Diary of a Wannabe Cover Artist

So I enjoy doing very amateur doodles in ps - mostly with blending colors and inanimate objects. Today I was thinking I might turn my rough scribbles into cheap, premade cover art and charging maybe like $10-15 per.

My question is totally out of vanity and my own self-consciousness, but do you think there's any kind of market for these kinds of covers?

Below are a few mock ups I did over the past few days. The art is really basic, and I don't want to bother opening up another site if they probably wont sell.

Thank you so much for the feedback everyone - much appreciated. I think I will go ahead and start a small site tomorrow. Maybe I can manage to sell a few just as a side project to help fund editing and cover art for my actual writing.

Toothpaste said:

1. You say these are your doodles so I assume they are all your original artwork? If you got the original inanimate object images from anywhere, are they free for use?

2. Ditto question on the fonts. Where did they come from? Do you have the right to use them?

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The images are all original and mouse drawn by me. I'm only using public domain and free for commercial use typefaces. Hopefully I should be safe in terms of legality/copyright issues.

WeaselFire said:

Absolutely not. Ignore the hundreds (thousands?) of other people doing this and earning money. Forget the many thousands of books published with these types of pre-made covers that the authors have paid for. Your future lies exclusively in designing vacation housing for the coming Zombie apocalypse.

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Sarcasm duly noted, though the question was pertaining to the aesthetics and not the general practice.

Alright, I did a little more research and have decided to raise the price point to $35 per cover. Thank you for pointing that out; I was surprised to find that even some less than stellar premade sites charge absurd amounts, though I imagine stock image costs play into that.

As much as I dislike hyphenated domain names, I couldn't pass up on the one I chose: www.premade-covers.com

Simple. Straight forward. Hopefully SEO friendly.

I made an FAQ page to address any legal issues and wrote up a brief purchasing contract. And now I'm off to work on a couple more covers.

Thanks again for the feedback everyone. Wish me luck!

Had to post, because I'm excited and have precious few people to share my joy with beyond the online world. I sold my first two covers!

I only needed one sale to be profitable (cover the $18 domain name). I was half tempted to blow the money on a better theme, but I've decided to hold off on that. Instead I reinvested in some stock photos to do covers that are not just mouse art. I've also started working in 300 dpi - thank you for the advice! These are the two covers that got handed off last night:


My husband stole my laptop for the day, and it has all my doodles on it. Since I had no motivation to draw from scratch today, I decided to make a go at manipulating stock photos into cover art. I'm using at least two images per cover to hopefully make them somewhat original/separate from their stock photo counterparts. This has surprisingly been way more time consuming than my mouse art. Spent easily seven hours on these today, and I'm still not totally satisfied. I'm also far to lazy to reorganize the website to accommodate them, so that'll have to wait until tomorrow.

I'm not perfectly certain on where to set my price point. I'm leaning towards leaving everything at $35 until I have a decent portfolio/client base.



Okay, that's all I've got. Will eventually post in the cover artist's section when I have more of a back stock.

Miss Strawberrii said:

These covers are awesome! If I had any use for them or was self-publish I'd love one from you!

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Ahh, thank you so incredibly much.

Oh, didn't see this got resurrected. Thank you! I started doodling in MS paint, lol. Over the past year I've moved on to using the slightly more sophisticated digital painting tools in photoshop. The more detailed stuff I usually sketch out the line art on paper before scanning it and adding layers of color and texture. Honestly, I wish I knew how to illustrate more cleanly. But ah well. We'll just call it a style difference.