eBook Cover: How to add e-book covers to Kindle book

When using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program, it asks for you to upload your book cover. However, this upload does not put the book cover into the book. Section 4: Upload Your Book Cover is the for product display only.

To add the book cover to your e-book, simply add a line of code to the HTML, add a page break and Zip the two files together.

1. Log into Amazon KDP
2. Add a new book or Edit an existing one
3. Scroll to Section 5: Upload your Book File
4. Select a digital rights management option. You need to select one before you can upload your book content. You can change your options before publishing.
5. Browse and upload your document.
6. Once upload and conversion is successful, click “Preview book” to view your book.
7. Click the “Download HTML” link. This will provice a ZIP file of your file conversion.
8. Unzip the file and open the HTML document in a Text Editor program.
9. Scroll to the section with the tag and add the following two lines below the opening tag:

    

   <img alt="cover" src="cover.jpg" title="cover" />
   <mbp:pagebreak />

    

10. Rezip the HTML file and the cover art together. NOTE: the image name in the code and the actual name of your cover image must match exactly.
11. Upload the ZIP file to Amazon’s KDP, and Preview.

How to create an HTML file

No matter what program you have your manuscript it will convert to HTML using the KDP program. (Video 1). This eliminates the need to use Word’s Save to Webpage feature. Although there is still a lot of excess coding, it is much more manageable.

Zipping the HTML and cover image

To upload your manuscript (in HTML format) plus the cover image it must be “zipped.” This required a variety of programs. In my video example I use Mac’s Stuffit. Once the file is compressed, the ZIP file can be uploaded to the KDP service, which again converts it to a usable Kindle file.

Zip Programs

Search for Zip program (Mac or PC) to find a program you link. Some are free, others have a one-time cost.

WinZip (Mac)
Stuffit (Mac)

Working with CSS Styles

To adjust the paragraph spacing, or to center text or images, you will be working with the CSS styles sheet. It is quite simple to add the elements you want, and we’ve provided the steps in our CSS tutorial.