In my previous post, I talked about how to convert a presentation to a report or e-book. This week, I want to show you how to design a cover for that report or e-book in PowerPoint. If you aren’t a designer and yet want to design an e-book or report cover in PowerPoint, you’ll find it a simple way to go. You already know the program, so there isn’t a learning curve like there would be for Photoshop or another high-end program. At the end of this post, I’ll suggest some other programs you can use instead.
I’ll also explain how easy it is to create the 3D image of the cover you see here.
What size will it be?
A report will almost always be 8-1/2 x 11 (or A4). But an e-book (I’m not talking about a Kindle book) can be any size. I prefer 6×9 because:
- Many paperbacks are that size or a similar size
- It gives the book more pages
Whatever size you choose, set your slide size to that. To set the slide size, click the Design tab, then Slide Size or Page Setup. Choose Custom Slide Size to set the size you want. Set the Orientation to Portrait.
Keep it simple
Since (I’m assuming) you aren’t a designer, you want to keep it simple. The basic concepts are:
- Use a white background
- A border is optional
- Use a band of bright color — or even two
- Use white text on the band
- Find an big, bold image or make a collage, like the one I created for the middle of the cover
- Put your name and credentials at the bottom
- A subtitle can help entice people to buy because it explains the value of the book
Sketch out your cover on a piece of paper. That’s right, paper. Then simply add shapes (rectangles), text boxes, and images. Move everything around until it looks good.
Export the slide as an image either by selecting everything, right-clicking and choosing Save as Picture, or by choosing File, Save As and choosing on of the image options from the Save as Type drop-down list. Ask a few friends for feedback.
Insert the cover into your report or e-book
Then insert the image into the beginning of your Word document. For image wrapping, choose square or tight to get the most flexibility to place and size the image the way you want it.
Make it 3D
The purpose for a 3D cover is just to present it as a product on a sales page. Here are the steps:
- Insert the image of the cover
- Right-click and choose Format Picture.
- In the 3-D Rotation section, click the Presets arrow and choose one of the options. I often use “Off Axis 2 Left” in the Parallel section.
- In the 3-D Format section, in the Depth area, increase the size until the book looks big enough. (Don’t exaggerate!)
- In the Lighting area, increase the Angle setting until the side of the book (the depth) doesn’t look so black; 70 degrees usually works for me.
- In the Shadow section, click the Presets arrow and choose one of the options. I usually choose “Perspective Diagonal Upper Right” in the Perspective area.
- Right-click and choose Save as Picture.
That should take you under a minute and it’s a great look for a sales page.
Other design options
For non-designers, there are a number of online graphic design websites. All let you combine images and text. Here are a few that I know of:
Have you designed an e-book or report cover in PowerPoint? What tips can you share? Leave a comment! And share this post with others because they might find it useful — just use the Share buttons below.
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Learnt something new. I was not aware that this was possible, I will try this for my upcoming book presentation.
Your site is unnavigable … (I guess these comments are more appropriate on the site redesign blog, but here is where I encountered the problem)
In this article the first thing you say is “last week …”. I’ve been trying to find that article:
– There is no hyper link in this article to it..
– you didn’t include the title of the other article, so I can’t search for it
– I tried the tags, but that article does not have a tag that matches tags on this one (create a new “ebook” tag)
– it is not listed in the “Related Posts”
– I went to your home page, but the articles do not show dates, so I can’t find it that way
– Your search window is hard to find.
– you have a drop down to find blogs by “category”, but the ebook tag does not appear, so what category are these 2 articles covered by? How are we to guess? I tried all 3 labels from the “Filed Under” label, but only this article showed up, not the one I was looking for.
– There is not visual indication that the categories in “Filed Under” and “tagged with” are actually hyperlinks (I found that by accident).
Eventually, after too many minutes I found the article by using the built in search to look for “ebook”. But even there it was hard to recognize (but that is not your fault).
Other than that, good material., just a little hard to find.
Thanks.
Ron, you’re right. I used to have a WordPress theme that made it easy to go to the previous post and so I used language like “last week.” When I had the site redesigned, the new theme didn’t have that type of link. I’ve edited the post to add a link to that previous post and I’m glad you found it. I have a page that lists all of my posts, http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/pptblog/powerpoint-tips/, and that has an easy-to-find Search box and I searched for “e-book” to find it. Thanks for persisting!