How To Make Your KDP Cover Text Stand Out With Masking on Book Bolt

Whether you have written a full size novel or a low-content book, designing your cover is one of the most important steps in the publishing process. Your book’s cover is the first thing your potential buyer sees, and contrary to popular belief, people really do judge a book by its cover.

When working with the text of your cover, there are many design tricks you can use to make your text stand out and pop. If you are an Adobe Illustrator or an Adobe Photoshop guru, you’ll definitely have more options based on your skill level, however if you are an average joe or jane like myself, you need simple, yet effective ways, to accomplish great text design.

One way to make your text stand out is through something called ‘masking’. We can easily achieve an effect like this with Book Bolt, a KDP publishing tool used for book design and keyword research. Masking is when you overlay an image over your text, and then fill that text with that image. Here is an example of masked text:

To achieve this effect, all we did was type the word ‘Journal’ in white on a black background on a book cover template in BookBolt:

In this example, we will mask the letters in the word ‘journal’ with a green scaly image. First we overlay our image over our text by clicking on the ‘mask’ icon from the left-hand menu, and upload the image.

I know, it doesn’t look too pretty ….. yet. But trust me, this will get better! After you have the image positioned in just the right spot over your text, hit ‘apply’ in the left-hand menu under ‘mask’, and voila!

Now, you can go on to create the rest of your cover, with some pretty awesome text to design around.

Your cover is arguably the most important part of your book, because this is the first thing a potential customer will see when shopping on Amazon. Your book’s listing can be optimized for all the best keywords, your description could be super enticing and well written, and your interior could be beautiful and inviting, but if your cover looks dull, sloppy, or amateur, your buyer is never going to make it to your listing page to see any of that.

If you are not an expert in design, using a tool like BookBolt can definitely help ease the learning curve. With built in drag and drop tools, and elements you can use straight from their interface, designing both your interior and cover will take a fraction of the time it would take if you were to try to figure it all out on your own.

No headaches, no frustration, no spending a whole week trying to figure out how to put your book together. Simply design it, upload it to KDP, and move on to your next one. Easy peasy, just the way it should be.

Masking is a great way to achieve that professional design look, and now, with tools like this, it’s easier than ever to make our books stand out.

Check out Bookbolt for this and other pro level design features that will make your Low-Content books really stand out from the crowd.

If you are looking for more ways to make your book stand out from the rest, check out this post:

KDP A+ Content – The Game Changer To Sell More Low-Content Books on Amazon