Stage 6 — Design: Your Cover, Built to Sell at Thumbnail Size

Your cover will be judged at the size of a postage stamp, in a search-results grid, against forty competitors. That's the design brief — and it's why “my nephew does Photoshop” covers cost authors real money.

From your preferences, not from a template

The intake captured your genre, imagery style, colour preferences, and covers you admire. Stage 6 turns those into concepts presented for your selection — bold typographic, conceptual, photographic, or illustrated — designed to your shelf's conventions, because genre conventions are reader signals, not creative constraints.

The full wrap

Once you've approved a direction, we build the complete wrap — front, spine, back — at exact KDP specification for your page count and trim, so it sails through Amazon's print review. The back cover gets selling copy (not a summary — a pitch), because in person and in the “Look Inside,” the back cover is a sales page.

Nothing is uploaded without your sign-off. Your cover approval is the third and final checkpoint — and it's what triggers the final payment gate before Stage 7 takes the book live.