A note about covers: People do unfortunately judge a book by it’s cover. It may be sad, but it’s true. So you really need to have a good cover if you expect to sell books – even ebooks!
I’d recommend you hire someone with a strength in graphical design if you can afford to.
Or.. If you don’t want to spend much, start with a stock image from one of these sites:
First off, here are 3 sites that have royalty free images you can for no charge:
Here are some others that have very low cost stock images you can purchase:
- Crestock
- BigStockPhoto
- iStockphoto
- Veen
- Dreamstime
- Fotolia
- Getty Images
- FotoSearch
- JupiterImages
- ThinkStock
And if you want to try the Do-It-Yourself route, here are some options:
Take the image you purchase & use it with the cover creator tool I walk through how to use here.
There are also some great programs now available (most are online which is wonderful for cross-platforms):
Gimp (like Adobe Illustrator):
http://www.gimp.org/
Sumopaint:
http://www.sumopaint.com
Google Sketch Up:
http://sketchup.google.com/
Photoshop Online:
http://www.photoshop.com
Aviary Phoenix – Has built-in collaboration. Create and edit with the world. LifeHacker reviewed this as the best online image editor!
http://www.aviary.com/tools