A good page Beginner Ge To Book Cover Design Some other general rules are Learn some design. Photoshop Illustrator CorelDraw or even free source software like Gimp. Learn to use it. Do not design your book cover in Microsoft Word. Unless you are doing something that calls for a special size stick with one particular books size. I usually go with 6 x 9 unless there are more than 3 pages. Then I go with 8.5 (or ) x 11. Make sure your spine is calculated correctly. I use cream paper because the thickness rounds out to exactly .oo25 making it easy to calculate. Bright white paper is .2252. The reason you want an easy calculation is because a lot of software will end up rounding off. .2252 bes .23. In large books this may lead to the measurement being off enough to mess with the s. If you have a book with less than 125 pages do not put on the spine. 9 out of 1 times the printer will get the placement wrong or the will be too small to read. Unless you are a color expert use RGB over CMYK. Pretty much all printers now accept RGB after going digital. Back in the day you had to covert to CMYK first. CMYK can be unpredictable when printing and your colors will change if converting from RGB. With RGB you pretty much get what you see on the screen (so long as your screen is calibrated correction). And don't use color separation. When digital printing first took off printers used digital for color covers (which were cheaper) but would still use offset printing for the page interiors which only prints black. Even if the interior pages just had grayscale they would switch over to digital which at the time costs about 5ua2 more per page (same as color offset for interior) which added up quickly. But nowadays pretty much everything is done in digital and the prices havee down significantly. Use a bleed around you cover even if your s and fonts are within the file itself in the settings. It is easy to send one file to the printer than multiple files. Less things can go wrong. Be sure to flatten all your . You can do this usually by selecting the entire cover in case you have to make corrections to the makes the PDF smaller and helps avoid any unforeseeable color problems. Sometimes the printer will flatten the s or color in the book. If you decide to print in color later you won't have to change anything in the book file. Do notpress your has a lot of fine detail like a photograph then you may to supersize it. But above 12 is unnecessary. The cover file typicallyes out at around 1 to 2 mb. The interior file is usually no more than 6 to 1 mb. Use these same standards whether your cover is for print or an ebook.