Cover Studio composes a real cover — front, back and spine — from a photo you bring, a solid or gradient base, or, with Cover & interior design on, art generated from your manuscript.
Cover Studio
Design front covers, back covers, and spines in one integrated workspace. Start from AI-generated concepts, bring your own artwork, or build a typographic cover on a solid or gradient background. Customize text, backgrounds, and layout for each surface, check the result at thumbnail size with print safe-area guides, then export print-ready images.
Cover Studio wizard
A guided wizard on the Concepts tab takes you from a genre preset and a few plain-language choices to a finished front cover. With Auto cover text it runs Artwork › Cover Text › Pick a Proof; with Manual it runs Artwork › Pick a Proof › Text Treatment. Both paths land on the Front Cover tab, pre-populated, for you to hand-tune. The full creative brief sits in a collapsible panel inside the Artwork step.
Cover genre presets
Pick one of 13 genre presets — thriller, cozy mystery, romance (in bright and soft variants), romantasy, epic fantasy, sci-fi, literary, horror, historical, nonfiction, memoir, and YA — and Cover Studio applies that genre's font pairing, palette direction, and effect stack in one click, then seasons the AI art-direction brief so the generated concepts already lean the right way. Presets are a starting point: everything they set stays fully editable.
Cover art direction & AI brief
Before generating concepts you can guide the AI: pick moods, a palette direction (chosen from swatch rows, no hex values needed), and an imagery style, and add anything to avoid. A one-click path still works with no inputs. Each brief proposes about three creative directions per section — palettes, moods, scenes, and layouts — that you mix and match, with a plain-language summary up front and the full detail one tap away. Refining or regenerating keeps your earlier briefs so you can restore any of them.
Cover text effects & textures
Give titles a traditionally-published finish: foil and metallic fills, six blendable textures (foil grain, brushed metal, grunge, scratches, paper fiber, canvas weave), drop and long shadows, outline, glow, neon, emboss, etched, gradient fills, and curved (arc) titles. Blend modes — multiply, screen, overlay, and soft-light — grade background scrims and vignettes over your cover art. On the front cover you can also set the title behind the imagery, weaving it around your subject with a painted foreground mask. Every effect is adjustable per text element on each surface.
Cover versions
Save the whole cover design—front, back, spine, brief, and approved artwork—as a named version you can restore later. Keep a light and a dark variant side by side, or A/B-test two directions and restore whichever one wins. Restoring replaces the current design (with a one-click option to save the current design first), and each saved version keeps its own copies of uploaded images so a later upload never changes a version you already saved.
Cover mockups
Turn your finished cover into promo-ready marketing images from the Mockups tab — rendered live from the actual design, no AI credits used. Choose a scene (flat cover, 3D paperback with front and spine in perspective, or an e-reader frame) and a background (transparent, solid, or gradient), then export a 2000×2000 PNG. The 3D paperback uses your composited spine when you've set one up, and falls back to a stretched slice of the front cover's edge when you haven't.
Series style kits
Save a cover's style—typography, colors, effects, and layout for front, back, and spine, plus background type and genre preset—as a named kit, then apply it to any other project to lock in a matching series look in one click. Content stays per-book: title and author text pull from each project's own metadata, and artwork, uploads, masks, word-level overrides, and blurb text never transfer. Kits are saved at the app level so every project can see and apply them, and applying one offers a one-click option to save the current design as a version first.
Cover exports (KDP wrap & ACX audiobook)
Export print-ready cover files straight from Cover Studio: a KDP cover wrap whose spine width is computed from your page count and paper stock, with bleed handled automatically, and a true 2560×2560 ACX audiobook square, reframed from your art with your title and author re-flowed onto it. If your cover is based on an approved AI concept, a disclosure reminder appears on the Front Cover and Export tabs, since KDP requires AI-content disclosure at publish time.