You’re indie publishing your book. You’ve scoured the photo and stock sites and found a photo that perfectly expresses your story. So you slap it together with some fonts and …no. Something is not quite right. Your cover isn’t working the way you had hoped.

If this is your situation, don’t completely toss the cover. All you need is a makeover. Cover Your Dreams’s makeover service takes existing cover stock images and re designs them to reflect the style and professionalism your cover deserves.

Here’s a recent example of a cover makeover:

Before

After

The stock images this author began with were fine – handsome model, nice crisp flames – but this cover had several problems. The proportions and placement were off; there was far to much negative space. I solved that by increasing the size of the model and by using a free image as a background (occasionally additional stock images must be purchased for a makeover). The font of the original cover was doing nothing, saying nothing about the story or genre. Since this is a gritty urban drama we went with a gritty look for the font and made it as large as practicable – a good practice in ebook covers. Finally the blend wasn’t properly done in the original. Blending and super-imposing images is one of the biggest challenges for cover designers but it’s worthy doing properly. As part of making the images all work together I also did some color adjustments and shading.

I think the final cover looks pretty cool. What do you think? If you have a cover that needs a makeover, the makeover service starts at $49.