Book Back Cover Design: What Goes Where (Plus Jacket Templates)

Your front cover is finished, and the paperback still needs a back cover and a spine before KDP will take the file. Top to bottom, the back holds a hook line or one short review quote, the blurb, a small author photo and bio line if you want them, a publisher logo if you have one, and a clear spot for the barcode.

(If you only sell an ebook, none of this applies: ebooks get a front cover and nothing else. I covered that in ebook cover design.)

Book back cover design: what goes where

Start with the hook line at the top. It can be a short quote from a real review, or one line that says what kind of book this is. Say you write cozy mysteries: “A village bakery, one body in the flour bin” does the job, and so does plain old “A cozy mystery”.

Years ago I told authors to put “a werewolf romance” in the subtitle, even though it’s heavy-handed and cheesy, because it still helps more than saying nothing about the genre. Same logic here. If you don’t have a real review quote, use the genre line, and never make a quote up.

Under that goes the blurb (next section). After it come the extras, and they stay small: an author photo, a line or two of bio, a publisher logo if you actually have one. Nobody flips a book over to admire your artwork, so keep the back simple and give the type room.

The barcode needs its corner. If you don’t add one, KDP puts a barcode on the back cover for you, in the lower right (lower left for right-to-left books), so keep that spot clear of text. Keep all text at least 0.125 inches (3.2 mm) inside the trim lines too; that margin is easy to forget, and a clipped word on a back cover looks awful.

For the picture, extend the front art across the spine and onto the back, then calm it down: darken it, blur it, or put a plain dark panel behind the text. On fronts I like to fill the space with clouds or sky so text goes over it easily, and the same trick works here. If you can’t read the blurb from arm’s length, the picture is winning, and a pretty image behind unreadable type is crap.

Use the same one or two fonts as the front, and keep the blurb in something plain. If you’re not sure what fits your genre, I made a best-fonts-per-genre list years ago; it’s in this post on what font to use on your book cover. Small text like a series line or the credit under a quote looks more professional small and spaced out than blown up and crammed in (I said that about fronts in my 7 unbreakable rules post, and it holds on the back).

The blurb

The blurb is a sales pitch, not a synopsis. I’ve called the cover a billboard that gets people to read the summary and the reviews, so the summary has to be worth reading: who the main character is, what they want, what’s in the way, and then stop before the ending.

For the cozy mystery, that’s who found the body and the one question the book answers. Don’t walk through the chapters. Don’t spoil the twist. (Yes, your plot has seven subplots; the blurb gets one.)

Keep it short enough that you never have to shrink the font to fit it. If the type is getting tiny, cut words, not point size. For nonfiction, name the problem your reader has and what they’ll be able to do afterward, and a few short bullets are fine.

Pull some bestsellers in your genre off a shelf and look at their backs: how long the blurb is, what the first line does, where the quote sits. Copy the shape, not the words.

Book back cover template

Use KDP’s cover template for your exact trim size, page count and paper. KDP has its own cover calculator and template generator (search “KDP cover calculator”); you enter those three things and it downloads a template made for your book.

A generic “back cover of a book template” can’t know your spine. Spine width depends on page count and paper, so a template built for some other book puts your spine in the wrong place. The sizes and the spine math are in my KDP cover size post.

Build the back on top of KDP’s template: text inside the margins, the image running out to the edge (that’s the bleed, more below), the barcode corner empty.

Paperback cover design: back, spine and front as one file

On a paperback the cover isn’t three pieces, it’s one image. KDP wants a single PDF with the back cover, spine and front cover together (back on the left, front on the right for most books), images at least 300 DPI, transparencies flattened, and 40 MB or less if you can manage it.

The bleed is an extra 0.125 inches (3.2 mm) on the top, bottom and outside edges. So the full width is bleed + back + spine + front + bleed, and the height is bleed + trim height + bleed.

The spine is your page count times a number that depends on the paper; for white paper with black ink it’s 0.002252 inches a page. Take a 6×9 paperback with 300 pages on white paper: the spine is 0.676 inches, the full cover is 12.926 inches wide (0.125 + 6 + 0.676 + 6 + 0.125) and 9.25 inches tall. Same book on cream paper (0.0025 inches a page) and the spine grows to 0.75 inches, so the width becomes 13.0. Pick the paper before you design the spine.

Spine text is only for books with at least 79 pages, and you keep 0.0625 inches between the text and the spine edges. Back when this was CreateSpace (it’s KDP print now) I complained that its spine margins meant an elegant curly font almost never fit; you had to make the title very small or change the font, and chopping off letters is the ugly option.

Book jacket template

A book jacket usually means a dust jacket: the paper cover on a hardcover, with flaps that fold in at the front and back edges. Those flaps are two more places for a blurb and a bio.

A jacket’s size depends on the trim size, the page count, the paper and the printer’s rules for the flaps and folds, so the only template worth using is the one from the printer that will print that exact book. KDP’s hardcover has its own cover page and its own template; paperback numbers don’t apply, and I won’t guess at hardcover ones here.

If a “jacket maker” or “jacket creator” hands you a size, check it against the printer’s template before you design anything.

Book jacket template Word: can Microsoft Word do it?

Word can do it, with patience (OK, a lot of patience). Set a custom page size equal to the full wrap you calculated above, put the back, spine and front on that one wide page (guide lines or three text boxes help you see the panels), and save it as a PDF. I wrote years ago that making full print covers is “a little tricky”, but that you can make one that looks pretty good in Word if you get familiar with its features and use quality fonts and images.

Check your font licenses too. I told people the same about the fonts in my own templates: having a font doesn’t mean you have the rights to put it on a cover.

I’d keep my free online cover editor for the front cover art, not the wrap. My old help page called a full print cover there “not exactly easy or straightforward”, which was me being kind to my own software.

If you want ready-made layouts to start from instead of a blank page, my DIY Book Design & Formatting Bundle has 150 editable Word cover templates (80 fiction, 70 nonfiction), formatting downloads and five courses; the list price is $197 and it’s $39 through this link, with a 30-day refund if it’s not for you. My free video lessons also include one on the full print cover, and come with six free Word cover templates.

Getting the wrap done for you

If you’d rather hand it off, Creativindie Covers is my own design studio, and The Bestseller package is $549: a full print wrap with spine and back (Amazon, IngramSpark and bookstore-ready), ISBN barcode included, three free 3D mockups, real cover samples within 10 days and a 100% money-back guarantee. It’s here.

Whoever makes the wrap, drop the finished front cover into my free 3D book mockup tool when it’s done: you give it the flat JPG or PNG and it turns it into a 3D book image (add the spine image too if you want it to show), saved as a transparent PNG or a JPG.

PS) Whatever you build, hold a printed copy in your hands before you call it final, and check the spine and the barcode corner by eye.