Book Publishing Question

[Supreme Pizza Of The DPRK]

Hi all, I'm looking at self publishing my first book via all the usual digital delivery services and would like to know from anyone who has experience in this the best way to go about securing cover art. Are there artists who specialize in this and if so how does payment/use rights work? This isn't a big budget venture so keeping the cost down is of high importance to me. All help is appreciated thanks.

[Bolt-01]

hmm- Depending on what sort of thing you are after, there are quite a few folk on here who would probably be able to deliver you a pretty decent cover and I know of at least one boarder who is handy with text and would be plenty happy to sort the cover text for you both free and gratis... (or at least a compy copy of the file)

[AlexF]

In terms of rights, in theory it is sensible to agree these up front with an artist what you're looking for.

The option most 'real' publishers prefer is for the artist to take a payment up front for the job, and for them to sign over all rights to you (the publisher), so you are then free to use the same artwork again, should you end up wanting to publish the book a second time, or sign it over to a 'real' publisher, for example. The other option is to pay less money to license a piece of artwork so you can print it x number of times on your cover. Then, if you want to republish in future, you'd have to re-license the artwork.

In the world of self-publishing, we're not talking large sums of money. As Bolt says, it shouldn't be too hard to find an artist, e.g. from this very forum, who's willing to work for free (or not much money), but you should at least agree on giving them an easy-to-find credit in the book!

A lawyer would tell you to do all this in writing; a decent human being on a message board would say 'can't we all just be friends and assume no one's going to screw anyone else over a passion project?'