Combining an image with a video really makes a book cover come alive. One of my latest passions is animating my book covers.
My fantasy romance novella, Darkness Ignites the Flame: Book 3 of The Jura series is coming out at the end of this month. Here’s the cover!
Jade and Serin thought they found a home. Darkness found them instead.
A strange red cloud covers the mountain. It poisons the water. They sense danger in that storm. An old enemy finds them. Their only choice is to pack what they can and escape through the underground tunnels.
Soon, a new, more terrifying, enemy pursues them. In order to survive, Jade and Serin must use abilities they didn’t know they had. The chase shows them they’re far more unique than they believed… or desired.
That’s a draft of the book’s summary. I’ll tweak it a bit to make it more search friendly.
Just for fun, I animated the cover.
Making this is simply creating a video and turning it into a gif. When finding stock videos to merge with your book cover, I found it’s best to use ones that have a black or a white background. For instance, the video of the snow falling had a black background which made it easier to blend with the cover.
This one was easier than I expected. The next animated book cover I designed was far more challenging.
I wanted to do one for The Merging World Series. Since Chains of the Sciell’s cover seemed the easiest to animate, I just needed a video of chains, I started with that one.
I downloaded a sample of a chains video from Shutterstock and tried it out.
It’s cool but too busy. My publisher wasn’t a fan. On to the next. I couldn’t find a video of chains that worked so I switched to The Sciell.
Animated book covers are perfect for promotions. I see more engagement on social media when I share them. They’re so much fun to make!
If you’d like to have your book cover animated, email me at [email protected].
