How much should I be paying for stock photography for my Book Funnel lead magnet cover?
I’ve decided to take Thomas’s advice and I’m learning how to deliver my next lead magnet short story through Book Funnel. Again, following advice, I paid for a professional edit for the story and am working with a designer (actually two) for the cover. Both designers are friends of mine who are interested in expanding their offerings into cover design so it’s an experiment in learning for all of us. They aren’t charging me for their services but I obviously need to pay for fonts and images, right?
I don’t have a big budget (especially for a lead magnet) and what we’ve discovered so far seems a little confusing and the professional level is really pricey to me.
I’ve had writer friends tell me they do their own covers with Canva. I assume those aren’t photographic (which is a fine option for me). I did a quick search in Author Media for podcast episodes dealing with the nitty gritty of cover design legalities and cost, but didn’t find what I was looking for. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
I figure this is old news and easy peasy for many of you and I would appreciate any help you can offer through info and resources.
Thanks!
Jody
Regarding stock images, here’s the info my designer friend sent me today:
I've looked a little into stock photography options, and it gets expensive quick! So a lot of things are cheaper if they are not part of something that's being resold. For example, most of the images I used from iStock (the standard in stock photography as they pretty much have everything, but it's not the only place to get them) looked like they cost about 3 credits for you just to use them for personal use - and 3 credits translates to about $33 per photo. But if you want to purchase an extended license for each photo, like for something you want to use commercially to resell, that price jumps up considerably to about 33 credits (about $325 per photo). I know right now, the plan is for at least the first story to be a freebie item, so you could probably get by with the cheaper standard license. But if you think, at some point, that you might want to use these on a sellable item, then it's probably best to start with the commercial license so you don't have to go back and try to rebuild it from less professional photos later. Also, since most of these covers I've designed use a couple of images spliced together, you'd have to buy both photos. So going with stock photos, you're looking at probably $60 up to over $600 minimum per cover just in stock photos.
THE GOOD NEWS: I was looking around and there's a company called Pexels (https://www.pexels.com/). They are another stock photography company, but you can download images for free and use them for projects as long as you're not reselling them as standalone photos (ie just downloading them and selling them as is). The quality and the availability on this site is a lot more limited. You can still find high quality images but a lot of search terms don't pull up as many, or as nice of, images. If you're interested in going this route, you may want to do some searching on here to see if you can find images you'd be interested in using. The photos from Book Cover Option 1 all came from here, but as you can see, I ended up going with a simple mountain scene since the quality of string lights and dancing photos weren't quite what I was looking for to make them full size cover images.