Audiobook cover art is a square, and that changes everything
Every cover you have made for this book so far is taller than it is wide. The print front is a 6 × 9 page or something close to it. The ebook cover is taller still, at 1600 × 2560. Then you reach the audiobook edition and the shape changes entirely: it is a square, usually supplied at around 3000 × 3000 pixels.
Nothing you already own is that shape. And the distance between a 1:1.5 rectangle and a 1:1 square is not a distance you cross by dragging a corner in an image editor.
Resizing and re-composing are different jobs
There are only two ways to force a tall image into a square, and both of them break something.
Squashing it compresses the vertical axis. Faces go wide, circles go oval, and type that was drawn at a considered weight becomes a fatter, shorter version of itself. Everyone can see this, even people who could not name what they are seeing.
Cropping it keeps the width and removes the height. For a 6 × 9 front, making the height equal the width means cutting a third of the image away. That is not a trim. That is a different picture.
Which is why the honest description of this task is not "export the cover at another size." It is "rebuild the composition in a new frame," and it usually means re-cropping the art and re-setting the type.
What a third of the height costs
The crop takes from the top and the bottom, and those are exactly the places a cover puts its most important information.
The title usually sits in the upper third. On most covers it is high, because a title low on the page competes with the author name and disappears behind a shelf edge or a store's overlay. Crop the top and the title goes with it.
The author name usually sits along the bottom. Same problem, the other end.
A figure centered in a tall rectangle is no longer centered. If your cover has a single subject — a person, an object, a building — it was placed for a 1:1.5 frame. Cut the frame to 1:1 and the subject sits too high or too low, and the eye reads the result as slightly wrong without identifying why.
The quiet space goes. Sky above, ground below, the empty area you deliberately left so the type had somewhere calm to sit. Negative space is the first casualty of a vertical crop, and it is the thing the type depended on.
The type has to be re-set, not moved
If you crop and then drag the title back into the frame, you end up with the same words at the same size inside two thirds of the vertical room they were designed for. Everything crowds: title against art, author against the bottom edge, series line jammed between them.
A square wants different typesetting. Shorter line lengths across a narrower-feeling frame, more stacking, sometimes a smaller title relative to the image, sometimes a much larger one filling the space the crop just created. Treat it as a new layout that happens to use the same typefaces, and it works. Treat it as the old layout with the edges pulled in, and it never quite does.
It is displayed very small, and the thumbnail test gets harder
An audiobook cover lives in a listening app. It is a tile in a library grid, a small square in a now-playing bar, an image on a phone propped in a car mount or a watch on someone's wrist. Those are smaller than a store thumbnail, and there is often no larger view to rescue a cover that failed at tile size.
So run the thumbnail test again, on the square file specifically. Not on the print front you cropped it from — the crop is precisely what changed. Look at it at around a hundred pixels. If the title is unreadable or the image has become an indistinct smear, the square needs a bolder, simpler treatment than the print cover needed.
In the Cover Maker. Title, series and author stay live vector text over the artwork, so you can see what a square crop does to the composition before you commit to it. The ebook cover exports at 1600 × 2560 — the square audiobook version is its own piece of work, built from the same art and the same type. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
The title and author must match the book exactly
Retailers check the audiobook cover against the book's metadata. The title on the artwork has to match the title of the book, and the author name has to match the author. A shortened title, a dropped subtitle, or a name spelled one way on the cover and another in the listing is a rejection, and it is a slow one, because you find out after the upload rather than before.
Check the exact strings against what you registered for the print and ebook editions before you export anything.
The two routes that work
Design the print cover with a square crop in mind. Decide early that there will be an audiobook edition, and compose so that the middle third of the front stands on its own: subject roughly centered, room around the title, nothing critical hard against the top or bottom edge. This costs you almost nothing at design time and saves the rebuild later.
Or treat the audiobook cover as its own design. Same palette, same typefaces, same treatment of the type — a different composition built for a square. This is the better result when the print cover is already finished and was never planned for a crop, and it is what most professionally produced audio editions actually are.
What does not work is the middle path: a hurried square cut out of a finished tall cover, with the type shoved back in. It reads as an afterthought, which at tile size is the only thing it can read as.
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.
Next: Should you make an audiobook? · More: Ebook cover size, and why it is not your print front · The thumbnail test · Composition and negative space