I’m always looking for ways to have my books stand out. An animated book cover is just one avenue that I’ve been curious about for quite some time. Most of the animated covers look so cool. Surely I could figure a way to do it, so I did a little research and it turns out basic glitter and stardust aren’t very hard to accomplish.
This evening I tried my hand at animating my book covers with just a bit of bling. For other authors that want to give it a try, Glitterboo is an easy online program that you can use to create gifs utilizing your cover image art. The options are limited, but I find too much movement to be distracting.
I know that the size of the resulting gif needs to remain relatively small to display quickly and well on Facebook. I also know that these gifs will likely be for online marketing only. Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and other E-readers don’t support gifs as covers -not yet anyway. In the meantime, Glitterboo lets you download a static jpeg of your sparkling cover – and that can be used as an ebook cover if you want your marketing and cover to more closely match-up.
You are going to want an account with Giphy.com to have a home for your gifs. This will enable you to share your creations across various platforms relatively easily. You can also resize your gifs in Giphy. You can also create an account with Imgur as a way to get your gifs out into the world.
I plan on researching this idea further and will share what I find.
Good luck out there.
–Tarrant