Did you know that a professional looking 3D book cover can increase your conversions up to 43% instead of having a simple download link? Let me show you how to make a 3D book cover for free in three simple steps.
It doesn’t matter if you are creating a lead magnet for your e-mail list, an e-book tutorial or even an actual book you intend to sell, you should definitely take the 15 minutes to create a professional looking 3D mockup book for your site and marketing material.
Why would you need a 3D mockup of a digital book you ask? Well, this is simply because they increase your conversions and who doesn’t want to increase conversion rates? Why that is, I can’t really tell you for sure. It’s likely because they catch the eye of your readers better than a simple text.
There is also something special about mimicking a real physical product. It adds value and desirability to your product. It gives the impression to your customers that are receiving an actual well thought out and packaged product instead of a hastily whipped up PDF document.
No matter what the reason is, it does work so it would be downright stupid to not take advantage of this. The internet is full of services that will create a mockup book model for you. The price varies a lot as does the service. Some take 5 bucks for scraping up a model from pictures you deliver while some take hundreds for completely designing your book covers from the background to the styling and layout.
If you ask me, it’s ridiculous to pay hundreds of dollars from work that takes literally 15 minutes if you have any previous graphic design skills. Most of the service providers use paid premium designing services with professional templates they edit a bit and add the name of your book and that’s about it. Once they have everything set up it seriously takes them about 15 minutes for work they make out to be a serious project and charge you hundreds of dollars.
Fortunately, you don’t need to pay anything to make a professional looking 3D book cover mockup as I will soon show you. If you want to add things like transparent backgrounds or large high detail mockups, you might have to pay a couple of bucks but that’s it. But if you are satisfied with a white background and a smaller picture, you can do this completely free.
1. Design your book cover
The first thing is to design your book cover. It’s quite possible you have already done this while creating your e-book or lead magnet. In case you haven’t, you can simply use a free image editor like GIMP or heck, even your standard MS Paint.
It really isn’t that difficult. You simply take the title of your book, some graphics or a background image, add the author and maybe a citation. That’s it. If you don’t really want to spend the time doing it yourself, you can use a paid service like Canva.com for simple templates. That’s what I did. A typical book cover will cost you $1 to download but if you Google around you can usually find free template offers for Canva. I just paid the dollar.
So, I simply took a book cover template from Canva.com, replaced the cover texts with my own and downloaded it as a JPEG. Simple as that, you can see the result below.
2. Make the spine of the book
The next step is to create the spine of the book if you plan on using a 3D from a perspective that makes the spine visible. You can do this in Canva but I just made a very fast spine using an image editor and the book cover.
I just cropped one side of the book cover so that it was 150PX x 2050PX and covered all the orange and white with pieces of the grey background cover. Then I flipped the spine horizontally and added the title of the book. All I had to do then was to flip it back vertically and I was done. Voila!
3. Make the 3D mockup
Now that we have everything we need for our 3D mockup, it’s time to make the model. To achieve this without any cost, we are going to use a service known as Boxshot Light. The service is very easy to use and requires no technical know-how.
Choose the 3D book cover and the site will take you to your mockup editor. Click the “Images” drop menu over the book model to insert your book cover and spine. You don’t really need the back in typical use. You can, of course, create one if you feel like you might have use for it.
After you have uploaded your cover and spine, you can edit the orientation and shadowing of the model. The toggles above the book allow you to adjust the lighting, shadow contrast, skylight and zoom (tip: you can use your mouse wheel to adjust the zoom).
After you are satisfied with the orientation and shadowing, simply click render. It takes a minute or so for the model to render so sit back and relax. Once done, Lightbox allows you to download a small model with a white background for free. If you want a larger 3D mockup with a transparent background, you will have to pay for a premium subscription. You can see my results below.
Conclusion
I hope you found this simple tutorial useful for creating a mockup 3D book cover and will try it yourself. If you have any questions, you can always contact me on the comments section below or by subscribing to my list and replying to any of my e-mails.
Since making a 3D mockup book cover takes just 15 minutes to an hour, depending on how much of the graphics you have done previously, there is no reason to make one for your website or marketing material.
An increased conversion rate is something you should always strive for and use every trick that has been shown to improve it. If you are interested in improving other parts of your marketing or learning how to make money online with proven methods, consider subscribing to my e-mail list. You will receive the featured e-book and a 7-day marketing course for free, just so you know!
See you next time!