Covers

The Cover button on the left of the editor opens the cover designer. It also opens from the AI menu under Cover. The designer lays out the whole printed cover as one piece: the back, the spine and the front, plus the bleed a printer trims away. That is the file print-on-demand services such as Amazon KDP and IngramSpark ask for.

The type on a designed cover is typeset by Inkwell, not painted. The title, subtitle and author come from the book, so if you rename the book, the cover follows. The spine widens with the manuscript, too.

Designing a cover with AI

A book without a cover opens on a blank wrap. Design with AI… walks you through making one in four steps. It is also on the designer's AI tab, as New cover with AI… once the book has a cover. Nothing is written to the book until the last step, so you can close it part way and lose nothing.

1. The brief. Say what you have in mind, if anything: a medium, a mood, an image you want. Then Read my book. The AI reads the start of the book and writes a brief: its genre, its mood, an art direction and a palette. Change anything it got wrong, and choose how many directions to paint.

2. Directions. Paint directions turns the brief into several covers, each with its own art, typefaces, colours and arrangement. They are painted at the same time, and each appears as soon as it is ready. Pick the one you want to carry forward.

None of them right? Say what to change in the box underneath — "warmer colours", "try one without the lighthouse" — and Suggest others. The next set is written with what you saw and what you said about it.

3. Back cover. The AI drafts a tagline and a blurb; rewrite them as you like. In the blurb, leave a blank line between paragraphs and use *asterisks* for italics. Add an author bio or an endorsement if you want them on the back. Choose whether to leave a space for the printer's barcode or print one from your ISBN. The preview beside the fields shows the result as you type.

4. Printing. Choose your printer and paper. The spine is sized from the book's own page count (see Printer and spine). Use this cover makes it the book's cover and opens it in the designer for any finishing touches.

You can also build a cover by hand with Add (see below), or describe what you want to the agent in Ask the agent.

Reading the book and painting directions spend inkdrops; see below.

The designer

The large picture is the cover exactly as it will print. It is typeset from the same design the download comes from, not a sketch of it. Guides marks the trim and the spine folds in magenta, and the safe area, inside which text is never at risk of being cut, in blue. Turn them off to see the cover clean. Below the picture are the wrap's full size, the spine width and the bleed, and a list of anything a printer would object to. Click an item in that list to select the part it is about.

Click anything on the cover to select it. Drag it to move it.

The column beside the cover has three tabs: Elements, for what is on the cover; AI, for designing a new cover or asking the agent to change this one; and Print, for the printer, the spine and the download.

Elements

A cover is built from elements, listed on the Elements tab from the topmost down. Selecting one shows its settings underneath the list:

• Text: the title, subtitle and author, a tagline, the blurb, an author bio, endorsements. A text element can show the book's title, subtitle or author, which is how the cover keeps up with the book. Otherwise it shows its own text. In a blurb, leave a blank line between paragraphs and wrap words in *asterisks* for italics or **double asterisks** for bold. Shrink to fit makes text smaller rather than letting it spill out of its box.
• Art: the picture behind a design. New art paints a fresh one from the prompt above it. Edit the prompt first to change what it shows. Upload… uses your own picture instead. Focus chooses which part of the picture survives when it is cropped to fit.
• Picture: an author photo or a publisher's logo. Rounding turns a photo into a circle.
• Shape: boxes, ellipses and lines. Use one to give text a patch of colour to sit on. Fade turns a box into a gradient, the usual way to darken the top of a picture so a light title reads over it.
• Barcode: either a white space where the printer puts its own barcode (KDP does this for you), or a real EAN-13 barcode printed from the book's ISBN. Where the printer puts it keeps it at the printer's standard size and position; drag it and it stays where you put it.

The buttons beside each element hide it (it stays in the design, ready to come back), move it up or down the stack, or delete it. Add puts a new element on the front, ready to move into place.

Every element sits on a Panel: front, spine, back, or the whole wrap. Its position and size are percentages of that panel. Fill panel stretches it over the whole panel and into the bleed, which is what a background wants. Art and shapes that reach the outer edge of the cover carry on into the bleed by themselves, so nothing pale shows after the trim.

Printer and spine

Choose your Printer and Paper. Inkwell then works out the spine from the page count using the printer's own figures. Interior paper varies in thickness, so a 300-page book on cream paper has a wider spine than the same book on white.

The spine is always sized for the book as it is now. Inkwell counts its pages (without the cover pages) while the designer is open, and counts again a few seconds after the chapters or the book's settings change. The Print tab shows the result, for example "Spine 0.721" for 320 pages". The download counts once more, so the file you send a printer is never stale.

Spine width from your printer overrides the calculation when your printer has given you a figure of its own.

For a printer Inkwell does not know, choose Another printer and type in the thickness of one page from their specifications.

Printers refuse text on a very thin spine; KDP needs more than 79 pages. When the spine is too thin for it, the designer says so, and the spine text should be hidden.

Print resolution

AI art is painted at a size that looks fine on screen and soft in print. When you choose a cover, Inkwell enlarges its art to print resolution (300 ppi) in the background. The list under the cover says when a picture is still below that. Use Prepare for print on a piece of art to enlarge it after painting a new one. Your own uploads are used as they are, so upload the largest version you have.

Downloading

Download cover PDF saves the whole wrap, sized to the printer's specification, as the file to upload alongside your interior PDF. It uses the Resolution and Color Mode chosen in Publishing.

The same design is used everywhere else a cover appears:

• Include Cover on the PDF export puts the front panel before the first page and the back panel after the last.
• The ePub's cover image is the front panel.

Remove design deletes the design. The book goes back to the Cover and Back Cover pictures in Project Settings, if it has any.

Working with the agent

Ask the agent on the AI tab sends a request to the agent, for example "make the title larger and warmer" or "try a version with a pine forest". The agent edits the same design you are looking at. It checks each change by looking at the cover itself, and it asks before preparing art for print. Its changes arrive as edits you can keep or revert, like any other.

What the AI costs

Painting art and reading the book for a brief spend inkdrops (see AI Tools). Painting four directions costs a few hundred. Preparing art for print costs a little each time. On your own OpenAI key the art is billed by OpenAI and spends no inkdrops. Anthropic and xAI make no pictures, and Gemini keys are not used for art yet, so with one of those keys the art still runs on inkdrops.

When you upload a cover with AI-generated art, KDP asks whether it contains AI-generated content. Answer yes.