How to Format Your Book Cover For Kindle Direct Publishing
Self-Publishing Tips
I paid a friend of mine, who is a professional artist, to design my book cover. He produced a full wraparound design which impressed me greatly.
With great enthusiasm, I uploaded the cover to Amazon’s KDP platform. It looked perfect, so after dealing with the manuscript and a few other things that KDP requested, I hit the publish button.
A few hours later, I received an email from KDP telling me my cover was unsuitable for publication. It needed extending in both dimensions — top, bottom, left and right — by 3.22mm.
An important thing I learned from this is that, when you look at your uploaded cover on KDP, there is a red dotted line extended around the border of the image. Half a centimeter or so outside the red line is a dotted white line. You will need to make sure the text on your cover is within the dotted red line, and make sure your image extends beyond the boundary of the white dotted line. Otherwise, when you publish, your cover will have a black fringe running around its outer edge. This doesn’t look at all professional.
If you have a wraparound cover, like me, you can run into problems with increasing its size, as it’s just a single image. If you simply drag the cover to a larger size, you will also…
