Soft Cover Design Layout
In this section you will learn how to setup a Soft Cover for any book size and page count.
Before Starting
Before you begin designing your cover you need to have the following information:
Please keep in mind that all soft covers books, when trimmed, are less than .25 inches smaller in height, and less than .125 inches smaller in width. If you would like spine text on your book you will need a minimum of 90 pages.
Getting Started
For this example we will be designing an 8.5x11 90 page Soft Cover Book on Standard Glossy Paper.
The first dimensions you will need are for your spine, to calculate the width you can visit the Spine Calculator on our website(refer to this guide for all other dimensions.)
The height of the spine will always be approximately the same height as of your book, however when the book is trimmed there can be a variance of about .125 for each side that is trimmed, making the height of the spine 11 with a gutter of .125 on the top and bottom making the height of the safe area 10.75. For this example the spine size is .3125x10.75(marked by Cyan in the figure below)
The next dimensions needed are for the hinges. The width is always .25 and the height is the same as the spine, in this example 11. (marked by Blue in the figure below)
Please note that while the hinge is visible on the front and back covers respectively, it is not recommended to have anything on them other than the background because this area gets creased when the covers are opened and closed making it hard to read text or see images and fall in this area.
The next set of dimensions are for the visible area, indicating what will be seen when looking at the front or back of your book. These dimensions will always have the same height as your content and the width is .377 smaller than the content, making the visible area in this example 8.123x10.75(marked by White in the figure below)
The final dimensions needed are for the bleed area, which is the same for all size books, .625 along the outside edges(marked by Red in the figure below)
Below you will see an example of a Cover that has been properly setup for a Soft Cover Book
When placed in the appropriate Cover Template you can see how it lines up with the Spine, Hinge/Gutter and Bleed Area.
Once the Soft Cover is applied to the book it will look something like this.
Example with the overlay so you can see how the template lines up with the final cover.
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