Covers for Audiobooks

Here’s something I didn’t expect at the onset of producing an audio book with audible dot com. The book covers need to be reformatted or recreated. You might think this is no big deal, but to complicate things, the cover must be square like a CD cover and not rectangular. No big deal? That’s what I thought before I dove into the details. The cover specifications are simple and must be adhered to, otherwise the cover will be rejected.

You can’t just scale your current book cover from a rectangle to a square. The aspect ratio will be askew and will be rejected. Besides, it will look squashed and amateurish. You cannot add white space by adding a border to the sides of your cover image. This will be rejected also. If you scale up or zoom your image to fit the square format chances are it will be rejected since there will be too much noise and pixelation.

Here are the format specifications that audible dot com requires: the native or default size is 2400 x 2400 pixels with a resolution of 72dpi. Squashing down your existing cover may be difficult or downright impossible. So what to do? Create a new one.

What about brand continuity? I look at this a little differently. Audio books are unlike print or eBooks, so why not give them their own identity? Check out some of the covers on audible dot com. The ones that catch my eye are the ones with the big print with simple covers, and not the ones that take a portion of an existing cover and trim it or expand it.

I decided to redo my covers from scratch. I also decided to keep them relatively the same for at least the first two books. Why? Brand identity, specifically tailored for the audiobooks. If this works I’ll do it for all the books that appear on audible dot com.

Here’s the original cover for The Day Detroit Went Dark

Here’s the audiobook cover.

Here’s the cover for The System – A Detroit Story –

Here’s the audiobook cover. Pretty much the same thing.