How to Mock Up Book Cover


Book Covers Made Easy

Good design is about being superbly common. Every year, folks look to other people magazines to agree and dress the same. Some dude in some office somewhere decided red was happening.   With book covers, we’re designing new covers to look like successful covers, because being different doesn’t attract attention. We crave common. With that being said, let’s make nothing new.  

Finding an image

If our goal is to be common, you’d never need to create original assets. There’s enough stock photos and illustrations on the interwebs to satisfy this task.   Here is a list of sites I use for free assets. 1000+ Amazing Virus Videos · Pexels · Free Stock Videos Dareful - Free 4K Stock Video | Stock Footage for Free Free Stock Video Footage & Video Clips - Pixabay CLIPSTILL - Mesmerizing FREE cinemagraphs for your marketing & website Free Stock Footage Videos, 4k After Effects Templates and More! Free Stock Video Footage HD 4K Download Royalty-Free Clips   You really just need a background image and a person image in front. The background sets the scene (burning city, peaceful lake), and you’d want the person to have the body language that conveys the mood.   I searched Shutterstock for “woman angels”. This is a mockup, so I don’t care that it’s watermarked.  
   Download the placeholder.

Designing

I use Sketch...  

 ...but normal people don’t have Sketch, so I’m going to demo it in Keynote, which is the same as PowerPoint. First, create a document that’s 2:3 ratio and throw in your image.
 

Getting the right font

I use Dafont for free fonts. 1) Select the style. 2) Type in your preview text. 3) Download.

Style and color the text, put a Shadow for contrast.   

 Export as images.


Bonus Material

Use “Animate” to create an animated ad for your book.


Let’s wrap this up

This is a horrible cover design intended for demo purposes only. Mocking stuff up allows me to think about what potential readers will experience when faced with a grid of thumbnails. My big takeaway in this exercise is that my name is short and it shows up big on this format. Download the Keynote File

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