Yeah, right.  Of course we judge a book by it’s cover all the time.  Unless you are specifically searching for a particular type of information and there is only one book on that subject you will pick up whichever book has the most attractive cover to look at first.  Everytime.

The cover does have to match the subject matter of your book but you do need to have one.  If you are one of those cashed up people who don’t mind spending money there are many places online where you can find graphic artists willing to create your cover for you.

If that doesn’t describe you then perhaps you would like to examine the content of the new book I published yesterday, Mr Bearlys Guide to Creating 3-D book Covers , which use the free graphics program the Gimp.  This program works on Windows, Linux or Apple Macintosh computers.

There is a massive amount of help available online if you like to search or you can get access, via the book, to a collection of video tutorials you can download for a reasonable investment.  Spending the time to learn how to use the Gimp is time well spent as you can create so many things from web page layouts, book covers, artistic works and almost anything else you can see in print or on the internet that you see daily.

Have a look at these samples.

look just like any other images you might have seen online or even on the shelves at the local retail outlet.

Far higher quality than may people would expect from a free and open source program.  I personally can’t see any value, for a non-professional, to pay $1,000 or more for a program which won’t provide sufficient additional benefit to justify it.

I am not a graphic artist, my daughter laughs at my attempts to be artistic but I can create reasonably good looking book covers and I’m getting better.  At least I think so.

You are probably far more creative than I am and will be able to make better use of the power of the Gimp.  Grab my 3D book creation guide and have a go.  If the first efforts are no good you don’t have to show anyone.  Just make another.  I did.