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Amazon’s Cover Creator, or upload your own wrap?

Cover Creator is free, built in, and needs no other software. It is also the reason a lot of puzzle books look like each other. Here is the actual trade, and the specific case where using it will cost you sales.

When Cover Creator is the right call

• Your first book, and you want it published this week. Getting a title live and learning what happens next is worth more than a better cover on a book that never ships.
• You have no design software and no wish to acquire any.
• The book is for a small, known audience — a family collection, a classroom set, a care home — where nobody is choosing between yours and forty others.

In those cases the honest advice is: use it, publish, move on.

Where it costs you

The problem is not that Cover Creator makes ugly covers. It is that it makes recognisable ones, and puzzle books are a category where the buyer is scrolling a grid of thumbnails.

A shopper looking at large-print word search books sees thirty covers at once. Several will have been made from the same handful of built-in layouts, with the same type treatments, differing mainly in colour. Yours does not have to be beautiful to win that comparison. It has to be distinguishable, and a template that thousands of other publishers used is working against you at exactly the moment the decision is made.

The second cost is control. The layout options are fixed, so the things that sell a puzzle book — a clear statement of puzzle count, difficulty, print size, and who it is for — have to fit where the template puts them rather than where they would work best.

The technical difference that matters

Cover Creator builds the cover inside Amazon’s system, so the spine width is handled for you. That is a genuine advantage, and it is the single most common thing people get wrong when they move to uploading their own.

A KDP wrap is one flat image containing back cover, spine and front cover, with bleed on every edge:

• Width = (trim width × 2) + spine width + (bleed × 2)
• Height = trim height + (bleed × 2)

Spine width is page count multiplied by the paper’s thickness per page — and that means the correct cover size changes every time the interior does. Add ten puzzles and last week’s cover is the wrong width. Amazon rejects it with an error that appears to be about the cover, when what actually changed was the page count.

So the real question is not “Cover Creator or upload?” It is: if I upload my own, what keeps the spine correct?

Three ways to answer that

1. Calculate it by hand each time. Works, and relies on you remembering after every interior change. Our spine calculator does the arithmetic and gives you a blank template at the exact pixel dimensions, free.
2. Use a template pack. Fine for a fixed page count, and you are back to hand-calculating the moment the book changes length.
3. Use a designer that reads the page count from the interior. Then the spine cannot drift, because it is not a number anyone typed.

That third option is what we built, and it is the only reason we would tell someone to leave Cover Creator: you get design control without inheriting the spine problem that usually comes with it.

What a puzzle book cover needs to say

Whichever route you take, the same information sells the book, and it is worth being deliberate about it because thumbnail space is small:

• The puzzle type and count — “100 Large Print Word Searches” does more work than any image.
• Who it is for — adults, seniors, kids, beginners.
• The difficulty, if the book is graded.
• The volume number, if it is a series — and in the same place on every volume.
• Legible type at thumbnail size. Shrink your cover to 200 pixels wide and see what survives. Most first covers fail this test.

A reasonable path

Publish book one with Cover Creator if that is what gets it live. Then, before book two, build the cover properly — because book two is when a series starts looking like a series, and a series is where puzzle books make money.

If you do move, check the spine width against your final page count and not your planned one. That single check prevents most cover rejections.

Related

• Spine width calculator — exact dimensions and a blank template, free.
• “Your cover is not 300 DPI” — the other common cover rejection.
• Series generator — keeping covers consistent across volumes.
• KDP specs cheat sheet

More: Spine calculator · Cover DPI rejections · Series generator · KDP specs · Open the Studio