Self-publishing Handbook: What is a book jacketWhen you want to produce a printed book you will need more than just a cover, you need an entire book jacket. A book jacket consists of the cover, the spine and the back cover. Apart from having to design the spine and back cover, don’t forget they should include information on them as well.

Spine

  • Title
  • Author name

Back cover

  • Tag line
  • Blurb
  • Reviews
  • Awards you have won
  • ISBN and barcode
  • Link to your homepage etc.
  • Design credits

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Everything outside the pink and purple lines is the bleed margin. There should also be additional bleed margin on both sides of the spine.

When you are designing these, you need to keep in mind that you need a bleed margin. A bleed margin is a certain amount of millimetres (how much depends on the thickness of your book and size of the paper, so make sure to check back with your printers) where the design continues. There shouldn’t be any writing or important parts of design inside the bleed margin, since it gets cut off during production.