Last reviewed by Robert Prime — September 2026
Quick Answer: Expect $10–$35 for volume-produced custom covers, $45–$170 for premades, £90–£300 at the UK budget end, $497–$645 mid-market, and $880 average ($625–$1,250 typical) for professional commissions. Genre changes the price mainly because it changes how much has to be illustrated. The expensive mistake is not buying cheap — it is buying a wrap before your page count is final.
Below: the full ladder with sources, what actually drives the number, and the costs nobody quotes.
Table of Contents
- The full price ladder
- What actually drives the price
- Cost by genre
- The costs nobody quotes you
- What UK authors actually spend
- Does paying more work?
- What we could not verify
- Frequently asked questions
The full price ladder
All read from the provider’s own page on 19 September 2026.
| Tier | Provider | Price |
|---|---|---|
| DIY | Affinity | Free — “Affinity is free for individuals (seriously)” |
| Canva Pro | £100 / year | |
| Volume custom | GetCovers | $10 ebook · $20 print-ready · $35 premium |
| Premade | The Book Cover Designer | $99–$150 typical listings ($45–$170 range) |
| Book Beaver (premade) | £90 + £40 print files | |
| UK budget–mid | Book Beaver (bespoke) | £300 / £400 / £550 |
| Spiffing Covers | £450 | |
| Mid-market | Ebook Launch | $497 ebook · $595 with print wrap · −$50 per series cover |
| Professional | Reedsy marketplace | $880 average, $625–$1,250 typical |
| Premium | Damonza (from) | $1,695 premium tier · Everything package $1,995 / $2,595 |
Damonza also charges +$500 for a rights-managed image licence and +$200 for rush — both published, and both the kind of line item that turns a quoted price into a different final invoice.
What actually drives the price
Most cost guides list genre, complexity and designer reputation as if they were independent factors. They are largely one factor wearing three hats.
The real driver is how much of the cover has to be drawn rather than assembled.
Reedsy’s own breakdown makes this explicit: a cover built from stock photography plus typography runs $700–$800, while one requiring custom illustration runs $900–$1,500+. Everything else follows from that single distinction.
That is why the genre table below ranks the way it does. Fantasy is not expensive because fantasy readers are demanding; it is expensive because fantasy covers are frequently illustrated, and illustration is hours of drawing. Memoir is cheaper because a photograph and good type will usually do the job.
So when you are quoted a price, the question that actually explains it is: how much of this is being made from scratch?
Cost by genre
Reedsy’s figures, from 9,600+ cover projects. Median first, average second — the gap between them tells you how long the tail is.
| Genre | Median | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Fantasy | $910 | $1,760 |
| Young Adult | $900 | $1,570 |
| Science Fiction | $850 | $1,155 |
| Romance | $800 | $1,290 |
| Self-Help | $800 | $860 |
| Literary Fiction | $750 | $830 |
| Historical Fiction | $750 | $860 |
| Action & Adventure | $750 | $820 |
| Thriller / Crime & Mystery | $700 | $770 |
| Non-fiction (general) | $700 | $800 |
| Middle Grade | $700 | $1,080 |
| Biography & Memoir | $680 | $760 |
| Picture Books (cover only) | $470 | $760 |
Where median and average are close — Self-Help, Literary, Thriller — the market is predictable and a quote far outside the range deserves a question. Where the average is nearly double the median, as in Fantasy and Young Adult, a minority of illustrated projects is pulling the mean up, and your quote depends almost entirely on whether yours is one of them.
The costs nobody quotes you
The print wrap. Most cover prices are for the ebook front only. Beetiful charges +$95 for the paperback wrap and +$40 for audiobook. The Book Cover Designer publishes no price at all for spine and back — you arrange it with the designer.
Source files. This is the one that actually bites. GetCovers includes the layered source file only at its $35 tier; Ebook Launch charges extra. Without it you cannot change anything yourself, ever.
Which matters because of this:
The spine is arithmetic, and it moves. Amazon derives spine width from page count:
| Paper | Spine width |
|---|---|
| Black-and-white, white | pages × 0.002252" |
| Black-and-white, cream | pages × 0.0025" |
| Premium colour | pages × 0.002347" |
| Standard colour | pages × 0.002252" |
KDP also prints spine text only on books of more than 79 pages, and requires the cover as a single flat PDF at 300 DPI with 0.125" bleed.
So a late round of edits that adds 40 pages moves the spine by a tenth of an inch, and the whole wrap has to be rebuilt. If you have no source file, you are paying someone to rebuild it. That is the real cost of the cheapest tier — not that it looks bad, but that you cannot change it.
Fonts. KDP is blunt: “Unembedded fonts or fonts prohibiting commercial embedding prevent printing.” A font licence that forbids embedding is not a legal abstraction — it is a file that will not print.
What UK authors actually spend
Written Word Media’s survey of 1,346 authors, published December 2025, is the best available data. One caveat worth stating: it is a global survey with a US skew. No UK-only author spending survey exists — anyone quoting one is extrapolating.
The striking finding is where the money clusters. Even authors earning $5,000+ per month mostly spend $250–$1,000 on a cover. The high earners are not buying the expensive covers.
Does paying more work?
The same survey ranks cover design as the number one selling factor at every income level — and states plainly that there is no clear correlation between spending $2,000+ and higher income.
Both things are true. The cover matters more than anything else on the page; the price of the cover does not predict the result. What you are buying above roughly £600 is art direction and iteration, which is genuinely valuable for a book with commercial ambition behind it, and is not a purchase that pays for itself by default.
The practical reading: spend enough to get a cover that signals your genre correctly and reads at thumbnail size. That is a three-figure problem for most books, not a four-figure one.
What we could not verify
In keeping with how we write these — the following were sought and not obtained, and no number has been invented in their place:
- Damonza’s standard tier. Widely quoted at $645 or $395; their own pages did not render a price for us. Treat third-party figures with caution.
- BookBaby’s entire range. Every page on their own domain returned a 403 to us.
- Beetiful’s headline price. Both pricing URLs returned 404.
- Hardback, dust jacket and audiobook-square pricing. Damonza and Ebook Launch both list these as add-ons with no published price. That opacity is itself the finding.
- Stock licence print-run caps. The Shutterstock and Adobe Stock help pages blocked us. The limits are widely reported but we did not read them at source.
- Reedsy’s own figures conflict. Their blog gives $880 average / $625–$1,250; a Reedsy Medium post gives $700 average / $630 median. We cite the blog because it states its provenance (9,600+ projects, 2025). The discrepancy is unresolved.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest way to get a decent book cover?
A premade in a well-supplied genre, at roughly £100–£200 once the print wrap is added. Below that, GetCovers at $20 produces print-ready custom work — genuinely usable, with the caveat that the source file only comes at the $35 tier. See premade vs bespoke for when each works.
Will changing my cover later lose my Amazon reviews?
No. Reviews attach to the ASIN, and updating a cover on an existing listing does not create a new one. This is a persistent myth and it stops authors fixing covers that are costing them sales.
Is Affinity still £164.99?
No — and most cost guides are out of date on this. Affinity’s own site now states it is free for individuals. If you were budgeting for design software, that line may be zero.
Do I need to pay extra for an ebook and a print cover?
Usually yes, and it is the most common gap between a quoted price and the final invoice. Ask explicitly whether the price includes the print wrap. Our own full print wrap at £199 includes both, which is why we quote it that way.
How much should I spend if I am publishing my first book?
On the evidence: enough for a cover that fits your genre, and no more. The survey data shows high earners clustering at $250–$1,000, and no return on $2,000+. Put the difference into the interior or the launch.
Does a more expensive designer work faster?
No — often the reverse, because the better-known designers are booked further ahead. Rush fees are real and published: Damonza charges +$200. Budget time instead of paying for speed where you can.
Final thoughts
The honest summary of a decade of price inflation in this market is that the middle got hollowed out. There is a very cheap end that works if your manuscript is finished and you never need to change anything, and a professional end that is worth it when the cover has to carry a specific idea.
What to avoid is paying mid-market money for a cover you do not own the files to, on a book whose page count has not settled. That is the combination that costs twice.
Our own tiers — £129 ebook, £199 full print wrap, £399 illustrated — sit deliberately in that middle band, with the copyright assigned to you in writing and the wrap built to your final page count.
Read next
This is one of four guides on getting a cover made. The others cover premade against bespoke, and the spine arithmetic that breaks a premade wrap; cheap, AI or professional, including what Amazon makes you declare; and how to brief a designer, and the KDP specs that get files rejected. If you only need the number, you can work out your spine width from your page count in a few seconds.
— Robert publishing.co.uk
Who wrote this. I am Robert Prime. I run publishing.co.uk, a UK formatting and self-publishing service, which means I spend my week inside KDP's actual upload screens and rejection emails rather than reading about them. I was a guest on the Alliance of Independent Authors' Self-Publishing Advice podcast in July 2026, talking about how AI engines find books. Every price and specification on this page carries the date I read it from the source, and where I could not verify something I have said so on the page rather than filled the gap. If you find something wrong here, tell me and I will correct it and say that I have.
