I don't know a thing about book cover design!

When it comes to writing books, it seems that the first thing a new author thinks about is the cover of the book (I was exactly the same)... it doesn't really help that Wattpad places so much emphasis on the point that books which have covers are more likely to be read. What I'd like you to think about right now is this:- What is a book cover with no book?

That's right, a book cover without a book is just a pretty picture. By design, Wattpad will fix a blurred out image of your profile picture to the cover of your book until you specify an image to use as your cover in it's place. For the most part, this doesn't bother me... although there have been times when it's annoyed the crap out of me. Now, I have figured out a work around that I use for just this situation. What I do is take a photograph of my own and run it through the Wattpad Covers app or GIMP where I resize it to 256 pixels wide by 400 pixels tall (which is the size used by Wattpad.

From there, I add in the title of my book, followed by my author name and I save that to my computer before uploading it to Wattpad to remove the generic image that Wattpad uses.

If I'm brutally honest, the design of my cover at this point in the book is about as interesting to me as what you had for breakfast this morning. The reason for this is that, beyond this kernel of an idea, I have no idea how this book is going to turn out - or even if the book is going to turn out. One thing that you'll note about the image below is that only 2 of the books that you can see actually have covers at this point in time - and only 1 of those books has what I'd consider to be a proper cover. This is because I'm focussing more on the writing stage of these books as opposed to how pretty the cover looks - I can always create a cover at a later stage.

Sometimes, it is possible to be approached by members who make covers for you, you can request someone to make a cover for you within the Wattpad community or you could even make a cover yourself using the Wattpad Covers app, if it bothers you that much. I just feel that, at this point in the day, your energy is much better spent on getting the basics of your story in place.

It has been suggested that books without covers are less likely to be read by Wattpad members, however, I've not been able to find any evidence from my own experiences to either prove or disprove this "fact". I've found it to be an upward struggle no matter how I cut the cheese. Unless you happen to land lucky and fall right into the lap of a publisher or a promoter (which is a slim chance), it's going to be an uphill struggle to get those first reads regardless of what your cover looks like.