Creating a cover

[(anon)]

My question is regarding creating a book cover, I'm assuming I'd need to use the 'Advanced Option' for this, but I'm not a WYSIWYG kind of guy, so I want to custom make a front and back cover in maybe photo shop make it into a PDF file, problem is it seems like I need to upload one big pdf containing front and back cover, so what about the spine? How much room would I compensate for it? Wouldn't that depend on the amount of pages? Does anyone have a sample file so I can see exactly what it would look like to do this?

Thanks

[Elmore Hammes]

If you are loading a one-piece PDF cover, then yes, you include the Back, spine and front all in one file.

The spine width depends on the pages and the book characteristics (size, paper, color or b&w) - if you click on the Support tab above, that takes you to the main HELP page. On the right side of that page there is a "resources" button that has a calculator link for spine width calculation.

The HELP pages also have additional information on cover creation.

[(anon)]

Can't believe I missed that thanks.

On this section: http://www.lulu.com/en/help/book_covers_faq#cover_dimensions

It talks about being a few centimeters bigger than the book size, does this account for the bleed, for example if I have a 6 x 9 inch perfect bound paperback book my entire PDF would be like 6.125" x 9.25" (front cover) [spine"> 6.125" x 9.25" (back cover) and that's it? Or do I need to add additional space for the 'bleed' ?

Thanks

[Elmore Hammes]

The physical printed cover will be 6 x 9 for front and 6 x 9 for back. The dimensions you list include the bleed. You would want to keep any critical art and text outside the bleed area - plus an additional 1/8 to 1/4 inch away from any edge to avoid getting trimmed off, since there is some trim variance in the automated process. You do want your art/colors to go all the way to the edge of the bleed area however, to avoid any white edges when it is trimmed.

[ulillillia]

You can use the spine width calculator to determine how big you need to make your spine. I've used the one-piece cover route myself, created using GIMP (and Excel for the calculations to get the 3D effects), and yes, it does result in a single, massive image. My 273-page 6x9 book yielded a cover that's about 3760x2775 pixels, for 300 dpi. That's a good 29.85 MB of memory for that, not including extra layers and the undo history. If you don't have much memory on your system, consider doing the front cover in a separate file, the back cover in another file, and the spine in another. Then, create another to put all 3 segments together. This also makes it faster to edit, though slightly.

[Keith Dixon]

OR ... you can start to publish your content and work your way through to the cover stage. When you choose the one-piece pdf cover option at this stage, the system will then tell you exactly how big the file has to be, including spine. It saves a lot of calculating and possible errors.

You could even make the cover to an 'approximate' size, go through the publishing process on Lulu, get the details at the cover stage and then switch programs to Photoshop or whatever and finalise the details. Export as a pdf and then upload into the cover stage. Works for me.

[WaltAlexander]

I have worked through all the steps in publishing Time Trial but when trying to design a cover , the web page is unobtainable. Please either make the web page available or tell me, in detail, how to design a cover on my PC. The size would appear to be the difficulty. I can produce a design in 'paint' but don't think I can do the size. So help please.

Walt Alexander. e:hswales@toucansurf.com   

[Ken Anderson]

Try this