There are 2 options for creating your cover. You can either create your cover within the Book Designer or during Step 2 of the Product Maker, simply upload a front and back image, enter your text, and you're done! For many customers this is all they need, and they're off to checkout.
Video Tutorial: Design Your Cover in the Book Designer
Video Tutorial: Uploading a Cover
Video Tutorial: Previewing Your Cover
Gaining Knowledge, Losing Bliss
Professionals and designers need more information and details about how design their cover. First, we cannot emphasize this enough:
Three #1 Rules of Cover Design
Do not try to be precise about placements of items on your cover.
Do not try to place anything on the spine
Leave lots of bleed. You cannot be too conservative moving elements away from the edge.
All about Covers
We HIGHLY recommend your covers be created as sRGB .jpg files
We HIGHLY recommend you leave plenty of room around your cover edges so important items (heads, text) are not trimmed.
Do NOT include crop guides in your uploaded file. This is especially important with Illustrator files. These recommendations are in place because our covers are printed as a single image file. Thus, we must flatten everything in order to make a uniform print. To avoid font and color space issues all cover manipulation is processed with sRGB .jpg images. Images that are not sRGB .jpgs are converted in the background and this may lead to some format and color space miscalculation. Thus, we recommend you perform the conversion prior to uploading your cover file. See these screen captures for information on saving a PDF as a JPG.
Living on the edge is bad
Your mother probably told you this and hopefully you listened. If you set up your image to run to the very edge of the fold or crop guides, you will be disappointed. Binding equipment can easily have 1/4" fluctuation between cycles. Please compensate for this fluctuation.
Cover Dimensions
Perfect Bound Softcover
All softcover books have 1/8" (3mm) bleed on all edges, so the cover should be .25" (6mm) larger than the final book size.
Spine width for softcover books is 300 pages (150 sheets) per inch, or 118 pages (59 sheets) per cm.
Imagewrap Hardcover
Safety Margin for Turn-in (Bleed) for all book sizes: 1.0"
The full wrap cover is another great feature that many individuals use to make breathtaking books. This option is easily selected under the "Advanced" tab during Step 2. of the Product Maker. This option will auto-stretch the front cover image to exactly fit the entire book.
Cover FAQ
I created my book and I want to change the cover image. How do I do that?
Login, Click the on the pink shop tab click the title of your book click the edit product link click the cover options link click the colors and images tab click the browse button to the right of Upload new front cover image: get a new front cover image
click the update cover button click the save button
Your cover should be updated.
Can I create my own spine?
We strongly discourage creating your own spine. Paper size and cover dimensions vary greatly which makes calculating spine width difficult and we cannot guarantee that the spine you create will print perfectly. There is a high chance that it will fold over the cover. For this reason, we will not reprint a book with a custom spine.
For the best results, you have 2 options:
Upload a separate front and back image and use the spine text tool in the "Design Cover" section. Our software will automatically fit the text in the center of the spine.
Create a full-wrap cover with a continuous image - then use the spine-text tool to lay text on top of the full-wrap cover.
Note: Your book needs to be 40 pages or more in order for text to print on the spine.
Do you offer different text types for the cover text?
Yes, we offer a variety of fonts to use for your cover or spine text.
I want a photo on the front, a photo on the back and nothing on the spine. However I have uploaded both photos into your Design Cover page and the preview shows the two photos butting up against each other along the spine. The instructions on the page say "The Full Wrap cover below is the default used for all softcover and image wrap hardcover books" but that is not what I want.
If you wish to ensure that the cover is not full wrap you will simply need to click off the "full wrap cover" option.
When the system calculates the thickness of the spine one of the biggest factors that determines it is the amount of pages in the book. It is possible that your book is too thin to account for much spine width.
You will need to make sure you don't enter any spine text and the spine will appear as whatever color you choose as the "background color" for your book.
If you have any further questions please let us know and we will help in any way we can.
I have created a book in 4:3 landscape format. Do you offer a cover in that format with a photo on the front and a photo on the back? I can only find covers in that format with wraparound and die cut.
Dear Viovio, I am creating my first book and having trouble with the front cover. My title text seems to be on the top edge and I wanted to move it below the top edge a bit. Also, the font color of title is black even though I tried to change it bc its on a black background from where the photo seems to be cropped to fit your cover format. Thanks for the help
You should be able to change the placement of the text and the font color in the cover step. Please send your product ID to support@viovio.com so we can look into this further.
The cover problem I am having for my project is Id #103676. Want to move title text down an inch or so from the top centered to the photo & change font color. Thanks, S.
Is there an option to reprint just the dust-jacket cover of a book? When a cover gets damages, we would like to replace it. If there's a typo or the bride wants to change the spine text, we would like to be able to replace just the dust-jacket cover without having to reprint the entire book... Please advise on what we can do.
