Build a print-exact book cover
A print shop wants the cover as one flat sheet — back + spine + front — at exact millimetres, and every layout app makes that fiddly. Drop your front, back and (if you have it) spine images here, pick the trim, and out comes the wraparound as a PDF sized to the print bed, with optional bleed and fold ticks. No spine image? Give it a colour and the title — the spine is built for you, lettering fitted by the same arithmetic as the lettering fitter, sized by the same spine model as everything else on this site. In your browser; your art never uploads.
PNG or JPEG — it is cover-cropped to fill the panel exactly.
PNG or JPEG — it is cover-cropped to fill the panel exactly.
PNG or JPEG — it is cover-cropped to fill the panel exactly.
Fitted to the spine automatically — the same arithmetic as the lettering fitter.
Everything composes in this tab and nothing uploads — your cover art is yours. The spine is sized by the same model as the spine calculator, so the cover fits the book the site would print.
The one number that must be right
The spine. Everything else forgives; a spine a millimetre out shows white or swallows the covers. The builder takes it from pages and paper through the same spine model the site's own covers use — or a calipered figure straight from your print shop, which beats every model, including ours. Bleed (3 mm, toggleable) extends past every edge so the guillotine never finds unprinted paper.
Cover-crop, always
Images fill their panel exactly — scaled to cover, centred, overflow cropped. Faces and text near edges will move: keep them inside the trim, inside the safe area.
The generated spine
Solid colour, optional title lettered to fit — top-to-bottom by trade convention, bottom-to-top if you prefer the European way. Below the 6.4 mm lettering floor it refuses politely and leaves the spine clean.
PNG preview, honestly
The preview is the print PDF rendered — one layout, two artefacts. If the PNG looks right, the PDF is right; they cannot drift because they are the same bytes.
Questions people actually ask
Do my images get uploaded anywhere?
No. The wraparound is composed in your browser's memory with the same engine the file tools use, and both downloads are handed straight back. Cover art is frequently unreleased work; it stays on your machine.
What size should my images be?
At least the panel they fill, at print resolution: an A5 cover panel is 148 × 210 mm, so 1748 × 2480 px at 300 dpi. Bigger is fine — it's cropped, not squashed.
Can it do the covers this site sells?
It builds the same flat layout the studio's print-ready files carry, sized by the same spine model. For a chat book, the studio designs the cover from your chat; for your own book, this is the tool.
Why no spine text below 6.4 mm?
Binding drift rolls lettering off spines narrower than a quarter inch, whatever the arithmetic says. The fitter checks the floor so the foil order you almost placed doesn't become the mistake you did.
PDF or PNG for the printer?
PDF — it carries vectors and exact size, and PNGs get re-compressed by everything they touch. The PNG is for checking and sharing; the PDF is for paper.
The chat books this site makes carry covers sized by this same arithmetic.
Make the book — freeThis is one of the tools — or see everything we’ve written.