Canva covers continued

Further to my experiments with cover making, I have now finished a ‘cover’ for all of my fanfics.

I obviously couldn’t use the picture that inspired the Casper story. It was nsfw. *grins*

I posted them all on my Pinterest page and I reckon they look pretty good. I certainly don’t know enough about this to design my own book covers, but for fanfiction, they look fine. If you do use images like this for book covers, make sure a commercial use is allowable. All of the images here are free for all uses, unless they come from the movies themselves.

What I notice now is how many things out there are made from the same templates. I see them everywhere from podcast headers to some real covers on Amazon. I know how to do that for myself.

And as an added bonus, I’ve noticed a few more hits to some of the stories that usually don’t even get one in a month, like my Vin Diesel one.

So, all round, it’s been fun and educational.

Links:

mtr’s fanfic Pinterest board

my last post about Canva 

Making covers with Canva

I was tooling about on my Pinterest page and realised that my fanfiction list is missing an awful lot of entries. I don’t have Photoshop skills, I failed with Gimp - I needed another degree to work that one - and most of the banner makers I know from ages ago aren't doing it anymore.

But in the spirit of learning things from free videos, I was watching one where the person was making a printable book for Amazon. She’d upload it and if it sold, fine - if it didn’t, it had taken less than one hour of her time to make it. With print on demand, it cost her nothing other than time to produce a journal. And she could get weirdly specific: things like migraine journals and so on. She was selling the way to make these journals in more detail.

She used Canva. I had looked at it before, but needed some more guidance and watching the talk helped me see how to use it. It’s a lot like the old Microsoft publisher - yes, I’m showing my age. 

So I had a go with some of the prompts from the Anon twilight one shot contest from years ago. It took me about an hour to make five of them, using the pre-loaded formats and inserting the picture prompts from the contest. The pre-loaded images are also set to the correct sizes for various formats from Facebook headers to Wattpad cover sizes. Neat.

What do you reckon?

It’s a little dark, but it’s way better than this attempt where I used Word to make a cover.

I mean for heaven’s sake… I am so used to seeing the pilcrow - that backwards P that shows formatting marks - that I didn’t notice it was visible in the cover I uploaded to Pinterest. Facepalms.

Why didn’t you guys tell me?

Links:

Canva

mtr’s fanfics on pinterest

Bought and paid for