Book Cover Design: Templates

Paperback Book Cover Design Templates – $249!

For those wanting an inexpensive but attractive looking paperback book cover design for self-publishing through your favorite printer or publisher, I’ve worked up a (growing!) selection of layouts that I can quickly personalize to achieve your vision. I’m starting this service with paperback templates only, but I expect to be offering templates for hardcover jackets also in the future.

Benefits:

• Created by a professional book cover designer with years of experience.
• No learning curve, no software – just make a few choices.
• Premium royalty-free stock image for use on your cover included* (I hate disclaimers too, but this one probably won’t bother you.)
• Huge font selection.
• Sized correctly for your book’s page count and trim size.
• Formatted correctly for your printer of choice.
• Fast! Usually finished within 72 hours.

How it Works:

Choose a book cover design template layout from my the scroller above that suits you (click on a cover to see full layout) and write down the template number. Note: I’ve downsampled the template images as much as possible (from 300 dpi to 72 dpi – then reduced image quality to 60% for jpeg export) to keep file sizes down, but they’re still bandwidth intensive and there’s just no getting around that while still trying to give you a fairly accurate representation of what the templates look like. Downsampling this much reduces image clarity, color saturation, and makes text appear blurred – but rest assured your hi-res cover will be sharp and crisp!

Some of my designs feature full landscape background images, while others have a background image peeking out from behind a solid color or textured panel, and some rely upon typography, color, and structure instead of images. Check The New York Times Bestseller lists and you’ll find these styles are a staple that convey a strong identity and message. Font choices and their positioning are key elements to these styles which excel at conveying professionalism. Feel free to specify colors of your own choosing and whether or not you want a textured finish: here’s a link to a neat website with loads of info on color trends and palettes COLOURlovers with various layout styles for back cover text and title positioning. Remember that book printers typically print using CMYK colors, so if you specify an RGB color I’ll need to convert it to its CMYK nearest neighbor and it will likely vary somewhat.

While choosing your background image from my list of suppliers in the following section, you’ll use “keywords” or combinations of keywords to search for pictures, such as ‘denim’ like I used to find the faded texture for layout 02e – which I designed to look like a well worn, home-made psalm cover I once saw. You’ll notice on layout 02c I used a separate background for the back cover text box, while the text box on layout 02b uses a transparency to make the text more legible against the background. Well, you can specify those options too if you like…yes, they’re templates, but I designed them to accommodate a bit of customization within the framework of the layout.

Note that on layout 03a the front cover title has a special effect applied. These kind of effects are an “extra” which you can request, but incur an additional fee because they take more design work. I charge $35 per hour for modifications or alterations, but I bill in quarter hour increments. For example, the special effects I applied to the title text on 03a took me 12 minutes to do, so the charge would have been an additional $8.75 for the client. Not much all-in-all, but if you’re prone to changing your mind on font’s, or cover text, or other design changes – maybe you’d be better off opting for a full custom book cover design. My prices are very competitive!

Many of my templates will accommodate background images, so depending upon the layout you’ve chosen, you can further customize your book cover by choosing a licensed royalty-free stock image from my regular supplier Dreamstime and selecting your favorite. Don’t buy it! I’ll supply the standard license version as part of my service. Just make note of the image ID and supplier name to include with your order. Example: Dreamstime, Image ID: 9923110

*Note Your image selection should be the standard license “royalty free” photo’s or illustrations, and not those in the “editorial” or “extended license” categories which are not included. The Dreamstime “standard” royalty free stock image license restricts image reproduction for books to no more than 499,999 copies before requiring an upgrade to an enhanced license – which isn’t included in my service. But hey, if you’ve sold a half million copies of your book, you can certainly afford to shell out a few hundred bucks for a license upgrade!

Paperback Book Cover Templates
Any paperback trim size	$249.00
Ready-to-print artwork
Free bar code
Website cover images
Upload digital files to printer

Some image searching tips:

I’ve spent many an hour searching for just the right image to use as part of a book cover design project; clicking through page after page of photo’s until my eye’s go blurry. Save yourself some time by using keyword search’s effectively:

Most stock image providers let you use several modifiers to narrow down your keyword searches. You can separate several terms with ‘AND’ to include all results for those terms.
Example: Child and Boy and Beagle and Dog
You can exclude certain results by using the modifier ‘NOT’.
Example: not Puppy
You can expand a search by using the modifier ‘OR’.
Example: Car and Ford and Black or Silver
You can combine phrases with modifiers to narrow results by using quotation marks.
Example: “4 door” and Car and Ford and Black or Silver from the previous example would return even more specific results.

I choose cover fonts very carefully to suit readability and genre, but you can optionally choose a specific title (and/or text) font for your cover if you prefer:
by theme: Adobe Type Library: Font Themes
or style: Adobe Type Library: Font Styles

Note: Please limit yourself to one text and one title font selection.

Assemble the information I’ll need to complete your book cover design:

• Printer’s name (IE: Lightning Source, Lulu, BookSurge, iUniverse, etc.) so I can make sure that the completed cover fits their specifications.
• Trim size (6×9, 5.5×8.5, etc)
• Page count (it must be a final page count to determine the correct spine size).
• Author photo (digital-300dpi) if you wish to include one.

Text Files: Title, subtitle if any, author bio if you wish to include one, back cover summary text (some layouts will accommodate more text than others) and reviews & endorsements (blurbs), author name (some folks use pen-names after all), ISBN and retail price (price just in barcode or also on cover?). Also include the publisher name, address, and logo if you’d like that info on the cover.

Once finished, I’ll send you a link by email so that you can download your new book cover.