Book cover templates are a must-have tool when designing books. This article will discuss the various places that you can find them online and why they are necessary to help you design your book. It will also talk about the different formats that these templates use, such as Word or Photoshop.
Introduction
Book cover templates are very useful because all you have to do is import your text into the template file. That will save you quite a bit of time in setting up margins, headers, footers, and page numbers. If you are self-publishing your book through do-it-yourself companies, such as Lulu, you will find many templates available.
Lulu.com
Lulu has a wide variety of book cover templates available to match the book sizes that they print. These templates are available in pocket-size up to large square. The templates that come in the zip file will help you design both the interior of your book, as well as the front and back covers.
The interior template is in .doc format and the cover templates are in .png formats. The .png files will open as a layer in Photoshop , which you can display or hide as you design your book’s covers. You can calculate the spine width with Lulu’s spine calculator.
Source: Lulu.com
Blurb
Blurb also has a wide variety of templates available that you can use to format books in InDesign versions CS3 to CS5, QuarkXPress, Photoshop and Microsoft Word. They have a section which contains only InDesigns templates for the Mac and the PC. Then they have another section with contains the other formats. You can use these templates to design both your exterior book cover and your interior cover page.
Source: Blurb
OpenOffice.org Templates
Download templates for book covers, book interiors and ebooks at this site. Templates are available for Lulu and CafePress, as well as the standard format for self-publishing.
Source: OpenOffice.org
InstantPublisher.com
InstantPublisher.com has book cover templates that can be downloaded as image files to your computer or as a Photoshop file. They offer sizes for 4.25 x 7, 5.5 x 8.5, 6 x 9 and 8.5 x 11. These templates show you exactly where to place your margins, ISBN number and your barcode. Toward the bottom of the page, you will see a chart that tells you what size to make your spine, based on the number of pages that your book contains.
Source: InstantPublisher.com
SelfPublishing Inc.
SelfPublishing Inc. offers PDF templates for a wide variety of book cover sizes. These templates are for reference only and cannot be used inside programs such as Photoshop. Regular covers are included, as well as covers with dust jackets.
Source: SelfPublishing Inc.
Conclusion
The purpose of this article was to give you some solid resources where you can download book cover templates for your book design projects. The majority of these resources also come with templates to design the interior of your books. You can design book covers, using a variety of software such as Photoshop, InDesign, Quark, Word, OpenOffice and others. Many of them are downloadable to your computer in zip files, while others are online diagrams that can be downloaded as an image.
Looking for more tips and advice? Check out the other articles in Bright Hub’s guide, What You Need to Know About Self Publishing .
