Probably I’m not going to go into too much more of the front cover. It’s all personal taste anyway and a lot of trial and and error. I couldn’t resist trying again, and this is what I came up with:

I used a gradient for the background, I searched Pixabay it and luckily came up with the colors that I needed. I softened the photo again and added the text boxes for the title and my name. I did a separate text box for Running to and Love because the Love was spaced too far below Running for it to look good. I’m not 100% sure I would use this either, in fact, I would maybe look for a different photo. But anyway, the gradient looks nice. Play around with the fonts and sizes. Maybe add a tag line.

The how-to blog post from Joanna Penn that I referenced in my last blog post uses textures as a background filler. I tried to look for something similar here, but I couldn’t come up with anything except the color. But I only used one photo instead of mashing up three or four like she does, so that didn’t help.

Here is a list of websites I use for pictures and textures:

PIxabay

Pexels

CanStockPhoto

Dreamstime

Various

Gratisography

Textures

Textures

You’ll have to double check what the terms and conditions are of the photos and textures on these sites, but I think they are okay. Dreamstime looks like it might be a bit spendy, but even if you publish one book a year, shelling out a little bit of money isn’t too much of a big deal, especially since you’re doing the design yourself.

Maybe I’ll try one more time with a different picture. Remember, if this seems like a crap idea, you can still use the CS Cover Creator. After messing around with a cover for hours and hours it might not seem like a bad idea after a while.

Oh, hey, my next blog post will be about cover templates. I’ll look into it for ya.

Until next time!