In the past, I’ve always designed my own covers, and I’ve enjoyed doing so. But I’ve seen so many awesome covers here at WordPress, I wanted to have one like those on my new book, too. That’s a great thing about interacting with other authors here at WordPress: I think we all find a little motivation and some ideas toward improvement.

This cover is far better than I could have done myself. For one, if I have to put a person on my cover, I’m hopeless (a stick figure probably isn’t the way to go). There are some cool effects here that I wouldn’t have thought to try to do, and wouldn’t have been able to pull off if I had. If you hire a cover designer, (at a minimum) you definitely want the result to include features that you couldn’t have done by yourself.

Melissa Stevens at www.theillustratedauthor.net…