How a cover actually gets made, start to finish

Most guides tell you what a good cover looks like. Very few tell you what order to do things in, which is the part that decides whether you make one cover or four.

Here is the whole sequence. Nothing in it is optional, and the order is not a preference.

Decide what the book is — genre, reader, comparison titles
Look at the shelf you want to be on
Choose the trim size
Finish the interior and get the real page count
Find or commission the artwork
Set the type
Build the full wrap, not the front alone
Check it at thumbnail size
Check the technical requirements
Export for the printer you are actually using
Order a proof, read it, then publish

Steps 1 and 2 happen before you open any tool

Decide what the book is. Not the plot — the category. Which shelf, which reader, which three or four books yours would sit beside. An author who cannot name their genre in one phrase cannot brief a cover, because every visual decision downstream is an answer to that question.

Then look at the shelf. Pull up the top twenty covers in your sub-category and work out what they have in common: palette, type weight, whether there are people on them, how much of the cover the title occupies. You are not copying — you are learning the signal readers already use to sort books, so your cover can send it on purpose. Comp titles: reading the shelf you want to be on and Genre conventions: what your cover has to promise go into both.

Steps 3 and 4 are the ones people skip

Choose the trim size. It sets the proportion of every panel you are about to design, and changing it later means recomposing the art. Choosing a trim size.

Then finish the interior. This gets done out of order more than any other step, and it is the expensive one. The spine cannot be computed without a page count, the page count is not known until the interior is typeset, and it moves when you change trim, type size, margins or style. A cover designed against an estimate is a cover you will rebuild.

The width comes from the page count, the paper color and the printer — each uses its own bulk figure, and they do not agree. How to calculate spine width has the numbers.

Steps 5 and 6: art, then type

Find or commission the artwork. Buy a stock image, license an illustration, generate something, or hire a designer — all four are legitimate, and Hire a cover designer, or do it yourself? weighs them. Whatever the source, it has to be at print resolution, which is a much larger thing than looks-fine-on-screen — Resolution: why a good-looking image prints badly.

Then set the type. This separates professional covers from amateur ones more reliably than the artwork does. A modest image with well-set type reads as a book; a spectacular image with default type reads as a poster someone typed on. Typography and hierarchy is the long version.

Steps 7 to 9: the wrap and the technical floor

Build the full wrap. Back, spine and front are one sheet, and the back is where the blurb, the bio and the barcode live. A front panel designed alone always needs rework to become a wrap.

Check it at thumbnail size before you polish anything. The thumbnail test.

Then check the technical requirements, which are pass or fail:

Bleed of 0.125 in on the outside edges — top, bottom and both fore-edges. There is no bleed at a spine fold, because nothing is cut there.
Safe area about 0.25 in inside the trim line. Anything that must survive the cut lives inside it.
Artwork at print resolution. 300 DPI at final printed size is the target; below 200 DPI you will see it on paper.
The barcode block, 2 × 1.2 in on the back cover, kept clear of anything you need to read.

Bleed and safe area, explained once covers the first two properly.

In the tools. The Cover Maker draws live trim, bleed and safe-area guides, computes the spine from your real page count, paper color and printer, keeps title, series and author as vector text, reserves the barcode area and flags art under 200 DPI — and the final page count arrives from the Interior Formatter rather than being typed in. Start a book → · about the tools

Steps 10 and 11: export, proof, publish

One design does not produce one file. Across three bindings — perfect bound, case laminate, dust jacket — and four printers — Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, Lulu and B&N Press — a single design yields up to eleven wrap files, each cut to that printer's own geometry. Export for the printer you are actually uploading to, not a generic one.

Then order a proof. It catches what no screen will: a spine that drifted, a dark cover that came back muddy, type sitting closer to the trim than you thought. Order the proof. Then read it in daylight.

The two orderings that cause almost all the rework

Designing before the page count is final. The spine width changes, which changes the wrap width, which shifts the front panel inside it. Everything on the spine has to be re-fitted, and art that crossed the fold has to be recomposed. Finish the interior first.

Choosing artwork before knowing the genre convention. Art chosen on taste rather than category fights the signal you need the cover to send, and no amount of type fixes it. You end up buying a second image, or shipping a cover that tells readers the wrong thing about the book.

Both disappear if you work in the order above. The page count flows from the Interior Formatter to the Cover Maker, so the spine is computed rather than estimated, and the genre decision from step 1 is still sitting there when you pick the image in step 5.

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.

Start a book →

Next: Book cover dimensions, start to finish · More: Writing a cover brief, for a designer or for yourself · Feedback, revisions, and knowing when a cover is done