If you haven't been reading A Newbie's Guide to Publishing, you should. As with any blog, read it with a critical mind, but Konrath does address a lot of good points about publishing and the effect that e-books are having on the industry.
I've been reading The Innovator's Dilemma
I'll say right off that I don't know how to create a great book cover. What I want to explore in this post is my thinking behind the evolving cover for my first novel, Of Fish and Swimming Swords.
When self-publishing, you have to provide covers for each of the formats you're publishing. If an electronic edition, you'll need the equivalent of a front cover. If going with a POD edition, you'll need the front, spine, and back of the cover. Usually, you want the electronic cover to be a version of the POD cover. For my covers, I'm using Inkscape for vector drawing and the GIMP for final composition and effects. Both are free, open source applications that have versions for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and most UNIX/Linux distributions.
I'm thinking about self-publishing my novel, Of Fish and Swimming Swords, on Kindle and other ebook readers. Today, I want to talk a little about the process I'm using to build the book as I do final edits and formatting.
The easiest way to build a book for Kindle and have a good chance that it will look like what you want is to create a MobiPocket file. Amazon makes available all of the tools you need to create one of these files. I use a Mac, so if you use either a Mac or a Linux/UNIX system, you should be okay. I'm not sure how things work on Windows.