Ebook cover creators.

I’m fully aware that my artwork isn’t going to scare the pants off any pro but I just can’t afford to pay twenty zillion pounds for someone else to paint my covers.

     This past weekend I spent considerable time perusing the web sites offering this very piece of software. The functions within the myriad sites are relatively straightforward, and no more difficult than I could achieve with GIMP, but the large stocks of pre-painted book covers, whilst beautifully presented and far better than anything I could ever come up with, are just so generic.

     Perhaps it’s a mistake but I always try to paint my covers with an important scene from whichever novel they come from, but try as I might I simply could not come up with an image of giant lizards, or a half destroyed Buckingham Palace, and you can imagine my success in finding an image of giant lizards destroying Buckingham Palace. It was the same for my other books. A pterodactyl flying over the streets of Los Angeles, or a giant lizard cruising over Tower Bridge simply weren’t within their impressive stocks.

     Therefore, unless I can find a site catering for a mind as strange as mine, I’ll either have to save enough for a real artist, or simply improve my painting. And there’s my next problem. That might take years when I could be writing.

     So my question is this. I know everyone rails about the importance of magnificent book covers, but for Kindle, my main platform, does it really matter that much? Which is to say, would even my artwork stand less chance of sales than a bland cover with just the name of the novel?