Dust Jackets for Hardcover Books
Dust jackets are a valuable addition to any book as they provide protection and ten extra printable surfaces for artwork, author information, and marketing content
If you’re printing a hardcover book, you may want to add a “dust jacket”. The dust jacket is a popular and efficient way of protecting your book from wear-and-tear while adding ten further printable areas—the exterior and interior of the front flap, the exterior and interior of the front cover, the exterior and interior of the spine, the exterior and interior of the back cover, and the back flap, both the exterior and interior surfaces—to which you can add artwork, information and marketing content. Used in combination with image wrapping, it gives an especially professional and finished look to your publication.
We can print dust jackets in full colour on gloss, matte, or soft-touch coated paper; and emboss, deboss, laminate, foil stamp, and UV spot coat them, too, for added visual and tactile appeal. While dust jackets are usually added to hardcover books, they can also be added to paperbacks. A more common solution for paperbacks is to extend the covers with cover flaps, which can’t be added to hardcover books.
At QinPrinting we have over 25 years of success in the international offset printing industry, an expert team working with state-of-the-art technology at our facilities in Shanghai, and a genuine dedication to excellent customer service. Our commitment to our customers and high-quality products sustain our world-class reputation among mainstream publishers, successful self-publishers and independent creatives all over the globe.
What is a dust jacket?
A dust jacket is a single sheet of paper long enough to wrap around your hardcover book with a flap covering about a third of the inside front cover and then extending across the front, spine, and back of the book to another flap which covers about a third of the inside back cover.
The dust jacket is usually made of heavier, coated paper suitable for full colour printing, embossing, debossing, lamination and varnishing to render it both aesthetically attractive and physically durable. The common dust jacket paper is 157gsm or 200gsm gloss art paper or matte art paper. But remember when selecting your paper type that if you want your dust jacket embossing or debossing, you’ll need a heavier paper of at least 250 gsm / 92.4 lb.
What's the difference between a dust jacket and a paperback book cover with flaps?
A similar alternative is to create a cover with extra length on either side to incorporate a folded over flap that readers can use in which to keep a book mark or to which you could add a discount coupon off another book from your backlist, for example. But this is not strictly a dust jacket so much as a standard paperback book cover with added flaps. While it allows you a bit of extra room, it doesn’t actually offer any more protection to the book as a proper dust jacket would.
Dust jacket and cover flap design and template
While you have the liberty as a self-publisher to innovate and design your dust jacket in an unusual way, in most cases, it makes better sense to follow both convention and readers’ established expectations. So, what would that mean in practice? The following:
- Put a book summary and/or review quotations on the inside front flap
- Put your author biography and photo, and any additional content such as a website address or email signup, on the inside back flap
- On the front cover, put the main artwork, the author name, the title, and the strapline
- On the spine, add the title and author name and any imprint logo you may have
- On the back cover, add “the blurb” (an enticing text designed to intrigue a potential reader and get them to open the book to start reading), review excerpts, mention prizes and awards, and add the recommended retail price, and the ISBN and barcode.
The artwork for a dust jacket is usually one single design that goes across the entire cover sheet apart from the flaps. So you’ll need to design it with care so that the relevant parts of the image fall in the right places and there’s nothing that makes it difficult to read the text or that might obscure important information.
How do you calculate the dust jacket size?
You’ll need to calculate your dust jacket dimensions with care, although if you use our free template, the engine will automatically calculate everything for you with exact precision. Still, it may be useful for you to know how to work out the proper size of your dust jacket if you’d like to build your own template.
Dust jackets must be designed as a two-page spread—so a single template stretching across the flaps, covers, and spine as if it was one long surface. Depending on the design software you use, this might be known as a “double page” or as a “single spread”.
If there’s anything about this set up that confuses you. Just get in touch and we’ll help you create your design file correctly. But as we said, if you use our template generator, all these calculations are done automatically for you. It’s not as complicated as it might seem at first!
How long should a hardcover dust jacket flap or a paperback cover flap be?
As a broad rule of thumb, a dust jacket flap is usually equal to about a third of the cover width and just very slightly higher. That said, some book design have inside flaps as deep as the space will allow while others are no more than an inch or so, just enough to tuck around the outer cover and keep the jacket in place. Much depends on your design and the genre and format of your book. However, as a guideline, here’s a handy chart showing our recommendations for flap lengths based on the most popular and common book sizes:
| Size: Width x Height | Flap Width |
|---|---|
|
8.5″ x 11″ |
3.1″ |
|
11” x 8.5” |
4.7″ |
|
8.5” x 5.5” |
3.1″ |
|
5.5” x 8.5” |
2.3″ |
|
6” x 9” |
2.3″ |
|
9” x 6” |
3.9″ |
|
7” x 10” |
2.3″ |
|
10” x 7” |
5.5″ |
To make life easier for you—or your designer—we’ve developed a range of ready-made book design template which are free to download and are compatible with almost all popular professional design software. So, if you wish, you can download a dust jacket hardcover book template or a paperback cover template with cover flaps added here: Book Design Templates. Just input your book details in the relevant fields and remember to check the “Dust jacket” box. Then click download and our engine will automatically generate your customized template!
What’s the best paper for a dust jacket?
In theory, you could choose from a range of papers for your dust jackets. However, in practice—because it’s robust, gives beautiful colour reproduction, and is also suitable for special finishes such as metallic foil stamping and UV spot coating, we strongly recommend coated paper, also known as “art” paper. Coated art paper may be gloss or matte and is far and away the best paper option for photographs, images, graphics, and colourful backgrounds, as the coating holds the colours closer to the surface leading to a bright, crisp colour reproduction with well-defined zones and boundaries between areas of shade and contrast. Where gloss art paper has a little shine on it, matte art paper feels like silk, which is why it’s sometimes also known as “silk paper”.
The best weights (a measure of thickness in the paper industry) for a standard dust jacket are 157 gsm / 106 lb or 200 gsm / 135 lb depending on the size and surface area of your book. For a considerably over-sized book may need something heavier. But these two options cover the needs of most book dust jacket designs. But remember, whatever the size of your book, if you want it embossed or debossed, you need to choose 250 gsm / 92.4 lb art paper or C1S paper for the dust jacket. If you wish, you can also use textured paper for a unique look and feel.
Dust jacket surface treatments and special finishes
We can enhance any dust jacket with a range of surface treatments and special finishes which you may choose to apply singly or in combination.
Gloss lamination: results in a cover surface that has a bright, reflective sheen, like polished glass. It keeps colour prints looking crisp and vibrant.
Soft-touch lamination: sometimes also called “velvet”, “silk”, or “peachy” lamination. It’s both visual and tactile and gives a greater sense of depth to full-colour printing while being beautifully soft and velvety to the touch.
Spot UV coating: a “special effect” applied only to specific and clearly defined elements of your dust jacket design that you want to highlight and to which you wish to draw special attention. It works best on matte or soft-touch laminated surfaces.
Embossing or debossing: embossing raises the selected area above the surrounding surface. Debossing presses is into the surface. Both effects can be combined with foil stamping and coloured with ink, or they can be left as they are.
Foil stamping: sometimes known as hot stamping—we use this technique to add metallic effects to a printed surface. Popular colours are gold and silver, but we can also apply holographic effects and a full range of other metallic colours.
What is the point of a dust jacket?
Dust jackets have several functions. First and foremost is to add another layer of protection to your primary cover and interior pages. According to Biblio, dust jackets were first added to cloth bound books back in the 1800s, although they didn’t become popular until the early 20th century by which time printers had started adding text to the flaps as well as the covers and spine.
It’s this additional printable “real estate” that offers the second major advantage of a dust jacket: information and marketing. You’ll almost certainly have seen the ways in which mainstream publishers use the inner flaps of the dust jacket to add extra materials such as
- An author biography
- A list of other publications by the same author
- Prizes and awards
- A more detailed summary than the typical back cover blurb
- Reviews and plaudits
- CTAs (calls-to-action) like visiting the author’s website, blog, signing up to their newsletter or leaving a review
This is no small advantage, especially for the independent author for whom building their email list and obtaining positive reviews is the backbone of any promotional strategy. And as dust jackets are relatively cheap to produce, you can create more than one for the same book. Why, you may ask, would you want to do that?
There are at least two answers. The first is that with several alternative covers (at the cost of printing just one extra piece of paper!) you can A/B test them to see which one attracts more sales and then go with the one which will bring more profits. The second is that you can target different demographics if your book has crossover appeal. Mainstream publishers do this often. Think about the Harry Potter series, for example, which is available in a range of covers marketed either at children, at teens, or at adults. You could do the same kind of thing. If you have a romance thriller suitable both for the YA market and adult readers, you could produce three dust jackets for the same book: one aimed at the YA market, one emphasizing the romance element, and another more keyed to the thriller aspect of the story. You get the idea. For the cost of printing one additional piece of paper, you capture three times the market and boost sales and profits.
While most commonly associated with hardcover books, you can add a dust jacket to a paperback, too. In most cases, when adding a dust jacket to a softcover book, the inside of the jacket is left blank or given a textured or coloured covering. However, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t add information and content to those areas if you wish.
Talk to us! We’re here to help
QinPrinting is a world leader in professional-level offset printing services for both business and independent clients around the globe. Our world-wide reputation for excellence is built on detailed knowledge and experience within the industry, state-of-the-art printing equipment at our facilities in the beautiful city of Shanghai, unmatched prices, stringent quality controls, and a sincere dedication to personalized customer care. We want to make your life as easy as possible when it comes to designing your book’s dust jacket. So, if you have any questions still, please get in touch.
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