When I browse sites like UpWork or Thumbtack, I see countless people wanting to turn their ideas or manuscripts into books. But often, their listings are so off-base for what the industry-standards are that they can find it hard to actually get any interested freelancers to apply to their project. Even more problematic are the authors who jump into creating a book 100% themselves without any publishing experience. They often make key mistakes that can make their book seem more amateurish than it needs to.
Here are the biggest mistakes I see that can really make an indie book look unpolished.
I was looking at book covers online, as one does, and saw Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last. The colors are quite catching, and I wondered if I could recreate a similar cover. Here is the result of that, with step-by-step instructions. You will notice right off the bat that in my two-minute Google search I couldn’t find a free for use photo of a couple like the one that Atwood’s book designer used. So, instead, I used a vector graphic. I think it makes my version of the cover look a bit more like a young adult novel (hence my faux-title).