How to Make a Coloring Book Cover for Amazon KDP

A KDP paperback cover is one PDF file containing the back cover, the spine and the front cover as a single image, at 300 DPI, with 0.125 inches of bleed added to the top, bottom and outside edges.

You do not make three files. You make one, laid out flat, the way a cover looks before it is folded around the book.

That is the technical answer, and almost nobody tells you it before you are already sitting at the upload screen wondering why your lovely front cover has been rejected.

There are four ways to get that file. Only one of them involves being able to design.

Make the cover last, not first

The cover comes after the pages. Not because designing is harder, but because the spine width is calculated from your page count, and you do not know your page count until the interior is finished.

This is the one piece of order that matters. If you are working through how to publish a coloring book on Amazon, the pages come first, the page count comes out of them, and the cover is built to fit what you actually made. Getting those pages to the right size is its own job, and bleed and margins is where it is decided.

There is a second rule attached to the spine, and it catches coloring books in particular. Amazon requires at least 79 pages before you can put text on the spine. A 40 page coloring book has a spine, but it is too narrow to print on. Your title goes on the front and the back, and the spine stays plain. That is normal and nothing is wrong.

What the file has to be

Five requirements, and they are all checkable before you upload.

• One single PDF containing back cover, spine and front cover as one image
• 300 DPI minimum, which is print resolution, not screen resolution
• 0.125 inches of bleed on the top, bottom and outside edges
• Fonts embedded and transparencies flattened, which most design tools do when you export to PDF
• No crop marks

Leave room on the back cover for the barcode. Amazon places one automatically unless you supply your own, and there is a margin area reserved for it. Artwork that runs through that space gets a barcode printed on top of it.

Four ways to get the file

A tool built for KDP covers

This is what I use now. Judith Scholtz makes a KDP Cover Creator that gets the measurements right for your book. I bought it on Gumroad, I have used it, and it works great.

That matters because cover files get rejected on dimensions more than on anything else. Get the measurements right from the start and that rejection never happens.

It is $22 once, with no subscription. Get the KDP Cover Creator.

If you want to go further with KDP, Judith is the person I would go to. She runs the Digital Profits Collective community on Skool and teaches print on demand, crossword puzzles, word searches, designs and a long list of other things you can sell there. It is free to join, and I highly recommend it. Join Digital Profits Collective. I am an affiliate with this community. I may receive a commission with your purchase at no additional cost to you.

Amazon's Cover Creator, free and inside KDP

Amazon has a built-in tool called Cover Creator. It gives you layouts and fonts, lets you use images from its gallery or your own, and handles the sizing for you. It is free and it is already there in the publishing flow.

The catch is worth knowing before you invest an afternoon in it. You work inside their templates rather than designing freely, and covers made in Cover Creator, along with anything using their stock images, cannot be downloaded for use anywhere outside KDP. So it is a fine way to publish a book and a poor way to build something you also want on Pinterest, in a shop listing, or on your own site.

The template generator plus a design tool

Amazon has a cover calculator that takes your trim size, page count, paper type and ink, and gives you back a template sized exactly to your book, with the spine and the fold lines marked.

You open that template in whatever you design in, put your artwork on top of it, keep everything important inside the lines, and export a PDF. The template does the arithmetic so you never have to work out spine width yourself.

This is not designing from nothing. It is coloring inside lines somebody else drew, which is a much smaller job than the word "design" suggests. It is also the route to use if you are checking a file from anywhere else, because the template shows you immediately whether your artwork sits where it should.

Pay someone

Covers are one of the cheapest things to hand off, because the brief is small and the file is standard. If you do this, give them your trim size, your final page count, your paper type and the template from the cover calculator. A designer who has the template cannot get the dimensions wrong.

What a coloring book cover actually has to do

It has to work at the size of a postage stamp.

Nobody sees your cover full size before they buy. They see it in a row of search results, on a phone, about as wide as a thumbnail. Everything about a coloring book cover follows from that.

So: one clear image rather than a busy collage. A title big enough to read when the whole cover is an inch tall. And somewhere on the front, the thing the shopper is actually filtering for, which is who the book is for. "Ages 4 to 8" in readable type does more work than another illustration.

Open your own cover on your phone and shrink it. If you cannot tell what the book is in one second, neither can the person scrolling.

Glossy or matte

Both cost the same, and neither is a wrong answer.

Amazon describes glossy as shiny, which makes black covers darker and artwork more striking. Matte has minimal sheen and a subtler, polished look. Children's books lean glossy. Adult coloring books more often go matte.

If you cannot decide, glossy is the safer default for anything with bright artwork on it.

Questions people ask about this

Can I upload just the front cover?

No. Amazon requires a single PDF with the back cover, spine and front cover together as one image. A front-only file will not pass.

Why can I not put my title on the spine?

Your book probably has fewer than 79 pages. That is Amazon's minimum for spine text, and most coloring books sit under it. The spine stays blank.

What does bleed mean?

Bleed is extra artwork past the edge of the finished book, 0.125 inches on the top, bottom and outside edges, so that when the printer trims the page there is no white sliver along the edge. Your background should run into the bleed. Your text should stay well inside it.

Do I need to make my own barcode?

No. Amazon places one on the back cover automatically. Just keep your artwork clear of the area reserved for it.

What if my cover file comes back the wrong size?

That is the most common rejection and it is a fix, not a restart. Compare your file against the template from Amazon's cover calculator, which is built to your exact trim size, page count and paper, and correct the dimensions. If a tool generated the file, send it back to the tool with the correct measurements.

Can I change the cover after I publish?

Yes. The cover is one of the things you can replace later, which is worth remembering if you are stuck on it. A published book with a cover you will improve later beats an unpublished book with a perfect one.

The cover is one step. If you want the rest of it in order, I wrote up what I learned into The Coloring Book Business Guide, which covers finding a niche that is not already flooded, the tools for generating pages, the pricing decision, and fifty prompts to start from. Twenty-five for adult books, twenty-five for children's. It is free.