Cover design
The appearance of a book has a great impact on how much the reader’s attention is drawn to it. Therefore it is definitely worthwhile investing labour and creativity in it.
As a general rule, you can generate your cover with any graphics or layout program you have available, as long as you ultimately convert the result into camera-ready copy which is accepted by BoD. It is possible to submit hard camera-ready copy which is then scanned in by BoD, but generally the results are below par.
Do not start with the design until the book block is finished and you know the exact number of pages, because this determines the width of the spine (this is irrelevant for booklets). The following pages let you calculate the dimensions for paperback, hardcover, and booklet covers exactly. Let us start, however, with a few important definitions and instructions.
Spine
The spine is the narrow part of the cover which you see when the book (paperback or hardcover) is on the shelf. Don’t forget to put text on the spine, otherwise your book will be virtually invisible on the shelf. Before designing the spine you must calculate its width, which in turn depends on the number of pages and the paper stock of the book.
When laying out the spine, please consider that every production is subject to a certain tolerance. The typical tolerance of cover machines is +/– 2 mm. Spines which are particularly narrow bear the danger of being shifted toward the front or back cover. The danger of a misaligned spine can be reduced by designing the cover from front to back.
Due to their small number of pages and their spiral binding, booklets have no spine.
Lamination
The covers of paperback and hardcover books are coated (“laminated”) with coloured cover paper. Plain, glossy or, optionally, textured surface finish protects the cover against wear and stains. Hardcovers with dust jacket are coated with coloured Efalin paper, which can be printed on in black. The dust jacket, which is wrapped loosely around the cover, is printed in colour, including the front and back flaps.
Trimming edge
Make sure you add 5 mm – the trimming edge – to the four edges of the paperback cover and the dust jacket of a hardcover book (dust jacket left and right: 2 mm). This part is trimmed off again after the book has been bound, but it still serves a purpose: should the cover shift slightly out of place during binding, you don’t see a white edge without any print on it.
Folding edge
When designing the so-called case, which is firmly laminated onto the cover of a hardcover book, you must include a folding edge of 1.8 cm instead of a trimming edge. The folding edge of the book case is glued around the edges of the cover cardboard and coated with the end paper on the inside pages.
Fold
Figuratively speaking, the fold of a case-bound hardcover is the hinge joint of the cover: the cover is folded along these grooves on the two sides of the spine. While the fold is considered part of the total width of the cover, it should be designed separately: the distance between text and illustrations on the cover and the fold should be as large as the distance to the outer edge. Furthermore, it is recommended to centre text and illustrations not between outer and inner edge but rather between outer edge and folding edge.
ISBN
If you use an ISBN for your book, it must also be printed on the cover – typically at the bottom of the back cover. In addition to the ISBN, with BoD Classic and BoD Comfort a bar code is generated so your book can be easily scanned in at cash registers. You need an area of approximately 4 x 2 cm for the bar code on the back cover. Incidentally, due to the ISBN guidelines, fictitious names of publishing houses are not permitted on the cover.
Colour mode and resolution
If you use a graphics program for designing the cover or embed colour graphics in the cover design, please be sure to select the RGB colour mode and a resolution of 300 dpi. Please do not select colour separation. As with the book block, you may submit cover templates not only as PDF or PostScript files, but also as TIF files. This format can be selected as output format in all standard graphics programs.
