Some Tips on what you should do

Spend time on the cover

You have spent hundreds of hours laboring over your manuscript. The writing is good and the story is good. Does it make sense to spend an hour or two on cover design and selection? No, it sure doesn't. The cover is another aspect of your work. You should focus a lot of energy on it. I am not saying that you should spend hundreds of hours on it but the general rule applies to covers that applies to everything else. The more you put into it the more you get out of it.

Get some professional Help

Every POD house offers the services of a graphic artist or a team that will design your cover for you. If you are serious about marketing your book it would be money well spent. The improvement in quality has the potential to recoup the extra expense many times over.

If you do it yourself

If you are adamant about keeping creative control over your novel and you want to design the cover yourself here are some rules of thumb. Keep the design simple. In general, the more complex the cover gets the more difficult it is and the less impact it makes on your potential buyer.

Also, when creating the graphics, be sure to very carefully adhere to the publishers guidelines for cover art. And always create and save everything in the maximum allowable resolution. Something that looks good on your computer might be blurry or fuzzy when printed onto an actual book.

And always get an advance copy before you give final approval for printing. You have to get that first copy of the book so you can really see what it looks like. . An example self designed cover with analysis