.
Promotion
This is the toughest area for a lot of us and, I’m afraid, the thinnest in terms of free resources, at least as far as I’ve discovered. Paid online marketing was already a Thing, of course, before self-publishing; and the Indie Boom seems to have attracted a lot of new players into the market, some of whom are reputable, many of whom are either hopeless or, worse, dishonest. I have a particular dislike of those people who offer “5,000 Twitter followers for $15” and only have a hundred followers themselves. Perhaps I’m being cynical, but that doesn’t seem a great advert.
In this minefield, I tread carefully: however, there are two sites I wanted to mention, because they do try to offer some kind of free traction.
www.readersgazette.com is a fun place, and looks like it. The website design is colourful, to say the least. If you register your book with them, you’ll get a spot on the site, plus a facebook post, plus free regular automated tweets.
www.bookoftheday.org is run by a guy named Gideon Stephens, who is genuine about offering better promotion to Indie authors. If he accepts your book, then you will get free facebook promotion on a specific day, plus enhanced promotion on the site. He’s also working on paid options, which I haven’t explored yet. Gideon’s a nice guy, and his site deserves at least a visit.
Well, that’s it. I hope everyone who reads this post will find at least one place/thing they didn’t know about, and I hope they help you. Good luck!