Cover Art Builder

The Cover Art Builder is a canvas cover designer. You source or upload an image, layer your title, author name, and any other text over it, arrange everything with alignment guides, and export a finished cover. The result attaches to a piece or series as its cover. It is a paid Pro tool; your free Pro trial does not include it.

There is no AI in this tool and no generated artwork. You compose the cover yourself from real images and type.

The builder needs the room of a tablet or desktop screen to lay out its panels. On a phone it shows a short note asking you to open it on a larger screen. Design on a laptop or tablet, and your covers show everywhere on any device.

Where you start one

A few doors lead to the same designer:

• From the editor: open the tools panel while writing and pick Cover Art Builder. The piece you are in becomes the cover's home.
• From Manage: each piece in your notebook has a Cover action in its row that opens the builder for that piece.
• From the cover settings: wherever you set a piece's book cover or a series cover (the cover section in a piece's settings, or the series edit form), there is a "Design a cover" link next to Upload. It opens the builder for that piece or series.

You can also open it on its own from the tools list, design a cover unattached, and choose which piece or series to save it to from the "Use as cover" button inside the builder. Unattached covers wait for you under the Covers tab in Manage.

When you design a cover for a piece or series and export it, that cover becomes the piece's book cover automatically. It shows up everywhere the cover shows: the reading page, the feed, and the Library grid. It also travels into the piece's own downloads: export the manuscript as EPUB, Word, or PDF from the editor and the cover leads the file. Re-export after an edit and the displayed cover updates.

Sourcing an image

Image search draws from four open-access collections, each strong in a different area:

• The Met for fine art, illustration, and decorative arts: literary, romance, historical, gothic.
• Smithsonian for natural history, Americana, and air and space artifacts: nonfiction, memoir, adventure.
• Art Institute of Chicago for painting, prints, photography, and antique star charts: literary, dark, fantasy, and science fiction.
• Cleveland Museum of Art for painting, drawing, and works on paper across centuries and cultures.

Pick one collection from the Search source menu, or search all of them at once. When your piece has a writing type set, the sources that suit that genre are highlighted as a starting suggestion, not a limit. You can always search any source for anything.

You can also upload your own image (JPEG, PNG, or WebP, up to 10 MB) for contemporary photography the collections do not cover. Uploads are paid Pro only and count against your 500 MB image storage, the same library described in Images on Inkbreaker.

Why these collections, and what you can do with the result

Every image in search is released under CC0, the clearest public-domain dedication there is. The museum waives all copyright, so the cover you export carries no license conditions, no attribution requirement, and no restrictions on use. You can sell the book, list it on any storefront, and print it, with nothing owed to anyone. We filter each collection to its CC0 items and check the license on every result, which is why these museums were chosen over stock photo services and over collections whose terms would follow the exported file into places we cannot see.

Source badges ("Met", "Cleveland", and so on) appear on each result so you know where an image comes from. They are there to orient you, not because any credit is required.

Building the cover

Pick a format first. The presets cover the common cases:

• Book cover (1600 x 2400) is the default. It is a true 2:3 portrait, so it shows on Inkbreaker exactly as you design it, with no cropping. Use this one when the cover is for a piece or series on Inkbreaker.
• Standard ebook (1600 x 2560) for Amazon KDP and most storefronts.
• Large print (2400 x 3600) for KDP large print and IngramSpark.
• Square (3000 x 3000) for short story collections.
• Wide / social (3000 x 1688) for a Facebook or X header.
• Custom for anything else.

The format also decides where a finished cover lands on a piece. A portrait format (Book cover, ebook, large print) becomes the piece's book cover. A Wide / social design becomes the piece's header banner instead. Series have a single 2:3 cover, so any design saved to a series becomes its cover.

From there you work in layers: the background image, optional texture or shape bands, and your text. Each text layer has its own font, weight, size, spacing, color, and position. The font picker is a search box: type a few letters to filter, and every option previews in its own typeface so you see the type before you pick it. Fonts are grouped by mood (dark, fantasy, romance, sci-fi, literary, nonfiction, poetry, display, and handwritten) so you can match the type to the book. Every font is free for commercial use with no attribution, so anything you set on a cover is yours to sell. Drag to position, use the "Position on canvas" buttons in each layer's panel to snap things straight, and toggle the safe-area guides to keep titles clear of the edges.

Your work saves on its own as you go. Close the designer and your layout is waiting when you come back.

Exporting

Export produces three files at once:

• A full-resolution PNG for print-on-demand.
• A JPEG at quality 90 for ebook storefronts.
• A smaller web JPEG for the cover as it shows on Inkbreaker.

You can keep working while the export runs. When it finishes, the download links appear, and you can have all three files emailed to your account address, which is the easy path on a phone.

Attaching the cover

If you started from a piece or series, the cover attaches to it on save. If you started the designer on its own, use "Use as cover" to pick a piece or series, or keep it unattached for later. Unattached covers wait for you under the Covers tab in Manage, where you can open one back up to edit it, save it to a piece or series, or delete it.

Two places hold your covers, and they do different jobs. The editable design lives under Manage → Covers: open it to keep working. The flat exported image lands in your image library under Manage → Images, where the "Book covers" filter shows every cover you have exported. Delete a cover image you no longer use to free up storage, the same library described in Images on Inkbreaker.

When a piece or series already has a cover, saving a new one asks before it replaces the old design, and the previous design moves to trash where it can be recovered (30 days on free, 90 on paid Pro), the same recovery window described in Saving and recovering your work.