Designing Irregular sized book cover for Amazon KDP
Experienced book cover designers sure know the pain involved in designing book covers for books with irregular trim sizes. These are sizes that have not been provided by the amazon template generator such as 4 x 6, 10 x 8, etc.
First Attempt (Excel calculator)
My first attempt at providing a solution to this problem was creating an excel sheet to ease the difficulty of calculating each dimension as provided by Amazon on this page. I created a youtube video on the use of the excel sheet which you can see here and is by far my most watched youtube video. I described every step involved in creating the template with the use of the excel sheet and even though I spent 16 minutes breaking it down, it was still very much difficult to use.
The excel sheet outputs each dimension of the cover and you have to recreate the same with photoshop or any other graphic design software, ensuring every dimension is perfectly recreated. This took a lot of time and wasn’t exactly easy to follow.
App to generate irregular cover template (Python script)
In order to solve this problem and reduce the time spent on recreating the template, I decided to write a python program to create the template file based on the calculations on Amazon’s page.
The most important library which was used to achieve this is the fpdf library which was built for creating pdfs in python and PHP programming. The library comes with easy-to-use tools to draw shapes, lines and write texts on precise locations of the pdf.
The output of the pdf is quite amazing and the final file size generated is very small (about 2kb) compared to that from the Amazon template generator. I have proceeded to host the script on GitHub and also created an executable file of the program which enables it to run on any computer that does not have python installed. The link to the GitHub project can be found here.
If you’d like to download the .exe file of the template generator, you can download it here. Also, if you need my help designing a book cover for your irregular trim-sized book, you can order my services here.
