19 Book Covers for Ebooks and Print-on-Demand
Pressbooks’ primary function is to generate interior book files for ebooks and print books. You do not have to use Pressbooks to create your book covers—you can source those separately—but you can use our book cover generator to produce both your ebook or PDF covers. The file you create will be automatically sized to complex industry specifications.
NOTE: Print-on-demand services require that interior and cover files are submitted separately, but ebook services typically do not. Book covers will be included in your ebook (EPUB and MOBI) exports, but not in your PDF files.
In this section, we will cover:
- How to create ebook and print book covers in Pressbooks
- Ebook cover specifications
- How to include your cover in your exported ebook files from Pressbooks
- What’s different about the specs for a print book cover
- How to turn an ebook cover into a print cover in Pressbooks
How to Use the Pressbooks Cover Generator
Here’s how to access the cover creation tool if it’s installed on your network.
(NOTE: if you are using Pressbooks.com, you have access to the cover generator, but exported cover files will contain Pressbooks watermarks and ads until you upgrade.
1. Go to Export / Cover Generator.
2. Adjust your book information. This is automatically imported from what you’ve entered under Book Info, but what you enter here will not override the text you have entered on the Book Info page.
3. Set your theme (your book cover is going to inherit the font and design style of the theme you applied to your book. You can change that theme.)
4. Upload an image for the front of your cover. This is optional. You can also have a plain cover and specify the background color instead.)
5. Check the page count. Pressbooks will automatically fill this field with the page count of your most recent PDF export UNLESS you change it manually. If you change it manually once, it will no longer be automatically updated, so you will have to be very careful to check the page count here before exporting your final cover file.
6. Set the colors for your cover’s background and text
7. Click on Make PDF Cover and Make Ebook Cover to generate print and ebook cover files. A progress bar will appear to track your cover files as they export. when complete, the cover files will appear underneath the Download heading.
Preparing Cover Images for Print
Many print-on-demand suppliers (including IngramSpark) request that cover images be at least 300DPI. To ensure that our cover generator is creating covers that meet this requirement, we have added a check during the image upload process that will verify whether your image is large enough to export at the right resolution for your trim size.
Before you upload your cover image to the generator, you will need to check that it is the right size. To do so:
- Add .125 to the top, right side and bottom of your front cover dimensions (e.g. the front cover for a 6×9in trim size book would be 6.125×9