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Spend this first day creating a new book for your workshop participation. You might want to go with the idea of writing or maybe you'll prefer something more related to the book you intend to make. Throughout the mini workshops, you'll be encouraged to share your process; you simply want to create a book that you can share with others, if you're intending to do that. If you don't want to share, you don't have to! Some don't like people to know anything about the book until they start to publish.

But, I've never created a cover!

If you've never created a cover before, don't sweat it. You can use wattpad's built-in cover generator. Or, you can head over to https://spark.adobe.com/ (link included as external link). This is a place where you can build your own cover for free with little or no experience, if you work on a computer.

You can also add stickers to the covers you make there, if the stickers have a transparent background. The ones you'll find in the Dream Shop do.

Once at Spark, create an account. After that, you want click "Start From Scratch" and choose "Graphic." You may have to click on a big plus sign at the top before you see this option on the upper right. After choosing to start from scratch, click on "Custom," then set the width to be 512px and the height to be 800px. This is the size of a wattpad cover.

After clicking "Next," use a word to search the free pictures. If you choose more than one picture, the program will put all of them on the cover stacked vertically. If you don't want them stacked that way, you can choose one of the variations suggested by Spark. Once you have the image(s) sorted out, you can add text.

To add a sticker, you first want to download the sticker from wattpad. The stickers for each part of the Dream Shop are located at the end of their respective workbooks. Be sure you remember where you save it! (Remember, you need to be working on a computer.) Then, in Spark, when you're working on the cover that you want to add the sticker to, choose the plus sign near the top right of the screen. Choose "Photo," then "Upload Photo."

Navigate to where your sticker is located, and double click on it. The sticker will appear on the cover and you can change its size as well as location. There are four stickers in all for the Dream Shop, so be sure to save room for them!

Remember, for covers, less is more. These will be seen as thumbnail size, so you want text to be visible and legible. But, for now, it's enough to simply have a cover.

Create your book in wattpad

Once you have creatively wasted a lot of time, create a new book on wattpad with your brand new cover. Tag your book with #DreamShop2019 and #StoryCreation. In it, you will publish the exercises found in the workbooks to submit to the program as well as share with your fellow writers if you want to... you're not required to do either! Please note: if you are working through the Dream Shop after its initial run from mid September to the end of October, 2019, we won't be looking over items that might get submitted.

It is also recommended that you keep track of what you do in something like Word or Google Docs. Be sure, whatever you do, to backup, backup, backup!