It is no surprise that a book must always contain an excellent cover to deliver a good first impression. When a user browses an ebook store, one thing will immediately grab his attention: The cover art itself and its artistic style. Aside from the book’s description, the cover image is worth a thousand words. This is practically publishing 101, and it’s something every new publisher should always keep in mind. But guess what? A book’s cover doesn’t always have to present state-of-the-art graphics or an elaborate style. Even though this seemingly contradicts what I said above, the fact is that a “good” cover image is simply any art style that fits your book. That simple. Whether your book has a beautifully-rendered landscape or simply a dark background with white font, it’s considered a masterpiece as long as it effectively delivers the message to the reader.

That said, you have plenty of options for creating a book’s cover image easily without having to learn advanced Photoshop techniques or spending tons of cash.

Visit professional photo hosting websites such as Fotolia, iStockPhoto and Dreamstime. You can purchase beautiful pictures with a license to use them on your works for roughly $1.25 a piece. As far as the font goes, you may even use Microsoft Paint depending on the cover image. For example, if you search the aforementioned sites for “Isolated” images, you will find a lot of people/objects on white or dark backgrounds. In such cases, it is perfectly fine to rely on a simplistic font that fits the image properly, including Times New Roman, Arial or other.

If you wish to go a little more advanced without (again) having to learn advanced Photoshop techniques, join MyeCoverMaker. For only $10 per month, you have access to many useful features commonly used when creating book covers. Everything works in a drag-n-drop fashion, allowing you to make the font smaller or bigger by modifying it with your mouse cursor. The same applies to the image itself without compromising any quality. I don’t know how they do it, but it amazes me to this day. I have been able to turn 200×200 images into much bigger ones while retaining the vast majority of its quality. Moreover, everything you include in your covers is in the form of layers, allowing you to delete or modify any object on the fly. If you need to create book covers on a regular basis and lack any advanced artistic skills, MyeCoverMaker is an excellent choice.

While on the subject of Web-based photo editors, let’s not forget to mention sources like FotoFlexer and Pixer. These may not be the most appropriate for creating a cover image from scratch, but are a great way to modify existing images quickly and easily. You may crop, saturate, rotate, and add many more effects to your images. These are great to use along with any other editing tool.

Another intuitive option to create quick ebook covers is to hire someone on Fiverr. This site is a Godsend for anyone who needs just about anything done. Best part of all? Gigs only cost $5. So, if you don’t wish to do the work yourself using the above options, spare a $5 and provide the necessary details for someone to create a cover for you. Please note, however, that you may need to provide a background image first. In that case, purchase one at the sources mentioned above, then allow your Fiverr worker to work wonders.

That’s about it for now. In case you’re curious, I tend to rely mostly on MyeCoverMaker over anything else. In the end, though, whatever you choose depends on your tastes as well as the amount of control and quality you want to put into your ebook covers.

Good luck!