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Earlier this month, I published my first paperback book using KDP. Although it was a time consuming process, I wouldn’t say that it was difficult. Amazon’s documentation is pretty good and I found tons of external guides geared toward independent authors.
One adage is that people really do judge books by their covers and that new authors tend to overlook cover design as they grow closer to publishing. I have some experience with design and a subscription to Photoshop, so I was able to put together a decent cover roughly one week before publishing my book.
The mainstream advice for anyone publishing a paperback using KDP is to leave “expanded distribution” unchecked and instead use IngramSpark. This helps with wider distribution and gives authors a hedge against Amazon terminating an account.
IngramSpark (IS) has downsides:
- My book review/processing length was nearly five days, while KDP’s is consistently less than twenty four hours.
- IngramSpark charges $25 for any changes to cover or manuscript after sixty days have elapsed.
- IS’s print costs are higher than Amazon’s.
- KDP and IS have slightly different requirements for their paperback book covers.
What I wasn’t prepared for, and what I don’t feel is documented particularly well, is that the full back-spine-front cover from KDP can’t necessarily be imported to IS without issues. The spine width will be different. Although I accounted for differences in spine width, my first printed proof was “off” compared to my beautiful KDP cover.
This post will address item number four–there are differences between Kindle Direct Publishing and IngramSpark book covers. As I work through the issues with my own work, I want to provide a resource to other authors.
Below is the working copy of my book cover for my book, Framed: A Villain’s Perspective on Social Media.
What’s the issue here? What if I upload my KDP file and it just works?
One reason that there isn’t more discussion of this annoyance is that KDP-dimension cover images can be ported over to Ingram and the issue might not be apparent.
However, the spine widths of the two versions of my 436 page book differ by over 10%! That’s 24.94mm to 22.5mm. Uploading my (larger) KDP images into Ingram probably would have been accepted, but there would have been warping or much harsher cuts to the horizontal margins. Warping would occur because the decrease in width (due to the spine) would not have been paired with a change in height. So, all elements would get slightly “crunched” vertically.
There are some cases where this issue would be less pronounced. Probably whenever books are smaller and elements are less perfectly symmetric (square-ish), any stretching may seem minimal unless the books are compared side by side.
The point remains: if the spines are not the exact same width, your book cover will not be the same between the two platforms.
Do you have to pay $25 every time you make a change to a book on IngramSpark?
IngramSpark allows free changes to covers and internals for 60 days. Anyone looking to make last-minute changes to a manuscript or struggling to get the cover to be equivalent to Amazon’s has two months before mistakes start to cost money.
For this reason, I recommend that anyone working to publish on Ingram quickly orders proofs for review. The initial processing time took so long that I forgot about it, and even after paying for rush shipping, I’ll probably be close to day twenty by the time I know if my second proof was designed correctly!
Do you have to use the IngramSpark template with the inset guide?
Both KDP and IS provide cover calculators which allow authors to input number of pages and formatting info and generate template files that can be used in image processing apps like Photoshop.
Kindle provides a straightforward template. It’s intimidating the first time you see it, but everything is there, and there’s a guide that explains exactly what each line represents.
Ingram provides a pretty similar template, except it’s much lower resolution (about 50% of the size of my 436 page 6×9) and it’s awkwardly set inside a a different page.
The immediate question is: “Does Ingram require this template to be used and the PDF to be uploaded in this format?” No.
You can upload a document where the image is stretched to the all four corners as in KDP’s. There are plenty of reports online of people just uploading their KDP cover and finding the result to be acceptable.
It isn’t necessary to fit the cover to the inset guide and upload that, though that’s probably the best way to create a cover with the correct dimensions
What has to be changed and what decisions have to be made?
My recommendation is that you upscale Ingram’s template to whatever dimensions you used for KDP. I used the “max” dimensions, which was 7942 × 5550 pixels in the KDP template. with front and back cover roughly 3450 x 5250 pixels.
I measured the cover art area in the IS template and it came out to 1725 x 2625. It wasn’t immediately obvious to me, but once I compared the numbers, I realized that it was 50% of the KDP cover. Any design elements I’d need to copy over from the KDP Photoshop document would need to be scaled down to 50%. Alternatively, I could have doubled the size of the IS document. I strongly recommend the latter approach!
Before proceeding, I strongly recommend setting guide lines for both the KDP source document and the new IG document. If you aren’t able to break your source file into elements, see the next section.
There are two main tasks that must be completed to translate a KDP cover to account for IngramSpark’s spine:
- Adjusting the spine width (especially if there is a contrasting spine color, which my book has)
- Adjusting any stretched horizontal elements that are offset by the spine width
The new spine with is dictated by the guide lines set on the template file. Is it as simple as horizontally adjusting the spine? Well, no…
The author must decide whether to:
- Horizontally adjust all spine elements (in an pinch)
- Preserve text size (so KDP and IS look similar when shelved)
- Preserve all proportions (so IS design remains consistent with KDP’s)
Each approach has pros and cons. Option #1 is easiest and can be done even if the “source” element is one flattened image. I went with #2 because I had access to the elements and the complexity of #3 wasn’t worth it to me. I wanted my spine font size to be the same.
I preserved text size by splitting my text and other elements from my background, resizing the background, and then re-centering the text. That handled my spine.
Then, as I copied other elements in, I noticed that all of the front cover elements (those placed to the right of the spine), were offset by about 40px. This made sense because my spine width went from 597px in KDP to about 542px in IS.
As you can see above, I had a wraparound ribbon which was stretched to 100% of the cover’s width. Because the spine had been condensed, the elements on the front cover portion of the spine had to be offset to the left by 20-30px.
Once I re-aligned everything, my cover fit nicely in the guides and it was awfully close to being pixel perfect with my KDP cover. I still have some concerns about the bleeds and the difference in colors/inks, so maybe I’ll write a future post once I get the physical copy to assess!
What if you only have a final image/pdf and not the source files?
Unfortunately, anyone lacking access to their source files or not familiar with how to use image editing software might be in trouble. There isn’t a one-click KDP->IS conversion available and a designer hired for the KDP file probably won’t be willing to do the conversion for free.
I’m imagining that most people who find this post will find it after having encountered an issue with an IngramSpark proof. If you haven’t had an issue yet and don’t care about your cover being absolutely pixel perfect, maybe there’s a shortcut. Request a proof copy with whatever you have from KDP. It works for some people. Don’t let me overcomplicate it for you.
If you know there’s an issue and you want to resolve it, see the above section, starting back where you left off if you skipped the rest of it to jump here.
Conclusion
I’m still waiting on what will (hopefully) be my final IS proof. We’re in this one together. I sympathize that what should be a simple process following successful KDP publication is anything but. I hope this guide helps other authors avoid “wasting” a proof and spending precious time figuring out IngramSpark while designing that “pixel perfect” book cover.
I’ll update this post if I figure out anything else, and I welcome your questions. If this post helped you, why not subscribe to my newsletter or buy my book?
