You need a picture for your cover and you’d rather not pay for it. The free routes are the stock sites (Unsplash and Pixabay, for example), old paintings, and art you generate yourself; every one of them comes with rules, so check the license of the exact image before it goes anywhere near your cover.
Free doesn’t mean do whatever you want.
Free book cover images
Here is what the two stock sites actually say.
Unsplash says its images are free for commercial and non-commercial use, with no permission or attribution needed (a credit is appreciated). What you can’t do is sell the images without significant modification, or compile them to make a competing service. That’s a summary; the real text is on the Unsplash license page.
Pixabay is free with no attribution, and you can modify the content into new works. The limits matter more for a cover: you can’t sell or distribute content on a standalone basis (meaning unaltered), you can’t print it on merchandise or physical products for sale, and commercial use of content that shows recognizable trademarks, logos or brands is out. There are a few more (misleading use, recognizable people in immoral or illegal ways), and Pixabay’s license summary is only a summary; the full license is the one that counts. A paperback is a physical product for sale, so read it before a Pixabay photo goes on a print cover, and turn the photo into a new work (add type, blend it with a second image) instead of using it as is.
Old paintings are the third source, and they’re worth a look if your theme is a classic one. There are hundreds of paintings of Adam and Eve and the garden, for example, plus hundreds of stock photos of a bitten apple, so it’s easy to find one that nobody else is using. If the page doesn’t clearly say what you can do with a painting, leave it alone.
The last option is making the art yourself, which gets its own section below.
Can I use any image for my book cover?
No. A picture turning up in Google Images or on Pinterest tells you nothing about who owns it or what you’re allowed to do with it, so don’t use one from either until you know.
Amazon’s KDP help page on ebook covers says you must have the rights to EVERYTHING on your cover. That includes the fonts. When I put fonts in my Word templates, some were free and some were paid, and my license doesn’t pass to you (I can’t transfer it). Check the font you want, pay for it if it needs paying for, or switch to a free one, because there are lots.
So how do you find out who owns a photo? My six free Word cover templates come with seven free video lessons, and lesson 4 is finding and using images: the best cheap places to find royalty-free stock photos, plus a trick for finding a photo’s original owner or license info. That’s the free sign-up.
Put your title on a cover. Then make it your own.
Six free Word cover templates and seven short video lessons on genre, images and fonts, so you’re not starting from a blank page.
Stock photos for book covers
Everybody uses stock photography, major publishers included. So the fear that somebody else has your picture is real, but it’s smaller than you think.
Duplicates can’t be avoided entirely. If you find a perfect, beautiful picture, there’s a good chance someone else will use it too (the better the picture, the more covers it shows up on); and if you and another author both grabbed the same royalty-free photo, that’s what royalty-free means. Ranting about it only gives their book free marketing. I’d argue you just need the better design and the better book.
That said, don’t take the first great photo and use it as is. Spend a lot of time searching: one or two brilliant pictures beat something mediocre you’re trying to fix. Then change the one you pick enough that it won’t be identical to the other covers using it, and before you commit, scroll through the top 40 or so in your category and see whether it’s already on one.
Close-up faces get reused a lot. They can be really powerful, but a face from a stock site is likely to turn up on another cover, so if the face matters, get a friend to pose or hire a model for a quick photoshoot.
Plain scenery and nondescript pictures are safer: simple and beautiful, but not so perfect that every other author wants them. The most amazing genre-specific picture you can find (a vampire couple, say) is exactly the one a dozen other books are going to use.
Free book cover art
If the right picture doesn’t exist, make it. My free AI book cover generator makes the art and the title in one go, and you choose the engine: Ideogram is the premium one, with 3 free covers a day; OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 is standard quality with unlimited free covers; GPT-4o is there too. Upscaling and remixing use credits. I pay for every generation, and traffic is not kind to my bank account, which is why the premium engine has a daily limit.
The art is the easy part. The text is where it goes wrong: AI tools will probably get the lettering wrong, or pick a font that doesn’t fit the genre, and lame type will ruin gorgeous art. So I’d respin until the image is right, then add your own genre-appropriate type afterward (best fonts by genre is a decent place to start). It’s safer on licensing too; if the AI invents lettering that looks a lot like a commercial font, that could be a problem later.
Two more things before you publish. KDP asks you to disclose AI-generated content, and its AI content guidelines say AI-generated images include cover and interior images and artwork. If an AI tool created it, it counts, even if you edited it a lot afterwards. If you made the image yourself and used AI only to edit or refine it, KDP calls that AI-assisted and you don’t have to disclose.
And some readers object to AI art on a cover (I’ve written about that before). Better to know going in.
How to make the image yours
A free picture is one anybody can download, so change it until it’s yours.
- Crop it differently from the original; tighter, or off center to leave room for the title
- Recolor it: one monochrome tone, a color gradient, or everything gray with one red element
- Add a bit of texture
- Put a small scene at the bottom and fill the rest with sky or clouds, which is easy to put text over
- Blend two images, say a cityscape behind a close-up of a couple (you’ll need to strip the background off the couple, or blend the edges of both photos)
- Search “transparent PNG” for cutouts that already have no background and drop them over your picture (same license check applies)
- Then the type
My free online cover editor gives you the tools for this: layers, blending modes (multiply, screen, overlay and others), fonts, effects and templates, with preset sizes for 6×9 and 5×8 covers. It’s like Photoshop but free and online. For cutting people out of a photo, I used to have to place hundreds of tiny dots around a character by hand; automatic background removal is easy and kind of magic now, and there’s a post on AI background removers.
When the cover is done, run it through the free “does my book cover suck?” critique, and check it against the 7 rules of professional book cover design. The blink test in there (can someone tell the genre in one second?) is the one to start with.
If you’d rather start from a layout than a blank canvas, my DIY Book Design & Formatting Bundle has 150 editable Word cover templates (80 fiction, 70 nonfiction), formatting downloads and five courses; the list price is $197 and through this link it’s $39, with a 30-day refund if it’s not for you.
Your next cover doesn’t have to start with a blank page.
My DIY Book Design bundle has 150 editable Word cover templates (80 fiction, 70 nonfiction), the formatting downloads and five courses. It’s $197; through this link it’s $39. The cheapest time to fix a cover is before you pay to promote the book.
If it isn’t useful, email support within 30 days for a full refund.
