Paperback, hardcover, or both
Authors usually ask about hardcovers as a question of feel: which version is the real book. It is a better question about money and audience. Who buys this edition, what does it cost them, and does that reader exist for your title yet?
The mechanics of the three bindings are covered in Paperback, hardcover, dust jacket: what changes. This page is about which of them to actually produce.
The price is the decision
A hardcover costs more to manufacture than the same book in paperback: more material, a case, an extra pass on the binding line. Print on demand passes that cost straight through, and it sets the floor under your retail price.
So the hardcover sits on the page priced above the paperback beside it, and above most of the books it competes with. That is the whole trade. How it looks on a shelf and feels in the hand is downstream of a reader deciding whether to pay the difference.
Before you commit, run your real page count and trim through each printer's own cost calculator, in each country you sell in. Manufacturing costs vary by printer, paper, page count and territory, and they change. Do not take a number from a blog, including the confident ones.
Who actually buys a hardcover
This is the part that decides it, and it is narrower than most authors expect.
- Libraries. They buy for durability and shelf life, and in many subject areas prefer a case-bound copy. See Getting into libraries and bookstores for how that channel works at all.
- Gift buyers. A hardcover reads as a present in a way a paperback does not — strongest for illustrated books, cookbooks, poetry and anything bought in December.
- Collectors and series completists. Readers who already own your paperbacks and want the set to match, or want the better object of a book they loved.
- Event and speaking audiences. For nonfiction sold from a table after a talk, where the buyer has already decided.
Not one of those buyers is a stranger discovering you. A hardcover sells to people who already want the book. If nobody wants the book yet, it has no one to sell to.
What the paperback is for
Discovery, and being wrong cheaply. It is the impulse edition, at the price a browsing reader will risk on an author they have not read, and it is the edition to make your mistakes in. If the cover turns out to need work, you fix it and move on — see Fixing a book that is already published.
Some books cannot be hardcovers at all
Page count closes the door before taste gets a say. At Amazon KDP, hardcovers run 75 to 550 pages; paperbacks run 24 to 828.
A 60-page chapbook is a fine paperback and not a hardcover anywhere. A 700-page epic prints as a paperback and is over the hardcover ceiling. Other printers set their own limits, so check the one you are using rather than assuming KDP's numbers travel.
At the thin end there is a consolation. A hardcover spine is the paper block plus the case: at KDP, paperback bulk plus 4.8 mm (0.188976 in). A 75-page book on white paper bulks to about 0.169 in, so its hardcover spine is about 0.358 in — wide enough to print a title on, where the paperback at that page count gets no spine text at all, since KDP sets spine text only from 80 pages up.
In the Cover Maker. Pick the binding and the printer and the wrap is rebuilt to that company's geometry — up to eleven files from one design across Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, Lulu and B&N Press, with the spine computed from your real page count and paper color. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
The artwork decision is made once
The design decision and the edition decision are separate, and you do not have to take them at the same time.
You choose artwork, a title treatment, a spine and back cover copy once. Producing a hardcover wrap a year later is not a redesign; it is another wrap from the same design, cut to that binding's geometry. Panel widths, fold allowances and the thicker spine are arithmetic, not art direction.
The interior is the same book too — same trim, same page count, the same PDF. Check the printer's hardcover margin requirements before you reuse the file, but you are not resetting the text.
Start with the paperback
For a first book, publish the paperback and stop there. Add the hardcover when one of these is true:
- The book is bought as an object — illustrated, gifted, kept on a coffee table.
- You sell copies in person, at events, talks or signings.
- Libraries are a genuine channel for the subject.
- The paperback has sold enough that a second edition has readers waiting.
- It is part of a series people collect, and the set should match.
The reasons that do not hold up: that it will look more professional, or that you want one on your own shelf. Order an author copy for that.
Both, in the right order
If you are making both, sequence them. Publish the paperback, order a proof, read it in daylight, and fix what it shows — see Order the proof. Then read it in daylight. Then generate the hardcover wrap from the corrected design.
Do it in that order and you correct the book once. Do both at once and every mistake is two files, two uploads and two proofs.
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: Dust jackets, and the extra geometry they need · More: Paperback, hardcover, dust jacket: what changes · How to calculate spine width · Print on demand or a print run?