Covers

The Cover Studio is a free-form layer editor drawn on the exact wrap your printer expects: back panel, spine and front, at your trim, with the bleed and the barcode keep-out zone marked where they genuinely are.

One design drives three outputs that cannot disagree — the canvas you edit, the print wrap PDF, and the flat eBook cover JPEG.

Open a book from the shelf and choose 🎨 Cover Studio.

The pages

1. The Cover Studio — the two stages, the canvas, and how to move around it.
2. Templates and layers — starting from a genre template, then text, shapes, images, backgrounds and texture.
3. AI cover art — generating an image for the front panel.
4. The spine — where its width comes from, why it moves, and why spine text sometimes disappears.
5. Panels and geometry — why the front cover does not slide when your book gets longer.
6. Exporting a cover — print wraps, eBook covers, and which route to use.

The two stages

① Design — templates, layers, the background, texture and the spine. At the top, Paperback / Hardcover: the one print choice that belongs to the cover, because a hardcover's case wrap folds round boards and is a different shape to design on. Beside it, the trim, paper, length and spine the wrap is sized from — read-only, because they are the book's, set in ① Premise. If switching to hardcover would change the trim, paper or ink (KDP prints five hardcover trims and no standard-colour hardcover), the studio says so and asks first.

Under the binding, Wrap for lists each platform you print with and the spine width it gives this book (each printer's paper is a different thickness, so one design prints on several spines). Pick one to see the design on that wrap; the facts under it are that platform's. Add or change platforms in ④ Release.

② Files — what the design becomes: a wrap for each print target (pick one to see it on the canvas), the front for each ebook store, and the square audiobook cover. The wraps and ebook covers are built in the manuscript's ④ Release, where each target is measured and checked first — see Publishing.

The stages are a running order, not a progress bar. You can move between them freely, and nothing is gated on a synthetic "stage complete" flag — only on real state, like having nothing selected or no measured interior.

The one thing to know first

The spine width depends on your page count, and the page count starts as an estimate.

The canvas caption always tells you which you have: 312pp measured, or an amber ~63pp estimated. Do not lay artwork across a spine while it says estimated — see The spine.