Stock images: what the license actually lets you do
Stock photography is a perfectly good way to get a cover. Most of the covers on a bookstore table started as licensed stock and ended up unrecognizable after cropping, color work and type.
The trouble is that authors read "royalty-free" and hear "free." It means something much narrower: you pay once rather than paying per copy sold. It says nothing about what uses are allowed, and every stock license has uses it does not allow.
This is not legal advice. It is the short list of things that actually bite authors.
Editorial use only
The restriction that catches the most people, because the image is often the best one on the page.
Editorial-use-only images are cleared for news, commentary and education — not for selling something. A book you sell is a commercial use, and a book cover is the most commercial part of it. That includes a novel.
These images are usually marked, but the mark is small and the download button is the same size as every other one. Check before you fall in love with the shot.
Model and property releases
A release is a signed permission from the person in the photograph, or from the owner of the building, artwork or object in it. It is what makes a recognizable subject usable commercially.
- No model release and a recognizable face on your cover leaves you exposed to a claim from that person, regardless of what you paid the stock site.
- Property releases cover distinctive buildings, private interiors, branded objects and — often forgotten — other people's art and tattoos appearing in the frame.
Stock sites state the release status on the image page. If it says no release, the image is fine for a blog post and wrong for a cover.
Extended licenses and print runs
Many standard licenses cap the number of copies you may print — a figure that made sense when print runs were fixed and ordered in advance. Above the cap, or for certain uses, the site requires an extended license at a higher price. Book covers are frequently named as one of those uses, sometimes explicitly, sometimes buried in a clause about "items for resale where the image is the primary value."
Print-on-demand makes this genuinely awkward, because there is no print run. You do not know whether you will sell 40 copies or 40,000, and the license wants a number.
The practical answer: read the covers clause, and if a book cover is listed as needing an extended license, buy it. It is cheaper than finding out later, and the cost is once.
In the Cover Maker. Bring a licensed image straight in: the tool checks it against the print guideline, flags anything under 200 DPI as visibly soft, and can enlarge to 300 DPI in one click — inside your browser, nothing uploaded. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
A cheap site is not a clean chain
Some low-cost stock sites accept uploads with very little checking. An image on one of them may have been uploaded by someone who never owned it, and buying it does not launder the problem — it moves the problem to you.
The reputable sites indemnify you, up to a stated amount, precisely because their vetting is part of what you are paying for. That indemnity is the actual product. If a site is much cheaper than the rest, ask what part of the process it skipped.
Public-domain and CC0 collections are fine, and some of them are excellent. But "found on a free wallpaper site" is not a provenance. A wallpaper aggregator is a pile of images with no chain of ownership behind any of them, and a CC0 label applied by a stranger is a claim, not a clearance.
Never lift an image
It should not need saying, and yet: not from a search engine, not from a social post, not from someone's portfolio, not from another book's cover. Nothing about finding an image easily says anything about who owns it.
A cover is the single most public use your art will ever get. It sits on retailer pages, in ads, in your newsletter, in someone's hand. "Nobody will notice" is a bad bet generally and a losing one here specifically — reverse image search is free, and the people who run it are the ones with standing to complain.
What to keep on file
Do this once, when you buy:
- Keep the receipt and the license terms with the project files, not in your email archive. Save the terms as a PDF; sites revise their licenses and the page you read may not be the page that exists in three years.
- Note the image ID and contributor alongside them. If you ever need to prove the purchase, the ID resolves it.
- Credit where the license requires it. The copyright page is the standard place for it in a book: one line naming the image ID and contributor.
- Record what you bought. Standard or extended, and the date. Future you will not remember.
In the Cover Maker. Previews are free, unlimited and watermarked, so you can try a comp at your real trim and full size — and decide whether the image is worth the extended license — before you pay anyone anything. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
The short version
Read the covers clause. Check for editorial-use-only. Check the release. Buy the extended license if the terms ask for one. Keep the paperwork with the project. Then go and crop the image hard, because a stock photo used straight is its own kind of tell.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
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