How We Got Our Book Cover

One of the most important aspects of your book is its cover. The reason is that, when someone searches on Amazon or looks on a shelf, the cover is the first thing they see. To get our cover we launched a contest on September 20 on 99designs.com. 99D is a website where you can create a design contest and work with designers to get the graphics you need. You can get just about anything, and there are various price points.

One of the cool things about 99D is its integration with Slack. Each time a design was posted on the site or a comment was made we got a notification:

As you can tell we got excited when we received our first entry within 1 hour!

We ran what’s called a guaranteed contest, meaning that we paid up front, and guaranteed the winner would be awarded the prize, which in our case was $299, a very good price for a book cover. We did this so designers knew we wouldn’t be jerking them around, asking for endless edits, essentially wasting their time for the sum of $299.

We highly recommend that if you use 99D you run a guaranteed contest.

Over the five days the contest ran we received a total of 34 designs from 14 designers. Today we selected the winning design:

There is still some updating we need to do of the content in the back, so worry not friends, you won’t be reading Latin!