Sarah provides a lot of good advice in this article. As someone who designs book covers for other people, I find myself in a bind at times because the client, the person paying my bills, isn’t necessarily interested in my input. They just want me to create the cover based on what they envision. When I suggest that putting five characters on the cover is going to make it too busy, and much too difficult to distinguish at a small size, they often tell me to go pound sand and then find someone who will make the cover without providing advice. But you as the writer looking for someone to make a cover for you can benefit from Sarah’s article and either make a decent cover yourself or commission a cover that doesn’t suck.
Most indie authors have rolled, with relative ease, into hiring content editors and even copyeditors, (just don’t put either under “editor” on amazon. That editor tag on Amazon is for anthologies. You also shouldn’t put your cover artist under “illustrator.” Before I figured out that clueless authors were doing that, I passed up a bunch of books because I thought “An illustrated hard boiled mystery? Too weird for words.” That tag is there for actual illustrated books.) or figuring our how to swap with other indies for these services (which amounts to hiring) or other more creative arrangements.
One stumbling block remains in most writers’ publication schedule: covers.
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Lee Dunning 