If you are looking at self-publishing your own books then you will need to take into account the ecover. While there are certainly many places to publish your books including Amazon, Create Space, Kobo and Lulu they all have different guidelines which you must adhere to.
These requirements will apply to the format of your ebook and to your ecover. So if you are planning on eventually publishing to more than one place this is an extremely important factor to take into consideration.
By planning ahead you will know exactly what each publishing company requires and will be able to change your format and ecovers accordingly. If you don’t plan ahead and get your ecover created it can be costly to go back to that person and ask them to change the sizes and dpi requirements.
On the other hand, if you’re creating your ecover yourself (I recommend using a free to use ecover creator tool), it will be easy to go back in and change your ecover, but will become time consuming. Hence, planning ahead and doing your thorough research is important.
The Kindle platform is one of the most popular for any new authors to publish on. Keep in mind that their size requirements do change so subscribing to their newsletter is a good idea.
Currently their ecover size is as follows:
• At least 500 pixels horizontally and 800 pixels vertically
• Ideal height/width ratio of 1.6
• Maximum of 2000 pixels on the longest side is preferred
• Save at 72 dots per inch (dpi) for optimal viewing on the web
For Barnes & Noble the size currently is:
• Between 750 pixels and 2000 pixels in length
• JPG file sized between 5KB and 2MB
For Lulu their size is:
• 612 pixels and 792 pixels
• Minimum dpi 72 with higher being recommended
For Kobo their size is:
• JPG and PNG files to a maximum of 2MB
• 900 dpi is recommended
When taking the above points into consideration you will see that with some of the sizes you can simply resize your image using any type of graphic program such as Paint, Gimp or Photoshop.
The problems occur when the dots per inch changes dramatically. It is very difficult to change a 72 dpi image into a 900 one without distorting the image. By checking all of these requirements you can get your ebook cover created with the highest resolution needed.
Many of these self-publishing sites do have their own ecover creator within your dashboard. The problem with these is that they are very generic and will not make your book cover stand out. After all it is sales that you are looking for!
To create the best possible ecover yourself we highly recommend reading the this informative post!
Be sure to read this before starting on your first ecover, it will give you some valuable pointers.
