Canva for Authors

Canva for Authors

Hey Everyone!

My name is Renee and I love Canva. I use it to design my ebook, audiobook and paperback covers. It's simple, intuitive and fun.

My first book cover was for a sweet contemporary romance short story. I found a stock photo I liked on another website and uploaded it to Canva. I flipped the image, applied a filter then added some text.



If you'd rather leave your covers to a professional designer, then you can still use Canva to create your own promo graphics for your website, email, ads and/or social media. If you have access to the original image used on your cover, you can use that as a background for the graphic. I tweaked the transparency on the background image, used a review quote for text and popped the audiobook cover in the corner.


If you don't have the original image, there are heaps of stock photos and background images within Canva that you can use. 


I used Canva to make a graphic for the cover reveal for my latest release (the cover was also designed in Canva in a similar process to above). I found the easel graphic on another stock photo site then used a brush stroke frame in Canva to add the cover image. Lots of fun.



I used Canva to design the interior pages for my non-fiction Character Voices workbook and downloaded them as a PDF.

All the designs above are possible with the free version of Canva but the paid version provides much more flexibility. More images are unlocked along with the ability to resize a design with one click (instead of recreating it from scratch for each size, like I did with that first cover). You can trial the pro version for free for 30 days.

Canva isn't a substitute for Photoshop - you can't edit images to that level but then it also doesn't have that sort of learning curve. If you can drag and drop, you can use Canva.

Not sure what to design? Keep an eye out on social media for promo graphics and ads that appeal to you, screenshot them, then see if you can recreate something similar with your own books.