Creating an Ebook Cover that Captures Attention

On the left is the cover design I just did for my book that is about to be published; Payback, Volume One.
If you absolutely convinced you cannot create your own book cover you can hire someone to do it for you for a relatively inexpensive fee. You can find cover designers on google or you can save money and do it yourself for free. Yes, free with the use of an open source program called Gimp. You can download this program that does just about everything you can do with Photoshop here: 
http://www.gimp.org
I am assuming you are familiar with Photoshop and have some knowledge of how to use it for this article. If you don't you can always learn by trying to mess around with the controls on a photo and reading the extensive documentation on the Gimp website, but for this article I am going to write it for those who know their way around at least enough to follow the directions here. 
First you are going to need a photo that is copyright free and is available to use for reproduction. You want to make sure that the photo or photos you choose are not under copyright protection or you can be sued by the photographer. There are photos are on services like Photobucket and Flickr and if the user has not protected them with a copyright they are free to use. If you don't feel comfortable or find what you need there you can also find a stock photo company that has free photos or a website with them. There are plenty of options. If you want you can also take the photos yourself or paint a cover. It all depends on your skill level as an artist.
The first thing you want to do is research. Take a look at your favorite book distributor and the covers on bestselling books. It depends what kind of genre your book is. Take a look at the best selling book in your genre and for example we'll talk about romance books. My wife is a big romance book reader and I've never read one. She buys all of her books based on the cover and gets mad if the cover does not live up to the story. She loves it when the guy on the front is good looking and built like an action movie star. She doesn't tell me this but I assume he must be attractive as well. (duh!) So we need to look at these covers adn see if you can find an image like that. You also want to look at the type, the words and how it's laid out.
Once you find the image you have to make sure that it's high resolution. For distribution on most publisher's websites such as Amazon, Apple, and other ebook distributors the minimum size for a cover is 1,660 x 2,400 pixels. The resolution is 72 DPI. Don't bother making it any higher because the reslolution does not go any higher for an ebook reader or computer screen. The size is rather large so you do need an image with a high resolution that will enlarge to that size. If you use an image that is smaller it will look fuzzy at full size. 
Once you find the image you need open it in Gimp. Next you want to open a new image that is RGB and 72 DPI. Switch back to the image you are using for the background of your cover. Copy the image, go to your new image with nothing on it and under the edit menu you want to press paste into. Your image should look good at full size so zoom in to make sure. Next, position your image to the right position on the page. If you want you can also put a color or gradient or pattern behind it. If that's the case you will want to create a new layer first and put it behind the image.

Next you want to choose a font for your title. You most likely want something that is easy to read when it is reduced to a small image. Choose a block letter and a lot of titles are san-serif. If you need fonts do a search for free ones. There are many great fonts you can download. Don't try to get to cute. Just choose something that looks good and then choose a color. You want a color that looks good against your background. If you look at the cover above, for example, the orange title stands out great against the gray sky in the photo. Next you want to add your name as the author. This should be a different size and font, possibly a different color. Don't try and get to fancy with the information you put on the cover or you may get rejected by certain distributors. Don't try and put hyperlinks or offer free CD's or anything like that. Just look at the examples of book covers and try to do something similar to that. You might want to show a printed copy to a friend to see what they think. Don't tell them you designed it at first. Just see what they think, if it catches their eye or not. If not maybe go back and add some special effects to the type if necessary or change the color of a type or maybe plug in a different image. Sometimes I like to do two or three different images and pick from those to find the best one. Good luck and happy designing!