Concept piece · Book covers

Low Tide paperback cover

A cover for an essay collection about the sea, designed as a studio concept to show how a print-ready KDP paperback file is built: back, spine and front as one PDF, the spine worked out from the page count, and room left on the back for the barcode.

Type

Studio concept, not client work. The title, author and publisher are invented

Piece

Paperback cover: back, spine and front as one PDF

Spec

6 × 9 in trim · 240 pages on white paper · spine 0.540 in · 0.125 in bleed · 12.79 × 9.25 in overall

Proof

3D render made from the print file

Low Tide paperback cover: Print file — **Print file** · BLEED · SPINE FOLDS · SAFE AREA · BARCODE AREA

Low Tide paperback cover: Artwork — **Artwork** · CMYK · 300 DPI

The spine is 240 pages × 0.002252 in, or 0.540 in. Size it for the wrong page count and the title slides onto the front or back cover once the book is bound.

Low Tide paperback cover: A 3D proof of the finished paperback, rendered from the print file. — A 3D proof of the finished paperback, rendered from the print file.

Low Tide paperback cover: Front and back covers, as they print. — Front and back covers, as they print.

What we did

Worked out the spine from the page count and paper (240 × 0.002252 in = 0.540 in) and built the full cover to 12.79 × 9.25 in, bleed included
Kept every line of text at least 0.125 in inside the trim, and the spine text clear of both folds
Left KDP’s 2 × 1.2 in barcode area clear at the bottom right of the back cover
Ran the navy sea and the spine past the trim, so a little drift at the fold never shows a white line
Drew the sun and the water as flat shapes in a few solid colors, which print cleanly on a matte or gloss cover

KDP sends covers back for a handful of reasons: a spine sized for the wrong page count, text in the bleed, artwork where the barcode goes. This is how we build the file so none of them come up.

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