$1k Blog

Well, after much hesitation, I finally broke down and got a copy of CoverAction Pro. Although I’m not exactly a Photoshop expert, I was able to start creating my first e-cover with it within an hour of downloading the software (thanks Mark for those how-to tutorial Camtasia videos!)

You can see the results for yourself here:

http://www.how-to-diet.net/ecover.html

Now, yes, I know, it’s not perfect. In fact, it’s far from perfect. In fact, it probably sucks horribly. But it’s still one heck of an achievement for someone who was scared to death of working with graphics all his life!

Shockingly, the e-cover was well-received on the Warrior Forum - this thread has so far garnered about 30 replies, most of them positive (and those that aren’t positive contain constructive criticism, which is just as important!).

I’ll be working more with e-covers in the future, since I quite enjoy the creative process (now if only I could figure out this damn Gradient tool…) You never know, maybe I could open an e-cover service someday!

Now, to be a little bit more serious about it, I’ve been thinking about offering free e-covers to a limited number of Warriors. The objective is not primarily to build up my portfolio (although that would be nice, too). Rather, Warrior Forum has helped me a LOT over the last year, and I know from experience that people are always interested in free e-covers, so it could be a good way to give back to the community.

On a side note, if you don’t know what CoverAction Pro is, it’s a collection of Photoshop action scripts. Basically, you simply load them up into Photoshop and execute them and they handle the more complicated aspects of e-cover design (for example, adding a spiral binding or rotating the image). As a result, your ability to create an e-cover is now limited only by how well you can design the front and the side; CoverAction Pro takes care of positioning and adjusting the image to look like an e-cover.