How to Make a Book Cover for Amazon's Kindle Part Five

We're ready to add our title.  I've picked a font and installed it as I showed you in the first post. Here's the font, though I'm not sure if it's okay for commercial use.  As this is just a non for profit tutorial, it should be all right to use here.

http://www.fontsplace.com/nicolas-cochin-ef-free-font-download.html  This is a great, classic font.

This font runs a little small.  Usually I do my cover titles in size 300, but for this font, I went up to 400.  In the picture below, I've circled the font tool.  Just click on that, find your font that you downloaded and choose your size.  Then just type!  You can use the move tool to adjust the positioning.

As you can see, the text is on it's own layer!  Which is great because now we're going to do some text effects.

My feeling on text effects:  Keep it subtle and simple.  That's it.  Only rules I follow.

All right.  What I wanted to do was add a bevel to the font to make it pop and look less flat.  To do this I went to Filters > Decor > Add Bevel and set the number to 15 in the dialog box that pops up.  

The next thing I did was add a black outline to the text.  To do this, I installed an extension in GIMP called Script Fu.  You have to have this.  It makes life so much easier.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJWkx3pcw0A  This link will show you were to get this plug in and exactly how to install it.  It's what I used.  It's great.

After that, I decided that our lady didn't stand out enough.  I went to her layer and right clicked it and merged it down so that the hair brush we used and the lady are now on the same layer.  Then, I went to Script Fu > outer glow and I chose a red color.  Hmm...for me?  The outline was too harsh, so I went to Filters > Blur > Guassian Blur and set the blur radius to 200.  Then at the top of the layer dialog box is the layer's opacity. I took it down to 65.  After ALL that?  This is what I have.

A lot to take in, but if you have a question, post it here. 

One of the things I liked about the sample cover was the crest with the series name. I'm going to do something similar.  

I went to deviant art again and searched for scroll brushes.  I've had this particular brush for a long time, but hopefully you can find something similar in your search. I made a new layer and sized the brush appropriately.

Under that layer and under the layer the lady is on, I took a large, soft round brush and painted white under it.  I set the layer opacity to 35 and used the smudge tool to soften the edges.  This made the scroll stand out without too much highlight.  On top of the scroll brush layer, I used a font called Great Vibes.  After all that, I put in a tagline.  

And that's it!  This is the final result:

I think it turned out really nice and close to our inspiration cover.  I hope this helps anyone trying to make their own covers.  It may be clunky at first, but keep practicing.  I'm going to do a follow up post where I talk about color theory and composition for your images.  But for now, this tutorial is at an end.  

If there's any questions anyone has, please post them!  I'm happy to answer them to the best of my ability.  

Good luck and happy cover making!  Also, if you use this tutorial to make your own cover, I'd really love to see it!  Leave me a link! 

Cheers-

Lillian