A cover is the only part of your book everyone sees
Last reviewed by Robert Prime — September 2026
Every survey of self-published authors puts the cover first. Written Word Media’s 2025 survey of 1,346 authors found the cover ranked as the number one sales factor at every income level — above blurb, price, ads and reviews.
The same survey found that over half of indie authors spend between nothing and $100 on it.
Those two facts sit uncomfortably together, and they explain the shape of this market. At the top, Reedsy’s marketplace data across 9,600 completed cover projects gives an average of $880, typically $625–$1,250. At the bottom, GetCovers will produce a print-ready cover for $20, and premade covers on The Book Cover Designer sell for $45–$170.
We sit deliberately in the middle, and we are explicit about what that buys.
What it costs
| Price | What you get | |
|---|---|---|
| Ebook cover | £129 | Front cover only, sized for Kindle and the retailer thumbnails. Right if you are ebook-first. |
| Full print wrap + ebook | £199 | Front, spine and back, built to your exact page count and trim, plus the matching ebook cover. Cover formatting (£39) is included, not charged on top. |
| Illustrated / bespoke brief | £399 | Original illustration or a brief that needs real art direction. We confirm scope before starting. |
Two initial concepts. Two revision rounds. Print-ready files. The copyright assigned to you in writing.
Add a cover to a formatting order and it is the same price — we do not inflate the standalone price to make a bundle look like a discount.
How that compares
Every figure below was read from the provider’s own page in September 2026. Where a provider does not publish a price, we say so rather than estimate.
| Provider | Cover design | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| publishing.co.uk | £129 / £199 / £399 | Two concepts, two revisions, copyright assigned |
| Grosvenor House | £250 | Bespoke cover, published price |
| Troubador | from £150 + VAT | Published as a starting figure |
| Reedsy marketplace | ~$880 average, $625–$1,250 typical | 9,600 completed projects |
| 99designs | £249 / £409 / £649 / £979 | Contest model, more designers |
| Damonza | $645 standard, from $1,695 premium | 2 and 4 concepts respectively |
| Ebook Launch | $497 ebook, $595 with print wrap | |
| BookBaby | from $399 | Print cover includes the ebook version |
| GetCovers | $10 / $20 / $35 | Volume operation, unlimited revisions |
| The Book Cover Designer (premade) | $45–$170 | Sold once, then retired |
Where we are not the right answer. If your budget is genuinely under £50, buy a premade — a good premade beats a cheap bespoke every time, and we would rather tell you that than take the money. If you want ten designers competing on concepts, 99designs is built for that and we are not. If your book is a literary hardback where the cover is the product, the £625–£1,250 end of the market exists for a reason.
Why the price is where it is
There is a real reason the market splits at roughly £100 and roughly £600, and it is worth understanding before you spend anything.
Below about £50, you are buying selection, not design — a premade someone speculatively made, or a template filled in. That can be excellent. It cannot be about your book, because it existed before your book did.
Above about £600, you are buying art direction — someone thinking about positioning, genre signalling and series architecture, usually across several rounds. For a book with real commercial ambition behind it, that is money well spent.
In between is the band most self-published books actually need: an original cover, made for this book, by someone who knows what a spine does at 180 pages versus 340, and who will hand over print-ready files that KDP accepts first time. That is what £129 to £399 buys.
What you get that the cheap end does not
Files that pass. A cover wrap is geometry: spine width is a function of page count and paper stock, and bleed is unforgiving. Most KDP cover rejections are arithmetic, not taste. We build to the page count of the interior we are formatting, so the two cannot drift apart.
Copyright in writing. Paying a designer does not make you the owner of the artwork. Under section 11(1) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 the person who made it is the first owner, and section 90(3) says copyright only moves by an assignment in writing, signed. We assign ours. Most cheap covers come with no paperwork at all — we wrote a full guide to who owns your cover because it catches so many authors out.
An honest account of the stock layer. Almost every commercial cover uses licensed imagery. We cannot assign you copyright in a photograph we licensed, and neither can anyone else — what we can do is tell you exactly which assets are licensed, from where, and on what terms, so you know what you are holding when a foreign publisher asks.
What we need from you
The brief is shorter than people expect:
- Final page count and trim size — or let us format the interior and we will take it from there
- Your blurb
- Two or three covers you like, and one you do not
- The genre, as a reader would describe it
You do not need to describe a design, and you should not try to. Describing the reader is more useful than describing the cover.
Before you buy anything, read these
We wrote the research behind this page up in full, because the honest answers are more useful than a sales pitch — including the places where we are not the right choice.
- How much does a book cover cost? — every tier from free to £1,500+, with the published prices and who charges what.
- Premade vs bespoke — what “exclusive” really means, and why a page-count change breaks a premade wrap.
- Cheap, AI or professional? — marketplace gigs, AI images, and the declaration Amazon requires.
- How to brief a designer — what to send, what wastes time, and the KDP specs that get covers rejected.
- Spine width calculator — your spine in inches and millimetres, from KDP’s own multipliers.
Getting started
Add a cover to a formatting order at checkout, or order the cover on its own — the price is identical either way.
Not sure which tier? Send us the blurb and page count at hello@publishing.co.uk and we will tell you which one your book needs, including if that answer is “buy a premade instead”.
Who you are buying from. I am Robert Prime. I run publishing.co.uk, a UK formatting and self-publishing service, and I am the person who will answer when you email about your cover. Every competitor price on this page was read from that provider's own page in September 2026, including the ones cheaper than us, and the section above saying when you should buy a premade instead of hiring us is there on purpose. I was a guest on the Alliance of Independent Authors' Self-Publishing Advice podcast in July 2026. If anything here is out of date, tell me and I will fix it and say that I have.