Ebook Cover Design: Sizes, Free Templates and What Actually Sells

An ebook cover is a single front-cover image, ideally 2,560 pixels tall by 1,600 wide, saved as a JPEG or TIFF in RGB color. You can make one free with an online editor or an AI generator; just judge it at thumbnail size, because on Amazon that’s how people meet it.

The size is the easy part.

Making the thing look like it belongs in your genre is what sells.

Ebook cover design: what makes one sell

Your cover is a membership card, not a piece of art. Say you write cozy mysteries: it should look like a cozy mystery before anyone has read a word, and I’d take a cover that fits in and sells some books over one that stands out and sells none. (Boring answer; still the right one.)

Now shrink it to thumbnail size and squint. You can’t read the subtitle, and that’s fine. What you should still get is the genre and a feeling. I’ve always said a cover has to make an emotional statement even when it’s tiny, and at that size the text doesn’t matter as long as it looks well designed.

The title is still the biggest thing on the page. If nobody knows your name yet, the title does the work and can fill the width of the cover; your name goes under it at a decent size (readers don’t know you’re not famous, so don’t make it tiny). Anything smaller, like a tagline or a series name, can stay small.

I think the usual advice, that every word has to be legible as a thumbnail, is bad advice. People don’t read text on thumbnails; they read the listing beside it, or they click. Small text kept small looks more professional than small text blown up and crammed in.

One strong image beats a scene. Whatever you’re picturing (a crowd of characters, a specific setting behind them), cut it down to one image and clean text. Bestselling fiction in any genre matches one of a few simple layouts, and the self-published covers that look like crap usually tried something more complicated.

Fonts matter too. A good image with the wrong lettering looks amateur fast, and lame, genre-inappropriate typography is an easy way to ruin a nice photo or a piece of AI art. Here are the best fonts for book covers, by genre, and the 7 rules of professional book cover design are the longer version of everything above. If your cover is already out and not selling, the common cover design mistakes are worth a look.

Ebook cover size

These numbers come from KDP’s help page for ebook covers, as it read on October 31, 2026:

• Ideal: 2,560 pixels tall by 1,600 pixels wide (a height-to-width ratio of 1.6:1)
• At least 2,500 pixels tall for the best quality on HD screens
• Minimum 1,000 tall by 625 wide; maximum 10,000 pixels on either side
• JPEG or TIFF, RGB color
• Under 50 MB

The ratio is just height divided by width (2,560 / 1,600 = 1.6), and the minimum size has the same shape (1,000 / 625 = 1.6), so if you build smaller, keep the shape.

Light and white covers can disappear into Amazon’s white pages. KDP suggests a narrow medium gray border, 3 to 4 pixels, to hold the edge. And you NEED the rights to everything on the cover, fonts included.

My old Word templates were built at 6×9 and 300 DPI, which comes out about 1800 pixels wide (1800 x 2700 is a 1.5:1 shape). That was a good Kindle size when I made them; today, start a fresh canvas at KDP’s numbers instead of resizing an old file. The paperback numbers, with bleed and spine, are a different job: see KDP cover size and spine width.

Free ebook cover templates

There are a few free ways to start from a layout instead of a blank page.

My six free Microsoft Word cover templates come with seven free video lessons (genre research, images, fonts, the full print cover, promotion) and the Cover Design Secrets PDF; you can grab them free here. Word won’t save a JPG for you, so my instructions were to save the file as a PDF and then convert that to a JPG (if it looks bad, try another converter).

The free online cover editor has templates too, plus fonts, layers and effects, and its presets include 6×9 and 5×8 covers. For an ebook you’ll want its custom size tab.

I’ve also got separate pages for romance book cover templates and nonfiction book cover templates, and a post on premade book covers if you’d rather start from something finished.

One warning about fonts. Just because a font is in a template doesn’t mean you can use it on your cover: I used a lot of fonts in mine, some free and some paid, and I can’t transfer my license to you. Check the license of any font you keep.

If you want more to pick from, the DIY Book Design & Formatting Bundle has 150 editable Word cover templates (80 fiction, 70 nonfiction), formatting downloads and five courses, and it’s $39 through this link (list price is $197).

Ebook cover creator or maker: how to actually make one

I spent years building Word templates and an online editor, and then AI turned up and started making cover art better than I could make after 20 years of designing covers. So I built a generator too… before somebody else did.

It’s the free AI book cover generator, so yes, it works as an ebook cover generator. You choose the image engine: Ideogram is the premium quality one and gives you 3 free covers a day (I pay for every generation, which is why there’s a limit), OpenAI DALL-E 3 is standard quality with unlimited free covers, and GPT-4o is there as well. Upscaling and remixing use credits.

Use it for the art, not the lettering. Generators will probably get the text and fonts wrong, and the more detailed your prompt, the harder they struggle. My advice: run a bunch of simple prompts and respin until the image is right; add the genre-appropriate fonts yourself afterwards.

If you go the AI route, KDP asks you to disclose AI-generated images when you publish, cover art included, and an AI image you edited heavily still counts as AI-generated. It’s all on KDP’s AI content page.

Prefer a photo? Spend a lot of time searching; one or two brilliant pictures beat a mediocre one you try to fix. Then change it enough that it won’t be identical to the other covers using the same image. There’s more on where to look, and what the licenses allow, in free book cover images.

Once you have the art, add your title and name in the free online cover editor (layers, blending modes, fonts and effects; I built it because I was never totally satisfied with the Word templates). Open the custom size tab and set the canvas to 1,600 by 2,560 pixels.

Before you upload, run the cover through Does my book cover suck?, my instant AI critique, then put it on a white background and look at it small.

For ads and your website, a flat cover looks flat. The free 3D book mockup tool (used millions of times) turns your front cover into a 3D book image and saves it as a transparent PNG or JPG.

Ebook cover vs print cover

An ebook cover is the front and nothing else: one image, measured in pixels. A paperback cover is the back, spine and front together as one flat PDF, with bleed around the edges and a spine width that depends on your page count and paper.

Different file, different math.

If you’re only selling ebooks, ignore the rest. If a paperback is coming, don’t stretch the ebook file into a wrap; the numbers are in my KDP cover size guide, and the back cover is its own design problem (back cover design).

When to hire an ebook cover designer

When the cover needs something you can’t pull off yourself. The hardest thing for a DIY cover is blending two images, say a cityscape with a close-up of a couple, and that’s also the most common thing genre covers ask for. If you can afford a professional, hire one; if you can’t, that shouldn’t stop you from publishing.

I’ve been designing covers for 20 years, and my design studio, Creativindie Covers, makes an ebook front cover (The Debut) for $349: one cover concept, three rounds of revisions, a free 3D mockup and a back-cover blurb edit, with real cover samples within 10 days and a 100% money-back guarantee. Get started here, or read more about choosing a book cover designer.