Ebook cover size, and why it is not your print front
A print cover is a wrap: back, spine, front, bleed and safe area, all measured outward from your trim size. An ebook cover is none of that. It is one flat picture of the front — and it is a different shape from the front you just designed.
One image, and nothing around it
No spine, because there is no book block to wrap. No back cover, because the store shows your description instead. No bleed, because nothing is ever cut. No safe area, because there is no blade to wander.
That sounds like a relief, and mostly it is. What it hides is that the one dimension still left to get wrong — the shape of the rectangle — is not the shape your print front already has.
The size stores expect: 1600 × 2560
Aim for 1600 pixels wide by 2560 pixels tall. That is what the major stores ask for, and it is a 1:1.6 ratio: the height is exactly 1.6 times the width.
Treat it as a target rather than a rough minimum. A file at the right ratio but a different pixel count is usually accepted and scaled cleanly. A file at the wrong ratio gets letterboxed with bars, cropped by the store's own rules, or stretched — and none of those are decisions you want made on your behalf.
Print trims are proportionally wider
Here is the whole problem, three lines of arithmetic:
- A 6 × 9 page is 1:1.5.
- A 5.5 × 8.5 page is about 1:1.55.
- The ebook target is 1:1.6.
So your print front is a wider rectangle than the ebook slot it has to fill. Something has to give. Either you crop a vertical strip off each side, or you add height and leave empty space at the top and bottom.
For a 6 × 9 front, matching the height means losing roughly six percent of the width — about three percent from each side. That is a small number that lands in an expensive place.
Where the strip comes from matters
Look at where your title and author name actually sit. On most covers the title runs wide, close to the horizontal edges of the safe area, because that is how you make it big enough to survive the thumbnail. The author name often does the same along the bottom.
Crop the sides and that type moves toward the edge of the image. Words that sat comfortably inside your print safe area can end up almost touching the border — or, if the title runs full width, losing a letter.
The subtler failure is balance. A composition centered for a 6 × 9 front is no longer centered once the frame narrows, if the crop is uneven or the store trims from one side. A cover that felt settled looks slightly wrong and nobody can say why.
In the Cover Maker. Your ebook cover is exported at 1600 × 2560, cropped from the front of the print wrap, so the two editions come from one design instead of two files that drift apart. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
It is seen smaller than a print thumbnail
A print book has a physical life. Someone picks it up, turns it over, sees it face out on a table.
An ebook has none of that. It exists only as an image in a store, and that image is usually displayed smaller than a paperback thumbnail — a search result on a phone, a strip of recommendations, a row in a library list. There is no second, larger encounter to rescue it.
So the thumbnail rules do not relax for ebooks. They tighten. Run the thumbnail test on the cropped ebook file specifically, not on the print front you cropped it from, because the crop is exactly what changed.
Practical points for the file itself
RGB, not CMYK. Screens are RGB. A CMYK file is a print file, and converting it late usually dulls the colors — reds and deep blues suffer most. Work in RGB for the ebook from the start.
Do not over-compress it. Stores re-encode what you upload. Give them a clean, high-quality image so their compression has room to work; give them an already-degraded JPEG and the artifacts get baked in and multiplied. Soft edges and blotchy gradients are the tell.
No thin light type on a busy photo. True for print, ruthless on an ebook. Hairline strokes over detailed artwork survive at 1600 pixels and vanish at 160. If your title needs a calm area to sit in, design the area rather than hunting for a gap afterwards.
Nothing about price or format in the art. No price, no "Kindle edition", no store name, no "now only", no review star graphics. Stores reject covers that carry this, and even where they do not, the information is wrong the moment you change anything. The store displays the price; your cover should not.
Design the print wrap first
If you are producing both editions, build the print cover first and take the ebook from it.
Going the other way means inventing a back cover and a spine after the fact around artwork that was never composed for them, and retrofitting a wrap is far more work than taking a front out of one.
Building it in the other order also gives you the chance to leave a little horizontal slack around the title while you are still designing — a few percent of breathing room on each side, so the ebook crop takes background rather than letters.
In the Cover Maker. Design the wrap at your real trim and page count, then export the ebook cover at 1600 × 2560 from the same project — one title, one set of artwork, two correctly sized files. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
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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