How to: Design a nice ebook cover with Photoshop

by Jean-Baptiste Jung. 73 Comments -

A friend of mine recently asked me some help to design a cover for his forthcomming ebook. After designing it, I decided to make a tutorial and share it with you.

Disclaimer for Windows users: The cmd key on the Mac is the same than the Ctrl key on a PC keyboard.

Getting the template

While I was looking for some info about designing an ebook cover, I stumbled upon a very nice blank ebook cover template, that you can use to create your very own ebook cover. Download it here.

Design an ebook cover

Cover design

Now open Photoshop, and create your cover image. You can use the cover01_blank.psd template to make it fit our final work size.

Design an ebook cover

Assembling the template

Once you have your cover ready, merge all layers (Layer → Flatten image) and open the cover01.psd template, which already contain the shape of our ebook cover.

Drag and drop your cover to the template. To modify the cover size, adjust its opacity to 60% (So you can see throught) and press Cmd+T to resize it while holding the shift key down:

Design an ebook cover

In order to finish our ebook cover, we need to distort the cover to make it fit the template shape. To do so, select Edit → Transform → Distort.

Design an ebook cover

Don’t forget to set the opacity to 100% when you finished resizing, and now let’s have a look at the awesome ebook cover we have:

Design an ebook cover

Comments (73) - Leave yours

  3. J M C said:

    This is amazing! Your instructions worked – first time! Thanks so much, this will add a whole new level of “professionalism” to my ebooks…

  5. jbj said:

    @Shoban: I was planning to release a “How to start your blog efficiently” ebook, but I got too much things to do right now, so maybe later ;) I already wrote something like 10/15 pages btw.

  6. Catrin W said:

    I was always wondering how do they make it. And i though it was something very difficult :) , but now i see that it could be made very easy. Thanks, now i can design ebook cover by myself

  10. International Shipping said:

    This is a brilliant article. Thank you for the great advice and also the free template. I am gonna post this link on a few sites I post on as I think people will find it useful. I hope thats ok. Thanks again for the detailed instructions and template.

    thanks again

    Gerard

  17. Jay said:

    Great article, your final result looks awesome – & you make it look so simple!
    If anyone’s looking for more templates, or software that converts your 2d ebook cover designs into like a professional product shot, here’s one I 100% recommend. ( http://www.ecoversuiteelite.com ).
    It’s pretty cool ebook cover software that makes creating really pro ebook covers waaaay faster than modelling by hand!

    Thanks again for the great resources (i.e the blank psd file) – they’ll definately come in handy.

  19. Ajith Edassery said:

    Man… exactly what I have been looking for. My first eBook is shaping up and I was wondering what to do with the cover. People were quoting $75 and 100 for a cover…

    I might use Paint Shop Pro but the steps you explained holds good… Stumbling the post right away!

    Cheers,
    Ajith

  26. KRISHNA said:

    Hi Guys,
    This is the best ecover design that I have experienced till now. I downloaded it & will be using it since I am a newbie in Adobe photoshop stuff,

    Thanks again for this master piece art,

    Regards,
    Krishna

  27. chad said:

    what are you all talking about…this isn’t a tutorial at all. It one step showing the distort tool but the title says it’s a tutorial on designing an ebook cover?

  44. Ebook Rob said:

    Although it is very easy to do that but thanks for sharing resources. I think it saves a lot of time if we did get some such resources without much effort. It is the bright side of blogging and I do blogging for the same reason.

  45. Janet Halsketten said:

    Wow that’s a really cool and easy way to design e-book covers. I’ve ever thought, that making e-book covers is much harder, but it seems that I was wrong. Thnx for this great post. Enjoyed reading it.

  46. Raven said:

    Thanks so much for the template!! I am only used to working with photoshop to edit images. Do you have any links to easy instructions on how to create a cover with layers? I am looking through the HELP section right now and it’s not extremely helpful. (That is, how to add a photo image to a layer.)

  47. James Mann said:

    I love Photoshop and have been using for years. Mac has had the power to run Photoshop forever but not so for the PCs. I used to spend a lot of time doing things as my computer slowed the more involved my images got but I still loved it.

    I would hear people saying Photoshop was too hard to learn but I would just tell them it all starts with learning the toolbar and taking one small step at a time. After they create their first image most are hooked on Photoshop as well.

  50. virtumonde said:

    I just actually installed Photoshop along with Premier Pro. Although I will probably learn Premier Pro first it certainly helps to read all I can about Photoshop as well!

  58. How do I write an ebook? said:

    [...] Very true. I design all my own covers but use some great free resources online to assemble the final product: FREE eBook / eCover Action Generator – Create an Ebook Automatically! Other ways to design ebook covers include: How to: Design a nice ebook cover with Photoshop [...]

  61. Miraz Jordan said:

    Thanks so much for this easy tutorial. I’ve created a couple of ebooks for users of WordPress and have been trying to figure out how to do exactly this for the page they’re linked from.

    Having the Photoshop file you linked to as a basis also made all the difference.

    Your technique was simple to follow and produced excellent results.

  63. Tasha said:

    What if I don’t have a cmd key on my computer since I don’t have a mac? How would I resize the image to fit the book cover template if I don’t have the computer key?

  64. Tasha said:

    Nevermind, I figured it out. I thought it was the windows key but it turned out to be the Ctrl key on my keypad. Thank you for the great guide, it was a huge help!

  65. dona said:

    It is difficult for me!!! I could not do this on picasa i don’t know why but i could not create a cover for my ebook!! any other ideas please?
    Thank you
    Dona

  69. William K Wallace said:

    This will make my the task of designing a ebook cover so much easier this time. Just what I like a nice simple and easy to follow tutorial that works the way it is meant too.

  70. Joy said:

    Thank you so much. Even knowing NOTHING about Photoshop, I still managed to make a nice ebook cover with your directions and template. Thank you again!

  71. Lise said:

    I followed all the steps up to the dragging the cover to the template and it would not let itself be dragged…

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