Planning to get onto Fiverr

Well, you're on the art and design board. There's a lot of people here who make a living from their design work. You won't find many of them suggesting that $5 is a reasonable fee for a logo or a book cover. Nor is 99designs a great idea - asking people to work on spec, without any guarantee of payment. Not cool.

If you look at the top of this board, you'll find a recommendations thread. Why not find a proper book cover designer and pay the going rate for quality work?

The fewer people that support awful, exploitative sites like Fiverr and 99Designs, the better.

Think about it. If you need to get a leaky pipe fixed, do you post a contest for plumbers in which you make them all do work on your pipes, and then only pay the plumber whose work you like the best? Of course not. You research plumbers and hire one whose previous work you like and comes with good recommendations, and then you pay that one plumber for his work. Why should designers be treated any differently?

Find a designer whose work you like and then pay that designer real money, like you would for any other service.

I think some of the fiverr stuff is legit. I mean if someone wants to hold up a sign advertising your website and take a crappy picture of it, surely that's not worth more than 5 dollars

The people who are really making money on Fiverr aren't doing it $5 at a time, they're doing multiple orders or extra add-ons that make the total come out higher (still nearer $25-$50 than the several hundred you can expect to pay for high-quality cover art).

I use the site myself; it's nowhere near as exploitative as 99Designs competitive interface or Elance's obscenely low rates (ghostwriting for $100? Get real).

Ugh, Fiverr. Urgghhh.

"Exploitive" covers it in a nutshell. While I'll agree with MumblingSage that the tier system evens it out a bit, it's a nightmare to promote on (this knowledge comes from my other half, who tried to offer small photo editing services) and it's still nowhere near as useful as art networks like Deviantart (which also has an underselling problem, but not to the same extreme).

I'm working via Fiverr with about 15 services and I can tell you, with the exception of a few, there is no true $5 services there. The basics are $5. But for example if you want me to format a 100k ebook, that one usually ends around $50+. Fiverr is not a bad thing at all. It's a good secondary source of income, plus it's good for networking, to know new people. There are plenty professionals there. But as the others told, don't expect miracles for $5 as those are the very basics. And in the 21st century, unfortunately everything is exploitive. The question is can you turn it to your own favor or not.