How to Create a Book Cover on Kindle Direct Publishing

I published a book! I’m so thrilled to finally share my novelette about Black Lives Matter, the Korean Independence Movement, Korean American siblings, and ghosts in All the Ways We Intertwine.

Below, I share how I created and formatted my book cover, with extra attention to detail on the nitty-gritty of formatting the book cover for a paperback versus an ebook.

1: Find an Artist

Why you should commission artwork for your book cover

Isn’t that expensive? Yes, it’s an investment: an investment to make sure your other investment — hours, months, and years spent brainstorming, researching, workshopping, editing, and writing your book — doesn’t go to waste.

One of the biggest drawbacks of traditional publishing is that you don’t have control over anything except what goes within the covers of the book (and sometimes barely that).

Naturally, then, one of the biggest advantages of self-publishing is complete control. Why not tailor a cover to your story?

Finding an artist

In my case, I scoured #PortfolioDay on Twitter, not just to scope out potential artists but, more importantly, to scope out different styles and get a sense of what I wanted. What would best convey the feel and theme of the book?

My story is a speculative Asian ghost story with culture and history at its core. I didn’t want straight-up anime but I knew I wanted an art style close to it. I saved images of wispy, hazy brushstrokes because I knew I wanted something ethereal to represent the magical elements of my story. I saved cartoon styles that were distinctly Korean — again, not quite anime, but close to it.

I then took screenshots of traditional Korean fan dance and drum dance, important elements of the story, to figure out how I wanted my main characters to be posing.

Towards the end of my research process, I cold-emailed two artists. One of them got back to me quicker.

2: Gather and send source material

Your artist needs something to go off of. In my case, I sent my artist several documents worth of source material:

• The story itself, optional for her to read if she had time
• A 1-page synopsis, beginning to end, highlighting main themes, characters, and plot
• A 1-page description of what I was imagining for the book cover
• A collection of images with notes on what about those images I liked, whether it was the wispy ethereal illustration style or the epic, multi-character layout

Here’s a sample of the book cover idea document I sent my artist:

Image courtesy of author: Screenshot from book cover idea I sent my artist.

Here’s a sampling of the longer collection of images I sent, along with my notes, to describe aesthetic inspirations for the book cover:

Images courtesy of author: Screenshots from the aesthetic files I sent to the artist, showing an images along with comments about what I liked about them. Images are redacted because I do not have permission from the original sources to show their work.

3: Carefully inspect each draft of the book cover and provide detailed feedback

Here’s the initial mock-up of the book cover:

Image courtesy of author: Mockup of the book cover

Make sure to tell your artist not only what to fix but what works. In my case, I loved the layout and how she worked in all the different elements: BLM protestors, Korean Freedom Fighters, and the two main siblings, each posing in their respective traditional Korean art. I loved the wisps that represented the Winds of Change, a powerful magic in the book, and how those wisps seemed to thread all the characters together, since an important theme in the story is, like the title says, how we all connect through space and time.

Give yourself time to think about it if you can. You want to make sure you’re okay with the cover as much as possible before asking your artist to do the grueling work of turning a mock-up into a full-blown draft. Save your time, the artist’s time, and your money.

In my case, I sent the artist initial thoughts right away but asked her to hold off until 3 business days to implement the changes I suggested. A good thing, too: I ended up revoking all 2 of those suggested changes and keeping only one: modernizing Tim, the fan dancer, to look like a typical Korean guy today.

I gave my artist the okay to move on with the mock-up as-is, and she sent me the following draft.

Image courtesy of author: First draft of book cover

The final cover is amazing — but my initial thought was, “too much red.” I missed the purple.

It turns out, purple is the color of liberation. It’s the blend of red and blue, colors of both the South Korean and American flags. Red and blue also represent hold and cold, passion and cool intelligence. I couldn’t imagine the cover without purple.

I also missed having the Korean woman in the lower right corner, to signify the women who also fought in the Independence movement, and wanted the fans to incorporate green leaves around the peony flower patterns.

Again, I sent initial thoughts, but asked her to wait 3 business days. This time I kept all the changes, and she sent me the following two drafts.

Image courtesy of author: Second draft of book cover

Image courtesy of author: The final book cover image

If you’re like me, that first image is nice, but the second is more dynamic and vibrant. I liked the glowing lights set against the darker background like stars, since the story takes place mostly at night, as the siblings march through the streets of Washington, D.C.

4: Format the book cover on Kindle Direct Publishing

This was by far the most difficult part of the process.

4.1: Choose your image

First, you can choose between your own image or an image from KDP’s image gallery. (You can also skip the step if you want to come back to it later.)

Image courtesy of author: Choose which image to use for your cover.

Once you upload your book cover image, the KDP system lets you choose:

• Layouts, which include placement of solid color backgrounds and text boxes for Author, Title, and Subtitle (filled automatically with metadata) — within the layout, you cannot change the location of the solid colors or, more importantly, the text boxes
• Font — you can change this, as well as font size
• Color scheme for the text, main background color, and secondary background color — you can change any of all three of these

Here’s what the mockup layouts looked like when I uploaded the image for the ebook version:

Image courtesy of author: Mockup layouts for the ebook version, pre-populated with metadata and the uploaded cover image.

4.2: Choose a general layout.

After doing so, you can fiddle with versions of that layout (where exactly text fields go, shown below) and different color schemes and fonts. Both are limited but have enough variety to make your book stand out.

Image courtesy of author: Editing options for a paperback cover. Once you’ve chosen a general layout, you can fine tune where each of the fields go (shown highlighted). You can also choose different colors (the paintbrush icon in the lower left corner) and different fonts (the Text icon in the lower left corner).

You can experiment, save, and return to the cover later. If you save a version, experiment, and then exit without saving, your changes up until your last save will be lost. But maybe that’s okay if you have a cover you already like and just want to try tweaking it.

4.3.A: Fine-tune your (ebook) cover

For me, the two main problems were that:

1) The cover art was so fantastic I wanted to cover as little as possible. This made me choose one of the bare-bone layouts, with just two strips of color at the top.

2) There were already so many colors within the cover image that it was difficult to find a color palette that fit the palette of the cover image and had legible text. Here’s one option that worked surprisingly well: orange and yellow with white text.

Image courtesy of author: Initial cover for my novelette

The problem with this image is the text: my author name, “YJ Jun” is actually in the box for the “Subtitle” and my title is in the box for “Author”, because the box for the “Title” is right over Tim’s face.

Moreover, I had pressed enter-enter-enter to shove my name down to where it would be more visible to the point that it was actually outside the designated box.

Neither of these is a problem for ebook publishing. When the system saw my name in the “Subtitle” box and the, it asked me if I wanted to update my metadata to reflect the change, and I simply clicked “No.” (Otherwise, the listing on Amazon would say this book was written by “All the Ways We Intertwine,” doesn’t have a title, and has the sub-title “YJ Jun”!)

Image courtesy of author: How I formatted the cover by manually overriding metadata (left) vs. how the cover looked when metadata auto-populated the fields (right)

4.3.B: Fine-tune your paperback cover — it’s trickier

Paperbacks have two additional “covers”: the spine and the back cover.

Here’s what the mockup layouts looked like when I uploaded the image for the paperback version:

Image courtesy of author: Mockup layouts for the paperback version, pre-populated with metadata and the uploaded cover image.

Here’s the problem: when your book has a spine, the spine has boxes for “Author” and “Title” that are linked to their respective boxes on the cover. If I had left “YJ Jun” in the subtitle box, the spine wouldn’t have my name! But it would have “All the Ways We Intertwine” squished into the small box where my name is supposed to go on the spine. Believe me, I tried deleting text in one box and inserting in another, but there’s no way around it: the text boxes must contain what they’re supposed to.

Here’s what the paperback mockup looks like when metadata auto-populates the “Author,” “Title,” and “Subtitle” fields:

Image courtesy of author: The cover auto-populated fields with their respective metadata. The “Author” field is at the top of the front cover and the bottom of the spine; the “Title” field is in the center-right of the front cover and the bottom of the spine, and the “Subtitle” field is only on the bottom of the front cover.

After re-sizing the image, I didn’t like how the title covered so much of the artwork. I didn’t want to make the title small, either. So I manually typed information where I wanted to be on the front cover: I typed the title at the top in the “Author” field and my name at the bottom in the “Subtitle” field. I had to leave the “Title” field blank because the text wouldn’t be visible, or would look very messy, over Tim’s mostly-white fan.

Here’s what it looked like after I manually overrode the metadata:

Image courtesy of author: When I use the “Author” field for the title and the “Subtitle” field for the author name on the front cover, the spine automatically updates to match those fields. The “Title” field on the spine is empty, the actual title is in the “Author” field is at the bottom of the spine, and the author name doesn’t appear anywhere because there’s no “Subtitle” field on the spine.

The front cover is great, but notice the spine: The top of the spine is empty, because the “Author” field on the spine is linked to the now-empty “Author” field on the front cover. The bottom of the spine is where the title is. That wouldn’t be a problem for me if I had my name somewhere on the spine, but there’s no “Subtitle” field on the spine. The only way to get my name on the spine would be to write it in the “Title” field on the front cover, which is linked to the top of the spine. Trust me, I tried it, and the front cover looked bad: either my name blended into the white fan, or I had to enlarge my name so much it looked ridiculous.

Caveat to 4.3.B: If your paperback is short, it’s easier

It turns out that after uploading a final version of my manuscript, my paperback wouldn’t have enough room to have text on the spine because the book was too short (a novelette of just over 30 pages).

Here’s what the layouts looked like after the system realized my book didn’t qualify for text on the spine:

Image courtesy of author: Mockup layouts for the paperback version, pre-populated with metadata and the uploaded cover image, when the spine isn’t large enough for text.

Now I could do whatever I wanted with the fields on the front cover because they weren’t linked to anything on the spine. In the end, I chose the layout in the upper right corner of the image above.

4.4: Preview your image

At the end of all this, you can preview your cover to check how it will look on most tablets and in black-and-white versus color.

Image courtesy of author: Preview your final book cover in color or black and white on different devices.

You can also download the free KDP Online Previewer app to see what your whole book will look like, whether in ebook or paperback format.

The final product

The final product is stunning, if I do say so myself. But I’m more proud of all the effort that went into wrangling the KDP system into outputting a cover that fits my vision.

The great thing about the KDP system is that it allows you to link multiple formats of the book, namely ebooks and paperbacks. (There is now a hardcover version, which was not available when I published.) So when you publish your book, both are available through the live link.

Here’s how it looks on the live link:

Images courtesy of author: How the book cover looks on the live link for the book.

If your ebook cover differs from your paperback, which is used as the thumbnail? I’m honestly not sure. I started off with the ebook and then linked the paperback; in that case, the main thumbnail was the ebook cover (which differs slightly from the paperback version due to formatting issues discussed above). If I had started off with the paperback, maybe the paperback’s front cover would have been the thumbnail.