Fake Book Cover Maker: Make a Cover for a Book That Doesn’t Exist

You need a cover for a book that doesn’t exist: a prop for a play, a film or a photo shoot, a gift, a joke for a post, a row of dummy books on a shelf. The fastest free way is to make the art and title with the free AI cover generator (or build it in the free online editor from a template), then run the flat cover through the free 3D mockup tool so it looks like a real book in a photo.

Yes, I run a cover site, and yes, I’m about to explain how to make covers for books nobody wrote. The tools don’t care.

Fake book cover maker

There are three free tools here, and most people end up using two of them.

The AI book cover generator is the quickest. Describe the book (genre, title, author name, what’s on the cover), pick an engine, and you get a cover. Ideogram is the premium engine, with 3 free covers a day; OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 is standard quality with unlimited free covers; GPT-4o is there as well. A fake doesn’t have to be perfect, so if the lettering comes out a little off, fix it in the editor.

The free online cover editor is better when you want control: your own photo as the main picture (a friend’s face, your dog), plus layers, fonts, effects and templates. It’s like Photoshop but free and online. The presets cover 6×9 and 5×8 covers, an Instagram square, Facebook and Twitter headers, Pinterest, a 2×6 bookmark and a 5×7 postcard.

Last is the 3D book mockup tool, which is what turns a flat picture into something that looks like a book you could pick up. It takes a flat front cover (JPG or PNG; you can add a spine image too) and turns it into a 3D book image, single or in composite layouts, which you download as a transparent PNG or a JPG with a background. It’s free, and it’s been used millions of times. I built these for authors who want to make their own covers, but a cover tool doesn’t know whether the book exists.

How to make a fake book cover

The trick is to look like a real book of a particular kind. A romance looks like a romance, a thriller looks like a thriller; if a stranger can’t tell the genre in about a second, it reads as fake (and not in the funny way). That’s the blink test from the 7 rules of professional book cover design: flash the cover in front of someone and ask what kind of book it is.

1. Pick the genre look. Check a few real bestsellers in that genre and notice what they share: the kind of picture, the colors, how big the title is. You’re borrowing the look, not copying a cover.
2. Write the title, and play it straight. The sillier the title, the more serious the cover should look; say the gift is for a friend who is always late, and a thriller called Seven Minutes Behind in tall, tense letters already works.
3. Author name where a real one would go. Title big, filling the width of the cover; author name around half that size.
4. One strong image, not a collage. One simple picture with clean text looks better than a crowded scene, and it’s faster to make. For a gift, that picture can be a photo of the person getting it. If you need a picture you’re allowed to use, there’s a post on free book cover images.
5. A font that belongs to the genre. Thrillers and horror can take really big text; plenty of other genres don’t want it, and shouting ruins them. Best fonts by genre will get you close.

If it’s a gift, the back cover is where the joke lives: a blurb about the hero, a made-up one-line review. How back covers are laid out is in book back cover design.

One rule: a fake cover for a prop or a gift is fine, but don’t copy a real bestseller’s cover, don’t use a real author’s name or a publisher’s logo, and NEVER sell it as a real book. That’s common sense, not legal advice.

Printable fake book covers

If it’s a physical prop, the size is the only tricky part.

Measure the real book you’re wrapping: the height, the width of the front, and the thickness of the spine. The flat piece you print is the back, the spine and the front side by side, plus extra on the left and right to fold inside the covers. Wrapping an old hardcover in a new printed jacket like this is a common prop and decor trick (and the old book comes with real pages, which saves you the next section).

Work at 300 dpi so it prints sharp: a 6×9 inch front at 300 dpi is 1,800 by 2,700 pixels, so it’s inches times 300. The editor has a Custom size tab, but making a full wrap in it is not exactly easy or straightforward (I’ve said so before), so keep it simple. Design the front there, then lay the back, spine and front out side by side in Word, or whatever you normally print from.

Print a test on plain paper first and wrap it around the book. Trim, adjust, then use the good paper. Matte paper catches less glare under lights than glossy, which matters if a camera is going to see it, and tape only the flaps, on the inside of the covers, so the jacket can come off later.

For a dollhouse or miniature, design at normal proportions and shrink it when you print (big type survives shrinking, small type turns to mush). For a gift, you don’t need to wrap anything: print the front and put it in a frame, or use the editor’s postcard or bookmark presets.

Fake book pages

If the pages never show, skip this section.

If somebody flips the book open on camera, an old book’s real pages are the easiest answer. If you’re building from scratch (a hollow box, a stack of paper), type your own filler in a book-looking serif font, justified, with page numbers and a running header at the top, and print it double-sided. Use your own words, not a chunk of somebody’s real novel.

Fake book generator for social posts

For a “my book is coming” style post, whether it’s a real announcement or a joke, the 3D mockup tool does most of the work. Drop in your flat cover, download the 3D book as a transparent PNG, then put it on any background in the editor: a color, a photo of a desk, whatever the post needs. The Instagram square, Pinterest and Facebook sizes are already in the presets.

If you want it to look like an ebook on a screen, think tall and narrow: KDP’s ideal ebook cover is 2,560 pixels tall by 1,600 wide. More on shapes and sizes in ebook cover design.

Jokes work best when the cover is deadpan. A badly made fake looks like crap and the joke dies; one that looks like a real thriller gets the laugh.

Using fake covers to test a real book idea

Some of you are writers who want to see the book before it exists. That’s a good way to spend an afternoon, because a cover turns an idea into an object, and the first thing it tells you is whether the idea reads as a genre at a glance. Show it to somebody for one second and ask what kind of book it looks like. If they hesitate, the cover (or the idea) needs work, and you found that out before writing the book.

Put the finished front through the 3D tool so you can see it as a book, then run the flat version through the free “does my book cover suck?” critique. If the fake turns into a real paperback, the spine math is in KDP cover size, and KDP asks you to disclose AI-generated images, covers included.

If you want a proper layout for the real thing, 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 through this link it’s $39, with a 30-day refund.

Got a real book to cover? Start with the 7 unbreakable rules of professional book cover design.