Barcodes, and the price code beside them
The barcode is the least designed part of most back covers, because authors meet it last — usually as a white rectangle that lands on top of something they cared about. It is easier to plan for than to rescue.
What the barcode actually is
It is your ISBN, encoded as an EAN-13 — the same symbol used on any retail product. The thirteen digits under the bars are the ISBN itself, so there is nothing extra to obtain and nothing to make up. No ISBN, no barcode.
A scanner reads the bars, gets the number, looks up the book. So the barcode does not need to look interesting; it needs to be read by a cheap laser at an awkward angle in bad light.
Where it goes, and how big
Convention puts it in the lower right of the back cover, clear of the spine and the trim edge. Lower left is acceptable and less common. What is not acceptable is anywhere that crosses a fold.
Most print services reserve an area of roughly 2 inches by 1.2 inches (about 51 × 30 mm) for it, and will place the symbol themselves if you leave the space empty. Some print a plain white box there whether or not you were expecting one.
"The printer will handle it" is true, and it is still not a plan — the printer handles the barcode, not the design around it. If your back cover art, your blurb or your author photo runs through that rectangle, the barcode lands on top of it, and you find out at proof stage.
Treat the area as a fixed element of the layout, the way you treat the spine. Put the barcode zone down first, then compose the back cover around it.
Leave it light and leave it clear
Scanners read contrast between dark bars and a light background. A few rules follow from that, and they are not negotiable by taste:
- Light background, dark bars. White or near-white is the safe choice. Black bars on a dark green panel may look better and will fail.
- No artwork underneath. Not a photo, not a texture, not a gradient. A gradient is especially bad because it works at one end of the symbol and not the other.
- Keep the quiet zone. The clear margin on each side of the bars is part of the symbol. Type or artwork pressed against the edge of the barcode breaks it as surely as drawing over it.
- Don't scale it down. If the symbol is squeezed to fit a gap you left, the bars narrow past what a scanner can resolve.
In the Cover Maker. The ISBN and barcode options can reserve the barcode area so nothing important gets placed under it, or draw a blank box where KDP will print its own — so you design around the space rather than discovering it in the proof. Start a book → · about the Cover Maker
The five digits beside it
Next to the main barcode you will often see a second, narrower block of bars: a five-digit price add-on, technically an EAN-5. It encodes the retail price, and it is optional.
The first digit is a currency code; the remaining four digits are the price in that currency. An add-on always attaches to a valid ISBN — it is a supplement to the main symbol, not a barcode in its own right, so you cannot have one without the other.
When you want it. Physical bookstores, where a shelf price is expected and a bookseller may need to ring the book up without a lookup. If you are pitching to independent stores, or selling at fairs and signings, a printed price is expected.
When you do not. Print-on-demand, where the price is set in a dashboard and can change whenever you like. The moment you discount or run a promotion, a printed price is wrong on every copy. Most print-on-demand titles carry no add-on at all, and nothing about that reads as amateur.
There is also a conventional code for no price stated, used when a book carries an add-on block but no committed price. If a distributor asks for one, they will tell you which to use.
Currency is the trap
The leading digit is where it is worth slowing down.
US dollars and pounds sterling have standard codes. Long-established, widely implemented, safe to use.
The euro does not have a standard code. There is no universally agreed leading digit for it, and the failure mode is not a scanner error — some scanners read a leading digit intended as euros as pounds sterling, so the book scans at a plausible but wrong price.
If you need a euro price in the barcode, confirm the exact encoding with your distributor before you print. It varies by market and by retailer, and it is not something to settle from a forum post. The Cover Maker offers the add-on in US dollars and pounds sterling only, and says why when you look for the euro.
Don't bake the price into the art
Separate from the barcode: resist putting the price in your cover artwork as set type.
For a print-on-demand book this is the same mistake as the add-on, only harder to undo: changing it means a new cover file and a new upload. Repricing is one of the few levers you have, and it should cost nothing.
Fixed print run, one market, a price already committed to? Print it. Otherwise let the retailer display the price and keep your cover good for as long as the book is.
Get the ISBN right first — Do you need your own ISBN? — then the barcode is just a rectangle you remembered to leave empty.
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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