The three tiers

Premade: an existing design with your title set into it. Fast, cheap, and often better than a bad custom job.

Custom typographic or photo-composite: a designer builds to your book using licensed imagery. This is where most successful indie covers sit.

Illustrated: original art commissioned for your world. The right choice for fantasy and children's work, and priced like the skilled labour it is.

What you are actually paying for

Genre fluency. A cover's job is to tell the right reader in half a second that this book is for them, at the size of a postage stamp on a phone.

Print-ready files: front, spine and back at correct bleed and spine width for your page count, plus the square and vertical crops the storefronts and social platforms demand.

The cover after the cover

Your cover must also work in motion. Storefronts, social feeds and advertising all want moving art now, and a still cover sits inert beside a moving one.

The house tests that free: the Cover Motion Test shows how your existing cover behaves as motion before you commission anything, and the Pin Hall builds the vertical plate the feeds ask for.

Asked and answered

Is a premade cover unprofessional?

No. A good premade beats a weak custom design at every price.

Do I need a different cover for the audio edition?

Yes — a square version, at least 2400 x 2400 pixels for most storefronts.

What does a film book use instead of a cover?

A title sequence and a thumbnail frame drawn from the film itself, built as part of the production.