Free tool — no signup
KDP cover template generator
A downloadable, print-ready cover template built for your book — exact spine width, bleed, safe areas, and barcode zone for your trim size, page count, and paper, at true 300 DPI. Open it in Canva, Photoshop, GIMP, or Affinity and design right on top.
Full file: 12.926″ × 9.250″ (3878 × 2775 px at 300 DPI) · spine 0.676″
Rather skip the design work completely?
publish.ai designs your covers for you — full paperback wrap at these exact dimensions, ebook cover, print-ready PDFs, plus listing copy and launch graphics, all from one manuscript upload. From $29.99, delivered in minutes.
How to design on the template
1. Finalize your interior first. The spine width comes from your page count, so the cover is always the last file you finish. If editing adds or removes pages, regenerate the template.
2. Fill the whole canvas.Your background art must run through the pink zone to the very edge — that’s what gets trimmed (paperback) or wrapped around the boards (hardcover). White slivers at the edges are the #1 cover rejection.
3. Respect the green boxes. Titles, author name, blurb, and logos stay inside the dashed safe areas. Spine text needs a spine at least 0.0625″ wide (roughly 80+ pages), with 0.0625″ of clearance to each fold.
4. Leave the barcode zone empty. Amazon prints its own ISBN barcode in the marked rectangle on the back cover; anything you put there gets covered.
5. Export as PDF.Flatten or hide the template layer, then export the finished design as a single PDF at the exact document size — that’s the file KDP wants for print covers.
Common questions
How do I use this template in Canva or Photoshop?+
Download the PNG, then create a design at the exact pixel size shown (the file is true 300 DPI). Place the template on the bottom layer as your guide, design your cover on layers above it, then hide or delete the template layer before exporting your final cover as PDF (paperback/hardcover) or JPG (ebook).
What do the colored zones mean?+
Pink is bleed (paperback) or case wrap (hardcover) — your background must extend all the way through it, but nothing important can live there. The gold strip is your spine, amber strips on hardcovers are the hinges (never put text there), the dashed green boxes are the safe areas for text and logos, and the marked rectangle on the back cover is where Amazon prints the barcode.
Why does the template size change with my page count?+
The spine grows with every page — about 0.00225″ per page of white paper. A 200-page and a 300-page book need different cover widths, which is why generic templates fail KDP review. Regenerate the template if your final page count changes.
What file format does KDP want for the final cover?+
A single print-ready PDF for paperback and hardcover covers (the template PNG is your design guide, not the upload file). For ebooks, upload a JPG or TIFF front cover — 1600×2560 px is Amazon's recommendation.
Is this the same as KDP's official template generator?+
It uses the same published geometry — bleed, spine-per-page thickness, hinge and wrap allowances — and we verified the output dimensions against KDP's own calculator. Ours runs instantly in the browser, needs no download-and-unzip, and marks the safe areas and barcode zone on one layer.
Related tools: cover size calculator, spine width calculator, margins & bleed cheat sheet.