Tips for Designing a Book Cover on PosterMyWall

Designing can be a tricky a process. It’s especially true with book covers. They come in all shapes and sizes. Novels, non-fiction and academic books all have their own formats, and none of them have a fixed standard.

You also has to keep in mind printing requirements, and whether it’s the cover or the dust jacket (both come in different sizes). There isn’t any specific rule to creating book covers. 

Here are some tips to keep in mind when designing a book cover on PosterMyWall. 

Use Custom Sizes

Book cover sizes vary greatly from one book to another. It is a good idea to contact your publisher prior to designing, so you can ask for the exact dimensions of the cover. Some additional factors to keep in mind when designing a book cover are number of pages, size of the spine and size and thickness of the pages. 

For this purpose, we recommend using custom dimensions when designing your book cover in the PosterMyWall editor. 

Some commonly used book cover sizes, some of which are also “industry standards” are given below: 

• 4.37 x 7 inches (178 x 111mm)

• 5.5 x 8.5 inches (216 x 140mm)

• 6 x 9 inches (229 x 152mm)

• 8.5 x 11 inches (280 x 216mm)

• 8 x 10 inches (254 x 203mm)

• 5.25 x 8 inches (203 x 133mm)

• 5 x 8 inches (203 x 127mm)

• 8.25 x 11 inches (280 x 210mm)

• 7.5 x 9.25 inches, 19.1 x 23.5 centimeters

These sizes form merely the tip of the iceberg, as every publishing house has their own standard, reflecting the kind of books they publish. 

Collaborate with your Publisher

You should also collaborate with someone from the printing company, who are more knowledgeable on the intricacies of printing. Collaborating on designs is easy in PosterMyWall. Learn more about collaboration on PosterMyWall in our blog post about Shared Folders. 

You could ask them to tweak your design once you’re done, and make it best suited for the printer, as they will take into account trimming and bleed to make sure no elements of the book cover are left out. 

For the dust jacket, additional space needs to be taken into account for the folding and the flaps, which is something which also varies from publisher to publisher. 

Getting it Printed

PosterMyWall does not offer printing for book covers. Therefore, we recommend using PosterMyWall to design and download the book cover only, and get them printed by a publisher.

We hope this blog post helped answer some of the questions you may have regarding designing book covers on PosterMyWall. You can always contact our support team for any queries regarding designing. 

Quick Takeaway 

Design according to the prevalent industrial standard for your book’s genre. Keep someone from the publisher in the loop to help you out with the nitty gritty of preparing a design for print.