Guide
Four routes, what each actually costs, and the licensing traps that catch authors after publication rather than before. Written for people who have finished a manuscript and now face the part nobody warned them about.
A paperback cover is not one image. It is a single flat sheet that wraps the whole book: back panel, spine, front panel, plus a quarter inch of bleed that gets trimmed off. Most authors commission only the front, then discover the rest exists.
The spine width depends on your page count, which depends on your finished interior — so the spine cannot be known until the book is typeset. This is why so many covers come back from Amazon rejected: the cover was built against an estimated page count and the real book ran longer.
| Route | Typical cost | Best when |
|---|---|---|
| Commission a designer | $300–$800 | The book matters commercially and you want it to compete on a shelf |
| Premade cover | $50–$150 | Genre fiction, where convention helps and speed matters |
| AI generation | $10–$30/month | You have a clear image in mind and time to iterate |
| Do it yourself | Free–$15/month | Non-fiction, journals, or anything type-led rather than image-led |
Reedsy's marketplace, 100 Covers, Damonza and Ebook Launch all sit in this range. What you are buying is judgment about your genre, not just execution — a good cover designer knows what a thriller reader's eye expects in a thumbnail and yours probably does not.
Three things to specify when you brief them, because leaving them vague is where the money goes:
A designer makes a cover speculatively, you buy it and they add your title. The Book Cover Designer, GoOnWrite and Beetiful all sell this way. Cheaper and faster than commissioning, and the quality is often high because the designer made what they wanted rather than what a client described badly.
The trade: it is not exclusive unless you pay for exclusivity, and a genre reader may have seen it before. Check that before buying.
Midjourney, Ideogram, Flux and similar tools can produce genuinely good cover art, and for non-fiction and speculative fiction they are now a serious option. Two things to be careful about.
Practical advice if you go this route: generate at the largest size the tool offers, and generate the image without the title on it. Text rendered by an image model is unreliable at cover sizes, and typesetting the title separately gives you a cleaner result and the ability to change it.
Canva, Affinity Publisher and GIMP all work. This route succeeds most often for books where the cover is type-led — business, memoir, self-help, journals — and fails most often for genre fiction, where readers judge in a thumbnail against professionally made competition.
If you do it yourself, the single highest-leverage move is to look at the top twenty books in your category on Amazon, at thumbnail size, and notice what they have in common. Then do that. Originality in a cover is usually a way of failing to signal genre.
| Trim size | Front panel with bleed, at 300 DPI |
|---|---|
| 5 × 8 | 1575 × 2475 px |
| 5.5 × 8.5 | 1725 × 2625 px |
| 6 × 9 | 1875 × 2775 px |
| 7 × 10 | 2175 × 3075 px |
| 8.5 × 11 | 2625 × 3375 px |
Whichever route you take, the brief is the same four things, and getting them wrong costs a redraw rather than an edit.
Almost nobody sees your cover at full size. They see it about 160 pixels tall in an Amazon search result, next to eleven others. Before you accept any artwork, shrink it to the size of a postage stamp and look at it.
If the title is unreadable, the image is a grey smudge, or it looks like four other books on the page, the cover has failed at the only size that sells copies — however good it looks on your screen. This is the single most common mistake in self-published covers, and it costs nothing to check.
The spine width is the page count multiplied by the paper thickness: 0.002252 inches per page on white stock, 0.0025 on cream. So a 300-page book has a 0.68-inch spine and a 302-page book does not.
Which means the cover wrap cannot be finished until the interior is finished. Commission the artwork whenever you like — but the wrap gets built last, against the page count of the file you are actually going to upload. Every rejected cover we have seen comes from ignoring that order. The calculator will show you the number for any page count and stock.
We assemble it into the full print cover — the cover wrap KDP asks for: back panel, spine, bleed and barcode area in one file — plus a matching Kindle cover, with the spine width measured from your actual interior PDF rather than estimated. $39 a book.
See how it works