Pixel Forge — Book cover design
Book cover design
A cover has two jobs, in this order: tell a browsing reader what kind of book this is, and make them want it. Most covers that underperform commercially fail at the first one, and their authors assume they failed at the second.
We design for how books are actually discovered — as a thumbnail roughly 160 pixels tall, in a grid of thirty competitors, getting under a second of attention.
What we deliver
Ebook covers at platform specification — 1.6:1 ratio, 2,560 × 1,600 pixels, RGB, checked at thumbnail size and in greyscale for e-ink readers.
Paperback and hardcover wraps — front, spine, and back as a single file, with the spine calculated from your actual page count and paper stock, and the barcode area reserved.
Audiobook covers — square, 3,000 × 3,000 pixels, composed for the format rather than cropped from a rectangle.
Series systems — a consistent typographic and compositional structure across titles, so book three is recognisably related to book one.
How we work
1. Category research. We look at the top titles in your specific sub-category — not the genre broadly — and identify the visual vocabulary they share. Genre conventions exist because readers use them to filter, and a cover that ignores them gets filtered out before anyone reads the title.
2. Brief. Your book, your audience, comparable titles you admire, and where it will be sold.
3. Concepts. Two or three directions, each shown at both full size and thumbnail size. The thumbnail is the version that matters, and reviewing only at full size is how unreadable covers get approved.
4. Refinement. Agreed revision rounds.
5. Production. Files built to specification for each format you are publishing in.
The technical part
This is where self-published covers most often get rejected or come back wrong.
Spine width is calculated from page count multiplied by paper thickness — and it changes if your interior page count changes during formatting. We calculate it from the final count, using the correct multiplier for your chosen paper stock.
Bleed and safe area. 3.2 mm bleed, with all text kept well inside the trim, because trimming has a tolerance.
Barcode. Roughly 50 × 30 mm reserved in the lower back cover, on a light background with adequate quiet zone. Designs that ignore this get a white box printed over them.
Colour. Converted to CMYK deliberately, with the shift inspected, rather than left for the platform to convert automatically on upload.
Greyscale check. A significant share of ebook readers use e-ink devices. We verify the cover still holds when colour is removed — a check that is skipped constantly and catches covers relying on hue contrast alone.
Full detail: designing a book cover for Amazon KDP
What you receive
- Ebook cover at platform specification
- Print-ready wrap PDF, 300 dpi, CMYK, fonts outlined
- Audiobook cover, if required
- Layered source files, editable
- Marketing crops — social, banner, promotional
- Written transfer of ownership on final payment
- Font and image licence documentation
That last item matters for covers specifically. Stock imagery licensed for one use and applied to another is a recurring problem, and illustration commissioned without a clear rights agreement causes trouble years later when you want it on merchandise.
Commissioning an illustrator: rights and contracts
What we will tell you honestly
If your cover concept works against its genre's conventions, we will say so and explain what it costs you in discovery.
If your book would be better served by a typographic cover than by commissioned illustration, we will propose the cheaper option.
If the title is too long to be legible at thumbnail size, we will raise it early — because the fix is usually the subtitle, not the design.