I am nearly done revising my second novel, Once Upon An Anxious Mom, and now my baby needs a cover. This will be my fourth published book, and I feel comfortable designing my cover.

For my first book, Adventures With Postpartum Depression, I hired a cover designer on Reedsy. This was 2018, and I paid $805 for this design:

I love this cover! It perfectly expresses the vibe of my memoir, and it was totally worth the expense. At the time, I had a two-year-old and five-year-old and lacked the bandwidth to attempt my own design.

But for my second book, The Distance Learning Activity Book For Parents Just Barely Holding On To Their Last Shred of Sanity, I didn’t want to spend $805 for a cover. I played around on Canva and posted my designs on Facebook; hated everything; tried again but this time only sent my designs to a trusted friend; and hit upon the winner.

I love this cover! And it was free, except for the cost of my monthly subscription to Canva Pro. (And really, I could have designed the cover without Canva Pro, but I used the premium subscription to create the book’s content.)

For my first novel, Confessions of an Imposter Room Mom, I debated whether I would hire a cover designer through Reedsy or use Canva to design something myself. Ultimately, I decided I didn’t want to shell out big bucks for a cover until I’ve published several books in my series. Then, I can hire a professional to design covers for the entire series in one swoop for a cohesive look.

But I didn’t trust myself to design a novel’s cover! So I compromised and hired someone on Fiverr. I paid someone about $25 and three days later, I had several shitty designs. Lesson learned. You get what you pay for, and $25 gets about five minutes attention from a book cover designer.

I returned to Canva and with the advice of my one trusted friend, I designed my own cover again.

And you know what? I love it! It completely captures the feeling of that novel and it’s good enough for now.

Now it’s nearly time to publish the second book in that series, so I’m rolling up my sleeves and diving back into Canva, but this time, I’m leveling up my game with AI.

That’s right. I’ll be enlisting our robot overloads to help me design a bitching cover. I might not use AI-generated images, but when I go on writing break, I plan to play around with Midjourney and hopefully create some images that I can incorporate into the cover. I’ll probably design the final product on Canva and bounce ideas off my trusted friend. Stay tuned!