There are 2 options for creating you rcover. 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

Gaining Knowledge, Losing Bliss

Professionals and designers need more information and details about how design their cover. First, we cannot emphasize this enough:

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"

Spine Widths

Page Count	Express Hardcover	Premium Hardcover
24-72 pages:	.22"	.22"
73-146 pages:	.37"	.44"
147-220 pages:	.52"	.62"
221-294 pages:	.67"	.80"
295-368 pages:	.79"	.97"
367-440 pages:	.974"	1.15"

Book Size	Fullwrap Guide	Front Cover Guide	Back Cover Guide
11"x8.5"
12"x12"
8.5"x8.5"
8.5"x11"

All files are shown in the Cover Guides Gallery

Getting all wrapped up

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.