Everyone judges a book by its cover! Your ebook will need a cover. But there are differences in the way the front cover is dealt with in epub and Kindle e-books. This post is about how to generate an html cover for an epub using Sigil.
The first thing to have ready is, of course, an image file. If you are making an e-book version of a pre-existing print book, then use the print cover. In the vast majority of cases this will be just a little bit taller and thinner than the e-reader screen, most of which are 800 pixels high and 600 pixels wide. (A popular size for print books is 129 × 198 mm which scales to 800 × 521 px.) If you are making an e-book only edition, then you could use the full 800 × 600. On the other hand, if you have ambitions to bring out the e-book version as a print book sometime down the line, then I would advise you to design the cover graphic in a size appropriate for a print book cover and use that for the e-book only edition. You are then future-proof, should you want to make it into a print book later on. HOWEVER do remember that a print book file will require a 3mm ‘bleed’ for the printer, so build this into your graphic from the start and cut the bleed off the file used for the e-book cover.
Now, most e-reader screens are, as I’ve said, 800 pixels by 600 pixels, and have black and white displays. However there are some which are bigger, notably tablets such as the iPad and the Kindle Fire (both of which are colour). So to make sure your cover image will display with the best possible resolution, save the file with MORE than 800 × 600 pixels and also save it as a colour file. If you format the html cover properly, the e-reader will convert it to fit the screen, whatever size it is, and make it greyscale if necessary.
My recommendation is to save the file as a colour .jpg and to use the same size and resolution as the print file: For a book cover which is 129 × 198 mm this would be 1524 × 2339 pixels at 300 dpi. So, taking my own advice, I opened a draft book cover with my favourite image editor (GNU Image manipulation program, although photoshop will do perfectly well instead) , selected the cover minus the bleed (shown shaded in the image), and copied and pasted it into a new image file:
I saved the image file as ‘htmlCoverImage.jpg’.
Now for an epub e-book Sigil has a rather neat tool to generate the html cover, and I am (rather unusually) actually recommending using this. It is simplicity itself. Just upload the cover image to the ‘Images’ folder, by right-clicking on the images folder in the book browser and selecting ‘Add Existing Files …’ from the pop-up menu:
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