How much does a book cover cost?

A professional book cover typically costs between €30 and €1,500, depending on what you commission. A premade template sits at the low end; a bespoke typographic cover from a designer usually runs €150–€600; a fully custom illustrated cover with a hand-drawn print wrap commonly lands at €500–€1,500 or more. These are typical market ranges, not fixed prices.

What actually drives the price of a cover?

Cover quotes vary wildly because the words “book cover” hide four very different amounts of work. Before you compare prices, it helps to know what you are actually paying for, because two quotes that look ten times apart are usually buying two different things.

• How bespoke it is. A premade template restyled with your title is cheap because the design already exists. A cover designed from your brief, your genre and your story is more expensive because someone is solving a new problem from scratch.
• Imagery. Type-only and stock-photo covers are quicker to make. A custom illustration — a character, a scene, a hand-drawn map — is original artwork, and original artwork takes hours.
• Front only, or a full wrap. An ebook needs just a front. A printed book needs a full wrap: back cover, spine and front as one continuous file, with the spine sized to your exact page count and paper.
• Revisions and rights. A serious designer includes revision rounds and hands you the editable source files and full rights. A bargain gig often gives you a flattened image and nothing else.

How much does each type of cover cost?

Here is how the common options compare. Ranges are in euros and reflect typical market rates in 2026 for a standard single-volume book — confirm any specific quote with the designer, because pricing moves and every brief is different.

Cover type	Typical price	What you get	Best for
Premade / template	€30–€150	An existing design restyled with your title and author name	Tight budgets, fast turnaround, common genres
Custom typographic (ebook front)	€150–€400	An original type-led or stock-image front, digital only	Non-fiction, literary fiction, digital-first launches
Custom typographic (full print wrap)	€250–€600	Front, spine and back as a press-ready wrap, plus ebook front	Most paperbacks and hardcovers
Custom illustrated	€500–€1,500+	Original hand-drawn artwork built into a full wrap	Fantasy, children’s books, anything needing a distinctive scene

Two notes on the table. First, illustrated covers carry the widest range because “one character on a plain ground” and “a detailed wraparound scene” are hours apart in effort. Second, almost every print cover should be quoted as a wrap, not a front — a front-only file cannot be printed, and the spine width depends on your final page count and paper stock. If you want to see how that spine maths works, our spine width calculator shows it for any page count.

Ebook front or full print wrap — which do you need?

If you are selling only on Kindle, Apple Books and Kobo, you need a single front cover at the right resolution and aspect ratio for the stores. That is the cheaper end of any quote. The moment you print — paperback or hardcover — you need the full wrap, and the spine has to be calculated for your exact specifications or the title prints crooked across the edge.

The sensible move for most authors is to commission the wrap from the start, even if you launch in ebook first, and ask the designer to deliver the ebook front as part of the same job. It costs a little more once and saves you re-hiring someone later. If you are still deciding which format to launch with, our guide on ebook versus print walks through the trade-offs.

Stock imagery, hand-illustration or AI — what’s the real cost?

The imagery on your cover is where budget and risk meet, and the three routes are not equal.

Stock photography is legitimate and affordable. A licensed image plus skilful design gives many genres — thrillers, romance, business non-fiction — a polished, on-genre cover. The catch is that the same image can appear on someone else’s book, so the design around it has to do the distinguishing.

Hand-illustration is the most expensive route and the most ownable. A drawn cover is yours alone, it can depict the exact scene or character your book needs, and it scales perfectly across a series. This is why fantasy and children’s books lean on it. At Librum, every cover and illustration is drawn by hand in Photoshop and Illustrator, and standalone illustration starts from €10 per piece — a simple spot drawing near that floor, a full-page colour scene higher.

AI-generated covers look like the bargain and are usually a false economy. The rights position is genuinely unsettled and varies by country — in several jurisdictions, purely AI-generated images may not attract copyright protection at all, which means you may not be able to stop anyone else using the same output, and the training-data question is still being fought in the courts. Treat that as jurisdiction-specific and check your own country’s current position rather than assuming. Beyond the law, AI struggles with the things a cover lives or dies on: legible hands, consistent characters across a series, accurate period detail, and text it can actually spell. We never use it, for covers or interiors, and we think you shouldn’t pay for what you can’t reliably own.

Why does a cheap cover often cost more in the end?

Your cover is the single most important piece of marketing your book will ever have, because it is the first thing a browsing reader sees and the thumbnail they judge in half a second. A cover that signals the wrong genre, or simply looks amateur, quietly suppresses every sale you would otherwise have made — and that lost revenue dwarfs the few hundred euros you saved.

The other hidden cost is rejection and rework. A front-only file that won’t print, a wrap with the wrong spine width, low-resolution artwork, or an image you don’t actually have the rights to — each sends you back to the start. A cover built correctly the first time, as a proper press-ready wrap, is cheaper than a cheap cover you have to redo. Our KDP versus IngramSpark guide covers the file requirements your wrap has to satisfy.

What’s included in a Librum cover?

It is worth checking what any quote includes before you compare numbers. A bargain gig might be a flattened JPEG and no source files; a professional job should include concept directions, revision rounds, a full print-ready wrap and the editable files so you stay in control. Our covers come with two revision rounds, a full wrap plus ebook front, and you keep the editable source files and all rights — within our Print and Complete packages or as a standalone commission, always with a fixed quote up front.

If you want a cover drawn by hand for your exact book — never templated, never AI — tell us about it and we’ll send a fixed price, usually within a day. Start at our cover design service.