A lot that attracts readers to read your stories are book covers! Now, because I'm quite OCD with my books, I like them looking very similar with a theme to my bio, but often people don't.
For my book covers I use the app/website Canva. This is a really good app which can be used for all sorts of things like adverts, newspaper stuff etc & book covers who would have thought!
Canva is really good because you can get structured layouts already which is very easy & gives you less of a job to do. However, there is many different types of covers you can get!
Personally, when I'm making a cover I will use the section 'Poster' or 'Blog Graphic', both of these have the size to fit as the perfect wattpad cover so nothing is cropped out.
I am going to use the simple example using the section 'Poster'. I chose a simple cover with a simple font, cover etc. However, now to make it your own!
To get a background picture, I use WeHeartIt to discover & find pictures that I like. Now as I said, I like my covers having a theme, which is usually a colour scheme or a similar 'vibe'.
I typed in 'white' in the search bar to get my picture but if you want your covers looking similar, people will often create collections of themes which has very similar themed pictures which is really helpful in this case. But because I am only making one sample cover, I only had to choose one picture.
So I chose this picture to use as my background:
Going back into Canva, I deleted the original background picture & replaced it with my own.
To do this you tap on the original picture, press the delete button.
Then to import your own picture you click on 'uploads' which is on the sidebar.
After pressing 'uploads', you press the 'photos' button which then shows your camera roll.
You then select the picture you want to use as your background.
Then, you make the picture fit the page as much as you want. Personally, I like filling the whole page, however in some accounts I have not & have instead used a block colour but I can explain that in another post if anyone wants that.
Once doing that, you click on your background picture & then keep clicking 'Down layer' on the above bar until all text is over the picture.
Now it is time to fiddle with the positioning, colour & font of the text. For this example I chose to go simple.
Double tap on the text, this will allow you to rewrite the text if you want to (I changed it to 'Covers'), you can change the font, there is a range of choices for you to choose from for the front (I chose 'CINZEL').
You can also change the size & colour (I changed it to a pink, then I changed all of the text to the same pink colour).
I decided I didn't like the setting of the text so I moved it around & changed the size of the text to get the final result:
As I said, this is a very simple cover however I do believe that sometimes simple is the best.
Simple version:
1. Get pictures from WeHeartIt (can you google or Tumblr or whatever source you like)
2. Open Canva
3. Select your style of Design e.g. Poster or Blog Graphic
3. Select a layout
4. Delete original picture & replace with your own
5. Change fonts & titles if you want to
6. Change it around if you want to & add things in
7. Done!
If there is anything that is confusing about this or something that you don't understand because I will be happy to help in any way shape or form.