Help with cover art

[Eireann]

As you know, I'm self-publishing my book soon. The main thing I need to do first, is to create cover art. I'm not yet adept in this practice. I have the image itself, but pasting it from Photoshop into Word means that I end up with an image of less than half a page, surrounding by white borders. I also need to put the title on the image. Oh, and the image is horizontal, rather than vertical.

So. How do I put the whole thing on an entire page in Word, or can it be done? I'm thinking of taking the image and fading it into black for the lower half of the page.

[AccountingDrone]

MAy sound like a funky workaround, but go to the lol cat site, load the image into lolmaker, use their program to put the wording onto the image, and save the image ...

I normally load images into paint, and use the A type insert function to put text onto pictures then hit save as some other jpg title. You can size the image in paint in a number of ways depending on the picture. There are probably a lit better graphics programs out there, but I normally work with no budget for stuff and sort of work around issues.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

I don't think you want to put your artwork into Word. I don't know how you're planning on publishing it, but people used to send me artwork all the time in Word, and I kicked it back 100 percent of the time. As a graphic artist, artwork sent to me in Word is all but useless. Most likely, your publisher will want some other file format.

[Eireann]

It'll be an e-book. I know Amazon Kindle (where I'm publishing) takes documents in Word, but as for the cover, I don't know yet.

[Kogarashi]

My recommendations would be to either do the cover in Photoshop, or lay it out in a program like InDesign or Quark, which are meant for layout work. Both programs are capable of exporting as PDF as well. Of course, this assumes you have access to one of these programs....

[Eireann]

But then how do I have it cover a full page in Word?

[Kogarashi]

I'm not entirely sure about that. I'm not familiar with the setups for publishing with Amazon Kindle. If they take PDF format, you should actually be able to export the Word files into InDesign or Quark. As for doing the cover in Word, the most I can think of is putting up with the border around the pictures. Are you at least making sure the picture is the size of a full page in Photoshop?

Unfortunately, most of my book layout experience was done in Quark (and InDesign is basically just Adobe's less expensive version of the program and what I actually have on my computer), since Quark was the publishing standard where my university's speculative fiction literary journal was printed.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

According to the husband, tags are added to the cover page and it will show up the way it's supposed to if the tags are correct.

He says there is a kindle page over at Amazon that explains it. I have not looked at it.

I'm prepping files for the same thing myself over here, but he's my project manager on all that. He just tells me what to do and I do it. So I haven't seen the page myself. But this thread prompted me to ask him since it's info I will be needing myself.

[Eireann]

Okay! The cover ISN'T uploaded as part of the book text. This is a huge help. Now, I still need to create the thing. Here's a good way to learn some badly-needed Photoshop skills.

[AccountingDrone]

I was thinking that calibre might be somehow useful - it will convert almost any ebook file to any other ebook file, I popped open one of my ebooks in epub, and it has 3 different subfiles, one of which is the cover.

I used to use mobipocket editor to make ebooks, but then I got a droid that uses aldiko to read and it will not handle mobi files/

[Eireann]

I DID it! Diditdiditdidit!

I created a cover in Photoshop (simple cover, nothing fancy), then sent it to a friend who has already read the book. She thinks it's perfect for the type of book I've written.

Well - wish me luck in self-publishing. I haven't done it yet, but it's almost ready; I'll be making the big move in a few days!

[Kogarashi]

Yay, and good luck!