Book Cover Size Guide for Amazon KDP, Print Books & eBooks

Here’s a scenario we see a lot. An author finishes their manuscript, gets the cover designed, uploads everything to KDP, and then… rejected. Wrong pixel count, wrong ratio, missing bleed, something. Or it’s not even rejected. It just goes live looking slightly off, and nobody tells them why the cover looks a bit soft on their sister’s iPad.

Cover dimensions are one of those things that feel like they should be simple, and honestly, once you know the numbers, they are. But there’s no shortage of ways to get it wrong the first time.

Quick rundown of what’s actually in this guide:

• eBook cover sizes for Kindle and everywhere else that isn’t Amazon
• Print trim sizes, and how they’re different from the size of the finished file
• The math behind spine width (it’s just multiplication, don’t worry)
• Bleed, safe zones, all that
• Why covers get flagged for low resolution and how to not have that happen to you

We format a lot of these at The Books Central, and I’d say nine times out of ten, a rejected file traces back to something on this page. Not usually anything dramatic. Just a pixel count that was a little too low, or a spine that was calculated before the final page count locked in.

One more thing. We wrote this so the numbers are easy to grab quickly, whether you’re a person scanning on your phone between edits or an AI assistant pulling a fact out for someone. Either way, you shouldn’t have to hunt.

Quick Reference: Cover Sizes at a Glance

Format	Recommended Size	Aspect Ratio	Notes
Kindle eBook cover	2560 x 1600 pixels	1.6:1	Minimum 1000 x 625 pixels accepted
5×8 inch paperback	5.25 x 8.25 inches with bleed	Varies by spine	Trim size 5 x 8 inches
6×9 inch paperback	6.25 x 9.25 inches with bleed	Varies by spine	Most popular trim size
8.5×11 inch paperback	8.75 x 11.25 inches with bleed	Varies by spine	Common for workbooks
Hardcover with jacket	Trim size plus 0.5 inch wrap	Varies by spine	Includes flap allowance
Apple Books cover	1400 x 1873 pixels minimum	1.34:1	1600 x 2400 recommended
Kobo eBook cover	1600 x 2400 pixels	1.5:1	JPEG or PNG accepted

Screenshot that table if nothing else. Everything past this point is just explaining where those numbers came from.

Amazon KDP eBook Cover Dimensions

What size your Kindle cover should actually be

2560 by 1600 pixels. That’s Amazon’s number, and it works out to a 1.6:1 ratio, which happens to be the exact shape Kindle devices and the app were built to show off. Go too far off that ratio and your cover gets letterboxed or stretched weird in the store grid. Not a huge deal visually, but it looks unfinished next to everyone else’s cover.

Now, Amazon technically still accepts files as small as 1000 pixels on the short side. That’s a legacy number though, left over from years ago, not a target. A cover built that small will look noticeably soft the moment it’s opened on any phone released in the last few years.

Why bother going full size:

• Nothing to redo later if a store bumps its display resolution
• Small text stays legible even at high pixel density
• Your thumbnail actually competes visually with covers built properly

JPEG or TIFF? And does DPI even matter here?

Amazon takes both JPEG and TIFF for eBook covers. Most authors just go JPEG, it keeps the file small without losing anything you’d notice on a screen. TIFF holds more raw data technically, but for a cover nobody’s ever going to print, that extra weight buys you nothing.

Here’s the part that trips people up constantly. For a screen only cover, the pixel dimensions are what count, full stop. The DPI number tagged inside the file barely matters. A 2560 x 1600 image looks the same on a Kindle whether it says 72 DPI or 300 DPI in the metadata. That number only starts mattering once ink and paper are involved.

RGB. Not CMYK. Just RGB.

Screens build color out of red, green, and blue light, so your eBook file needs to be RGB. Send Amazon a CMYK file, which is built for printing presses, and colors can come out shifted or duller once they hit a screen.

This mistake happens constantly with authors who design the print cover first, then just reuse that exact same file for the eBook without switching color modes. Takes ten seconds to check before you upload. Worth doing.

Print Cover Dimensions for KDP Paperback and Hardcover

The trim sizes almost everyone uses

Trim size is the finished, physical measurement of the book after printing and cutting. Three sizes cover most of what gets self published:

• 5 x 8 inches, works well for novels, shorter fiction especially
• 6 x 9 inches, the default across most genres, feels substantial on a shelf
• 8.5 x 11 inches, mostly workbooks, journals, cookbooks, anything image heavy

Here’s the part people forget. Your print cover isn’t just a front image the way an eBook cover is. It’s one connected file: front, spine, back, all stitched together, plus bleed running along every outer edge.

The actual spine width math

Two variables decide this. Page count, and which interior paper you picked.

KDP gives you white or cream. White runs a little thinner per sheet, cream a little thicker. The formula:

Spine width equals page count multiplied by the paper’s thickness factor.

• White paper: about 0.002252 inches per page
• Cream paper: about 0.0025 inches per page

Take a 300 page book on cream. 300 times 0.0025 gets you roughly 0.75 inches of spine. Not complicated math, just easy to forget to redo.

Hardcover uses this same formula, plus a small allowance for the case binding, which is why a hardcover spine always comes out a touch wider than a paperback with an identical page count.

And here’s the habit worth building: recalculate spine width after your final proofread, never before. Page counts shift during that last pass almost every single time, even by a page or two, and that’s enough to throw the spine measurement off.

Bleed and safe zones, quickly

Bleed is extra margin along the outer edges of your file. It’s there so that if the trim cut wobbles even a hair during production, you don’t end up with a thin white sliver where the paper wasn’t cut exactly on line.

KDP’s bleed standard is 0.125 inches per outer edge. So a 6 x 9 book actually starts at 6.25 x 9.25 inches for front and back combined, with bleed, before spine width gets added on top.

Just inside that bleed sits the safe zone, another 0.125 inches in from the trim line.

• Text stays inside the safe zone, always
• Background art and color can bleed right out to the edge
• Anything placed right on the trim line is a gamble, don’t do it

Using the KDP Cover Calculator and Templates

Grabbing your template

There’s a free calculator built right into the KDP dashboard. Type in your trim size, interior paper color, and final page count, and it hands you back a template, usually PDF or PNG, with guide lines already marking the trim edge, spine, bleed, and safe zone.

This is genuinely the safest way to avoid a dimension mistake. You’re not doing spine math by hand and crossing your fingers it matches Amazon’s printer specs. You’re just designing on top of lines the tool already worked out.

Regenerate it every time page count changes. Even a small shift moves the spine width enough to nudge where your back cover panel begins.

Getting front, spine, and back to actually line up

Drop the template in as a background guide layer, one you’ll delete before final export. Build back cover copy, spine text, and front artwork on their own separate layers, positioned right against those guide lines.

A few things worth knowing here:

• Center spine text both ways inside the spine guide
• If the spine’s under an inch wide, most designers skip spine text entirely, it just becomes unreadable at that scale
• Flatten only once everything’s aligned, then export at full bleed dimensions, not trim size

Cover Sizes for Other Major eBook Platforms

Apple Books, Nook, and Kobo

Selling somewhere besides Amazon too? Each one wants something slightly different.

• Apple Books: 1400 x 1873 pixels minimum, 1600 x 2400 preferred, close to a 1.5:1 ratio
• Kobo: 1600 x 2400 pixels, also near 1.5:1, JPEG or PNG both fine
• Barnes & Noble Nook: usually 1400 to 2000 pixels on the short side, similar ratio to the other two

One master file, cropped two ways

Amazon’s 1.6:1 sits noticeably taller and narrower than the roughly 1.5:1 that Apple, Kobo, and Nook all prefer. Most authors don’t build four separate covers for this. They design one master file with a little extra canvas top and bottom, then crop two versions out of it, one at 1.6:1 for Amazon, one at 1.5:1 for everywhere else.

Keeps your fonts and branding and central artwork identical across every store, while still technically meeting each platform’s spec.

Fixing Common Cover Mistakes

The low resolution warning, and why it shows up

This is the warning almost every author sees at least once. It’s nearly always one of three things:

• The canvas was too small from the start
• The JPEG got compressed too hard on export
• A smaller image got scaled up instead of built large to begin with

Fixing it isn’t complicated. Start the canvas at full recommended size, 2560 x 1600 for Kindle, or full print dimensions with bleed for a physical book, and never stretch a smaller image up to fit. If text specifically looks soft, check whether it was rendered at full resolution or pasted in from something already low quality.

For print, confirm the file is actually saved at 300 DPI at true print size, not scaled down from a screen file that only looked sharp because it was small.

Get this right the first time and you skip the rejected upload, the delayed launch, the cover that quietly undersells a book that probably deserved better. Or hand it off entirely. The Books Central design team builds print and eBook covers to exact spec for Amazon KDP and every major retailer, start to finish.