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 three 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 three stages

① Setup — platform, trim, binding, paper, bleed. The shape of the book. Editing it here is the same control as the premise screen and the editor's ⚙ Format button; there is one setting, reachable from three places.

② Design — templates, layers, the background, texture and the spine.

③ Release — measure the interior, establish the spine, sign off, bundle. Covered in 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.