Cover design principles that sell at thumbnail size
A retail thumbnail is roughly 200×300 pixels. Whatever the cover does at full size is irrelevant if the title is unreadable and the genre unclear at that scale.
Test at thumbnail before you fall in love
Export every concept at 200×300 and view it on a phone, in a grid alongside the current category bestsellers. The winner is the one you can still read and place instantly.
Signal the genre in under a second
Readers browse by pattern-matching. Thrillers use high contrast and condensed sans type; literary fiction uses restrained serif and negative space; romance leans on illustration and saturated colour. Break the convention deliberately or not at all.
Two type sizes, high contrast, no thin strokes
Title dominant, author name secondary, everything else cut. Hairline typefaces and low-contrast colour pairings disappear at small sizes and in the greyscale of an e-ink reader.
Design the spine and back at the same time
Paperback and hardcover wraps need bleed, spine width tied to page count, and a back cover with blurb hierarchy. Our cover design service delivers the full wrap alongside the ebook file so nothing is refitted later.
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