The Cover for the Print Book

Do you need to create a professional cover that meets the technical specifications required for publishing your print book? No problem.

The Unlimited plan of StreetLib Write allows you to create a cover for your book, complete with front, spine, and back, even if you haven't used our editor to create the print version of your text.

P.S.: Did you know that with the Pro plan you have included a year of Write Unlimited? Find out more here.

Here's how:

The print cover wizard

Choose to create the cover for print books:

A screen will open that will ask you to upload or drag the image you want to use for your book. Remember that the image must always be

or you must have the necessary rights to use it. Stock images are fine to use if you have properly licensed them. You have two possibilities:

if you don't have an image yet, click on FORWARD to create it with artificial intelligence (AI);
if you already have an image ready for your cover, upload it in this step. If your image already contains the title and author name, just check the box "The image already contains the title and author," otherwise don't check this box and just click FORWARD after uploading the image.

At this point, you can choose the color schemes proposed by us based on the cover image you uploaded in the previous step or modify them. All the cover colors can be modified at any time, so at this stage you can also decide to use one of the proposed color schemes.

You will also have to choose the format of your book. The size of the paperback cover depends on the book format and the spine size. You can choose the book format from the dropdown menu or, if the format of your book is not present in the menu, you can check the "I want to use custom sizes" box and enter the format you have chosen for printing manually. For all the specifications on how to create the text PDF, we recommend reading our dedicated article.

By clicking on the "i" symbol, you can instead calculate the spine size of your book using our calculator, at the bottom of this page. In our example, we want to print in 148x210 mm and our cover has a 30 mm spine.

By clicking FORWARD, the wizard takes you to a new screen where you can enter the book title and author name, because the image uploaded in this example did not contain any text. You can also decide how to position the title and author name on the cover, although you can change the position of the text later at any time. In the example shown, we have chosen the layout with author and title at the top.

By clicking FINISH, the steps for creating the cover are completed. You can start making all the changes within the editor.

Editing the paperback cover

The paperback cover consists of three parts: the back, the spine, and the front. Once the cover is created, you can make all the changes you prefer, using the useful tools provided by the editor. Here are some examples:

1. Change the position of the title and author name

The title and author name are two separate frames, so you can drag them to any point on your cover. In this case, I don’t want the text to cover the flowers on my cover, so I will drag them up a little.

2. Change the font of the text

To modify the font cover the text, double-click on the author name frame on the front and select the text; a menu will open at the top with various tools including Font, by clicking on the Aa symbol you can change the font from the default one. In this case, we have chosen Old Standard TT. You can perform this operation for all text present on the cover.

3. Increase the text size

Depending on your needs, you may need to increase the size of some text on the cover, for example the title. In this case, select the title frame, and a tool menu will open at the top. By clicking on the gear symbol, you can increase the font size of the text in the frame according to your needs. From this window, you can also change the font. In this example, we have in fact chosen the Sacramento font, different from that of the author's name.

4. Change the text color

To change the color of the text, click on the paintbrush symbol at the top. In this case, I want my text on the front to be the same color as the flowers, so I select the eyedropper symbol and click on a flower point. This way, the text color will become the same color as the flower.

5. Insert elements on the back cover

The back cover usually includes marketing text for the book and sometimes also the author's photo and biography. You can insert all these elements by positioning yourself on the Back Cover at the bottom left and clicking on the + symbol.

Here's what the back cover looks like after inserting text and author photos:

6. Uniform the text color

How to make sure that all the texts on the cover have exactly the same color? Colors have specific codes that you can copy and paste to make all the cover texts uniform. After using the eyedropper tool to decide the color a particular text should have (for example on the front cover), just click on the color window and copy the color code. Move to the spine and back cover to do the same operation (paintbrush + text color window) and paste the same code in the specific field.

7. Change the color of a single word

If you need to change the color of a single word, for example make the word title darker than the rest of the text, here's how to proceed. Double-click on the book title frame and select the word title. Click on the A symbol in the menu at the top and select the color you prefer.

8. Use filters to modify the background image

Write provides various filters to modify the background image of your cover. You can adjust the brightness, opacity, contrast; you can transform it to grayscale or blur it, depending on your needs. For example, I want to change the tint of the image and slightly blur it, how do I do it? Click on the paintbrush symbol and then on Filters. Check the Hue Rotate box and move the slider until the image has the tint you prefer. Then check the Blur box and increase the blur of the image. Attention, the filters only modify the image and not the text.

Now all you have to do is download the file by clicking on DOWNLOAD, to use it as a PDF cover for publishing your paperback book.