Following my less-than-excellent first experience with third party cover designers, I decided to give it another go.

This experience was more thought-through than the last one. I put a lot more effort into the process myself. Nevertheless, I wasn’t satisfied with the results and so I defaulted to another solution: do it yourself.

Not to be embarked upon lightly, this involved reading and watching videos about cover design, getting rid of my preconceived notions of how I wanted the cover to look, watching a ton of videos about graphic design in GIMP (because you don’t buy professional software for a one-off project) and scouring free image repositories for assest I could use (because you don’t sign up to depositphotos for a one-off project).

I’m undecided on the final result, but it’s at least more appropriate for the book. You be the judge.

Read on to hear about the process, and to see the results…