This simple tutorial is thanks to Finally_Home's suggestion. By the way, I can't believe this writer has over 98 fanfics in just 5 years!! A lot of interesting titles too, such as strawberries and cigarettes. I can't believe I find out this just now....^^" Anyways, check out this writer's stories if you like reading. 

Moving on, so I recently created this poster here with just Word, PDF, Paint, and some built-in picture-viewing program called Irfan View:

To be honest, it is much better than what I could make with Photoshop because I'm just that awful at blending, layering, and etc. In a hindsight, I'm glad that I didn't buy Photoshop because that would have been a waste of money. If I really want to incorporate people flawlessly into my story cover, I would just request/beg one of the AFF pros here to do it for me. XD

Anyways,  I'm not very good with tutorials and to be honest, probably a good number of you already know this. However, I hope it would still be helpful to people who wants to make their own story covers. 

Step 1: Jog down a concept or two of what you would like. Keep it simple usually results in a relatively nice looking end product. 

Step 2: Go ask your best friend, Google, for some pictures that would align with your concept the best. There are plenty out there for free, personal, and creative use. For pictures that I would rather have without any unnecessary backgrounds (ie. the sword in this poster here), I would use search "png" (ie. search "sword png). 

Step 3: Once you're ready to put things together, for the picture, make sure to right-click and select "behind text" as shown below. By selecting this, you can move the picture anywhere on the page. For text, I recommend using Text Box (go to the Insert tab and the option should be under the Text category) because you can then manipulate it the same way as an image. 

Step 4: Once you're happy with the placements, you can start playing around with the colour scheme and whatever else Word can offer you.

For my particular poster, there is a line that intersects with the guard of the sword. Unforuntately, I can't seem to find anything on Word that would help fade this line:

Step 5: However, I will eventually get rid of this ugly line. But first, I'm relatively satified with it. As such, I save it as a PDF, then from PDF, I used it as a jpg file. I'm not sure about others, but I don't have an option to print to jpg from Word. 

Step 6: Now that the file is a jpg, I just open it to view with my laptop's built-in program, Irfan View. From there, I have more options to edit further such as contrasting to get rid of the ugly line or the barely there snowfall effect. Alternatively, you can just upload the story cover to google drive and access the picture though your phone & add effects with your phone's photo program. 

Step 7: Finally, I thought there was too much white space at the top of the poster, so I used Paint to crop it. lol XD Anyways, you can do this first before Step 6. 

Bonus: You can do the same thing with MS Powerpoint too. ^^

Aforementioned that I'm not very good with tutorials, so please feel free to ask questions and I will try my best to help. 

Have a good night everyone!

Capriquariusmei