How To Design Book Covers for Print with Inkscape

In this tutorial I'll be demonstrating how you can design a physical book cover that can be uploaded to Kindle Direct Publishing to be printed on an actual book.

CORECTION: At the end of the video I said that you should export your finished design as a JPG file. This is incorrect. KDP requires a PDF document, so instead of exporting, go to "File, Save As" and save your work as a PDF document.


Timestamps:

00:00 Intro
00:40 Download the template
01:26 Setting up the workflow
02:22 Setting up the template
07:56 Designing the front cover
12:39 Designing the spine
14:26 Designing the back cover
18:06 Exporting your work
19:18 Conclusion

Intro song: "In Da Mood" by Combustibles, used with written permission

[theafrican]

Even though I won't be making book covers any time soon, I learned at least a few more things about inkscape.

[k-town]

I'm doing all my book covers in Inkscape. I learned most of my skills from your channel.

[Helli__]

I love what you're doing! Showing that one can learn, build up professional skills and create results that appear same as professional as done with industry Standart tools, but using FOS tools. These tools and the knowledge you share makes those things accessible to those who can't afford to purchase creative suites like Adobe etc.!
Thank you!!!

[thiagoabreuon]

Great tutorial, Nick! It's simple but effective to understand and recreate. Congrats!

I'm reaching 7K subs! Im happy! 🥳🥳🥳

[Kurtjames]

Dude, you are amazing at what you do and I have to thank you for all of your Inkscape tutorials because I have a business of my own doing arts and crafts and DIY's and thing like that and I needed to create a logo, but didn't know how to. So I went on YouTube to learn how to create logos and do other things and I ran into your channel and thanks to you, as well as Davies Media Design for Gimp, I have been able to create a beautiful logo design for my online business. It almost feels like I have been using Inkscape for 100 years with all the videos your done, but in reality, I've only started using Inkscape for about a year and a half lol. But thank you for your knowledge on Inkscape cause it's helped me in a huge way.

[enastypos]

Another useful tutorial from the man who taught me to use Inkscape properly.
11:03 If you want to use italics with a font that it's not designed for (e.g., Impact), first you highlight the whole text (or part of it) and then you press cntr+i. To get it back to normal, you take the same steps one more time: Highlight the text and then cntr+i

[marvjamali]

i really needed this, thanks Nick for the video

[brendanward]

Thanks, Nick, you're a life-saver.

[IsaacNiutom]

Dude, your tutorials are hooby for me! I really enjoy watching them.

[Hi_Its_Alice]

Your are a great teacher:) Was able to reproduce your example in~ 1 hour first time using Inkscape :))) Thank you !

[algerianeagle]

I was waiting for this video ...please make more videos about the book covers and if you can make another one using Gimp

[michaeladeolu]

Gosh I've been waiting for this video, make more please

[JavierRodriguez-kngp]

Hi Nick, as allways excelent video, I just have to add something: the resolution at the end of the process it is set to 96dpi and that is not good for printing, better work on 150dpi or even 300dpi. Also we must to set a color profile to CMYK on document setting section. Finally, .jpg format is a lose quality format, it is good for screen but for printing I prefer .png or pdf cause, if you have transparencies and dept colors it will save you a lot of mistakes on final results. Thank you for share your knowlege, I really learned a lot follow your videos.

[csmemarketing]

Hi Nick, great tutorial again. I also use Inkscape in my workflow to setup print documents, however you may have missed something in the export area.
Set the export resolution to 300 dpi, then export as jpg. I read some other comments here where they said to save as PDF instead, for Amazon KDP, which actually flows into one of your solutions to convert Inkscape Artwork from RGB to CMYK using Scribus.
Inkscape 1.1 and Scribus has gotten a lot better, and I tried importing an Inkscape PDF to Scribus. Changing the colours to CMYK was super easy based on your tutorial, using the Colour Editor in Scribus.
Thanks again.

[frankiet-h]

Fantastic tutorial Nick, you're the George Clooney of .svg editor tutorials :)

This could have been very confusing, you've managed to distill a very complicated process into very achievable steps.

Thank you.

[DavidCollinsRivera]

Thank you for this, Nick! It's exactly what I need!

[brandon_wallace]

This is a great video and very useful. Thanks for creating it.

[michaelfrisch]

well, i create covers for my books since one year.
at first i learnd picture editing by myself.
step by step it comes better and better

[shubham_dalvi]

Love the channel since it's inception 🤗. You're a wizard, Nick 🧙🏻‍♂️. Time for face reveal.

[MrDailywealth]

Nick, KDP Paperback actually requires the Book cover to be a single PDF file. **I see you added that statement to the description** Thanks