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How to Design A Book Cover
How to Design A Book Cover

Designing a book cover in Chapterly is simplified by using the intuitive design tools to build your cover design.

JoEllen avatar
Written by JoEllen
Updated over a week ago

Designing the Book Cover

You can navigate to the book cover design page by first clicking on the Library tab at the top left side of your Chapterly dashboard. Then select the book that you want to edit. On the right side of your book title and description page, you will see an icon that says, “Edit Cover.” Another way to add a book cover is to click on the “+” sign next to “Book Covers” and then select, “Add Cover.” Click on the Edit Cover icon to open the design template.

You will be directed to a selection of template choices that you can select and then edit. The first template is a "Blank Cover" that you can select if you want to either upload your own cover design or design the cover in Chapterly. You can also choose from the numerous free templates available that you can edit by changing the text and images on the cover design.

How to Add Your Own Custom Book Cover Design

If you want to add your own custom book cover design that you created outside of Chapterly, you can upload it to your book. To upload your own cover design, please select the "Blank Cover" template for your cover design, click next. Then select the book type: Hard or Soft Cover, Saddle Stitch, eBook, or Dust Jacket as the book type. Click "Create Cover" to load the blank book cover.

Then click on the circle/square icon at the top of the design toolbar and select, "background-image" from the dropdown menu. You have the option of choosing from the huge database of Unsplash images, or you can add your own image by clicking on "Upload" if you have already uploaded an image, select "Album" to add the custom cover image as the background, and click open. The image that you uploaded for your custom book cover will populate on the cover design page and the cover will be saved automatically.

PLEASE NOTE: In order for the cover image for a 5" x 8" to display properly, it must be no less than 1500px x 2400px to look good on paper when printing at 300 DPI. If the dimensions of the cover image uploaded are less than that, the maximum print size for that image will produce a 2" x 3" thumbnail to avoid a loss of image quality.

You can also edit the name of the cover design, cover size, font type, color, orientation, outline, and shadow of text also by clicking on the double arrow (>>) at the top right-hand side of the cover design page.

Every change that you make to the cover design will be saved automatically. If you are not happy with the change(s) that you made, you can click on the “undo arrow” in the edit navigation bar, or you can also click the “cancel undo arrow” to return the previously edited version. Finally, you can add a new text box to the cover by clicking on the “T” in the design navigation bar which will add a new text element to your cover.

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