Book cover template

[rahmama]

I need to design a book cover for a 6x9 paperback book. I'm looking for a good template to work with. Does Xara have anything like this? or anyone know where to find one?

Anyone with experience with Lulu POD? The cover has to be created separately and then uploaded as a PDF.

Thanks for any help in advance.
Rahma

[David O'Neil]

You can start with this. You will have to change your spine width appropriately to your own project, and move the spine and left (back) template appropriately. You can then create your own graphics on additional layers on top of the template layer, lock all of the newly created layers, select everything in the template layer, and export as a JPG at 100%, 600 dpi, which flattens everything, and produces a rather large file, depending upon your graphic. (It also only exports things within the rectangle of the template.) Then use Acrobat to convert it to a PDF, per their standards.

At 300 dpi, flattened texts have artifacts around them, therefore I've found 600 dpi to be best. I have not tried non-flattened files. Lulu says they don't take anything other than items created with Acrobat, so I didn't want to experiment, especially as I've found huge differences in file size with PDFs created with Acrobat vs PDFs created with Xara.

I've gotten excellent results.

Best wishes,
David

[rahmama]

Oh cool. I knew I came to the right place. It will take my some tries to get it right I'm sure, but this is just what I was looking for to get me started.
Thanks for sharing.
Rahma

[Manoj]

Hi,

Don't forget to take the bleed into account--the little bit extra on all sides that will be trimmed during printing. Different publishers can ask for slightly varying bleeds, so I've found it's best to ask what they will be comfortable with.

Spine thickness is also important as that's dependent on the number of pages and the kind of paper used. A lot of publishers have a spine thickness calculator on their site so you can check.

This is all explained in more detail here with images:
http://www.lulu.com/en/help/onepiece_dimensions

Hope that helps
Manoj

[rahmama]

Thanks.