When posting a story, there are four things you need before you can post. Right now, we're going to focus on the most attention-grabbing aspect: the cover.
Yes, yes. We have all heard the age-old saying that one should not judge a book by its cover. And this is true. You shouldn't. A crappy book can have an amazing cover, and an amazing book can have a crap cover. However, the goal of the cover is not to make or break a book: it is to draw attention to the book. Your book is out in a sea of hundreds of thousands of other books, and people need a reason to pause and be like 'wait, what's this?'
A great book cover is a very important way to do just this. We are attracted to pretty things. It cannot be helped. And honestly, most of the time, when people see a subpar cover, they'll expect an amateur-level book, especially on Wattpad. Not because this is the for-sure case, but because people expect those taking their craft seriously to have explored ways to get or create a solid cover.
Is it a for-sure indicator? No, but it's more akin to a rule of thumb that people use. Myself actually included...
"But Cross," you say with a frown, "I have no cover skills."
Well, me neither, so I'm glad you're part of the club of talentless designers! Thankfully for you, there are many amazing designers across Wattpad! Dreamland itself has a plethora of talented designers you can request from over on Dreamland Graphics. Most communities will have a graphic shop you can check out, and you can also search for graphic designers across Wattpad :smile: Most have pretty reasonable "payment" (not money payment, but Wattpad tasks like reads or follows).
Do keep in mind, though, that 95% of the covers you find here are not for commercial use. If you try to use the covers you have designed for you out in the publishing world, well... You may just get sued.
Okay, now that we have all that preamble out of the way, we need to address the most important question you'll have to ask yourself when approaching a cover: what do you want?
Before you can even answer that question, it is important to know a couple different of things: common cover styles and common cover types!
●○●○●○ Cover Styles●○●○●○
-----Simple Covers: Simple covers are the most, well, simple (hah) of the cover styles. Most of the time, you find a picture online and make some small tweaks or add some pretty text, and bam, there's the cover! Maybe a glow is added, sparkles, changes to give a person cat eyes. These covers, if they have any, will have just really basic edits like that. These ones can be very effective, but depending on the designer, it can veer toward text-slap territory, which is just throwing text on an image. Not saying covers like this can't look fantastic, but it can also be *very* easy for text-slap covers to... really obviously be text slap.
Keep in mind, these covers usually just mean finding a nice image off the internet to use. This is not meaning someone draws the image and puts text on it. That is another type of cover entirely. Might as well address that one next, though it is very uncommon on Wattpad.
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