Creating a Book Cover for Your eBook

Your book cover carries more weight than almost anything else in your listing — it’s the first thing a reader sees, often reduced to a thumbnail the size of a postage stamp on a phone screen. Here’s how to approach it.

Your Options

Make It Yourself

Free or low-cost tools like Canva let you design a cover without design experience. Works best for a simple, clean design — text-heavy or minimalist covers hold up better than anything trying to be visually complex.

Use Cover-Maker Software

Purpose-built tools (Canva’s book cover templates, BookBrush, and similar) give you templates specifically sized and structured for book covers, which removes some of the guesswork around sizing and layout.

Hire a Freelancer

Marketplaces like Fiverr or 99designs connect you with designers at a range of price points — quality varies significantly, so review a designer’s actual portfolio in your genre before committing.

Hire a Design Company

A professional service designs, formats, and delivers your cover ready for every platform’s requirements — the highest cost option, but the most consistent quality and least back-and-forth.

What to Get Right

• Pass the thumbnail test. Shrink your finished cover down to roughly the size it’ll actually appear at — a small search result thumbnail — and check whether the title and your name are still legible. If they blur into the background at that size, they need to be bolder or simpler.
• Avoid elaborate or script fonts for the title. They might look great full-size, but they’re often the first thing to become unreadable at thumbnail size.
• Use bold, high-contrast colors and imagery. Covers competing in a crowded genre category need to stand out at a glance, not reward a closer look.
• Match the cover to your genre’s visual expectations. See our guide to choosing fonts by genre — readers subconsciously judge a book’s genre by its cover style before they read a word of the blurb.
• Proofread the cover text itself. A typo on a cover is one of the fastest ways to undermine reader trust before they’ve even opened the book.
• Make sure the cover accurately reflects the book’s content and tone. A cover that oversells or misrepresents the story leads to mismatched expectations and worse reviews.
• Include your author name on the cover. Most aggregators and retailers require this for the listing to be accepted.