If you’re an author who’s just starting out in the game, then you’ve probably found yourself wondering how you can actually design an amazing book cover. You may not have the budget just yet to spend hundreds on a professionally-made book cover, and that’s completely fine. Luckily, there’s a super easy way you can make an amazing book cover in just a few minutes, totally free: It’s called Canva.
My History With Canva
I discovered Canva back when I was first starting to write books, way back when I was in 7th grade. At the time, Canva was a much smaller service. Today, it’s expanded in an insane way to include things like AI tools! Seriously, it’s wild to see how much things have changed since then. I use Canva all the time alongside Photoshop, but since you have to pay for Photoshop, I won’t mention it in this article.
I will discuss how to make a great book cover using Photoshop later, so stay tuned for that ;)!
At the time, I used Canva primarily to make covers on Wattpad before starting to work on my own novels and novellas. I really liked Canva for its simplicity and ease-of-use, and I’ve been a loyal Canva customer since then.
In fact, I use Canva for the covers of my series, The Fallen Age Saga.
But, Isn’t Canva a Subscription??
Yes and no. Canva is a freemium service, so it has a free tier and a premium tier. You don’t need the premium tier for basic things, so don’t worry about it just yet. I did review Canva Pro in a separate post in case you wanted to look into it and get a few opinions on it though.
How to Make a Book Cover in Canva
I made a new Canva account without the Pro access to show you all how it looks like and how you can do it. The first step in the design of your own free book cover would be to sign up for Canva–naturally. I just used my Gmail account because I don’t like remembering and writing down passwords, LOL!
This is what your dashboard in Canva looks like when you first sign up:
What you’re going to do first is you want to type in the type of project you’re going to make. Just type in something like ebook and pick the size that is right for you.
Canva will offer up some templates or you can choose to work from scratch:
For the sake of simplicity, I picked a template, but if you’ve got an itching for design, go ahead and create a blank cover!
Just a note, some templates are available for purchase or for Pro subscribers only, but you can just pick any of the free ones if a template helps you orient your ideas better.
Now that you’ve picked a template (or no template), here’s what the design space looks like:
Alright, so I’m going to be designing a contemporary romance novel and I’m just going to pick a random title. Let’s go with… Falling For You. Yeah, that sounds romance-y enough!
But honestly, I don’t like that image. Like, at all. So, what can I do to replace it?
Well, Canva has a section called Elements, where you can find graphics and stock photos to use. You can also use websites like Unsplash and Pexels if you want more free stock photos. Canva’s stock photos are sourced from premium sources, so you may need Canva Pro for quite a lot of the pictures!
So, I’m just going to use Unsplash to find a picture that I actually want and then copied it and pasted it into my Canva project. Basically, this is what I’ve gotten now:
Tip: If you accidentally delete your image, just click on “Uploads.” Even if you copied and pasted the picture into Canva, it’ll be in the uploads tab!
Alright, but I still really don’t like that title’s font. Just click on the text or go to the “Text” tab and add a textbox. You’ll see that it shows you the font you’re using:
Now, Cinzel and Cinzel Decorative are really good fonts for book titles. A lot of authors use it and it’s free so, obviously a lot of people like it. I do like the font, so I think I’m going to keep it. I did resize it and here’s what I got now:
Ah, much better now!
Obviously, all that’s left is to change the author name, as my name is obviously not Sebastian Miller.
This is much more acceptable now!
And really, that’s it. That’s all you need to do to make a book cover, totally for free, in Canva! I didn’t spend a cent on this cover. I got the image from Unsplash, the font was free, and so was the template. All that was needed was a bit of a design spin on the whole thing.
Feel free to experiment and try out new and interesting designs. You might find that you can get some really cool covers. Here’s an example of a cover for a dystopian novel:
And even fantasy:
My point is, you can easily design a book cover for free in Canva because Canva makes it really easy to do so. I love Canva’s interface and I think that it’s perfect for beginner graphic designers.
Once you start raking in some cash from those books of yours, maybe give Canva Pro a try. Or, give its free-trial a go! For 30 days, you can get access to everything Canva Pro has to offer when you sign up with my link!