Let’s move on, shall we? Now, let’s focus on getting things done. Good news: Practically-speaking, there’s not much to it!
Your book cover design doesn’t need to win awards. What your cover design just needs to do is look the part. It’s a uniform, basically. Ideally, you’ll want the cover to attract prospects. That’s difficult. But what you absolutely positively don’t want to have is a cover that will repel a prospective reader if their eyes happen to fall on your cover. Guess what a crappy homemade book cover does.
You can get one done for only $5!!! Yes, only $5 for a pro book cover design. Through the Fiverr website. The artists are able to charge higher prices now, but I just did a search for book cover, and there are still quite a number of them that charge just $5 to start (they can charge more for premium services and features, which you won’t really need for a Kindle book). We’re talking pro quality cover designs here.
Five bucks. You can’t afford that? You gotta be kidding me. For the sake of argument, let’s do some really simple math. That’s 20 quarters. Just toss a quarter a day into a jar. In less than 3 weeks, you’ve got your five bucks. Oh, you don’t have quarters on weekends? That’s just a month’s worth of weekdays to get to a five, then. Or just skip tomorrow’s coffee and pastry at Starbucks and be done with it, for goodness sake.
One last tip, and this has nothing to do with money. Go for larger, thicker typefaces (fonts). So the title and author byline will still be legible when viewing that cover at smaller sizes, especially thumbnails. You know, how your cover will normally appear to prospects browsing through Amazon and other sites. Sans serif fonts usually do better with resizing, by the way, than traditional serif faces.
For similar reasons, take the draft cover designs you’ll be getting from the artist and examine them at smaller sizes, not just big ones! Some of those cover designs, particularly the highly detailed ones, can sometimes look really odd when shrunk down in size.
Good luck and have fun!