How Do I Add Crop Marks to My Book Cover Document?

[gaylem24939371]

I'm am working on a book cover and it's turned into a nightmare. Short story long, my former book distributer provided book cover templates created in Adobe InDesign which included crop marks and bleeds on the template. That way I knew EXACTLY where to place my title, images, and so forth because I could see where the cut off lines were. Now I work with a different distributer, and, unfortunately, their book cover template is not compatible with Adobe InDesign. So, I took the measurements from the template to create an InDesign document. The spine width is perfect, and I'm able to add the bleeds with InDesign, but NOT the crop marks. Just got my proof copy from Amazon. The title, at the top of the page, is nearly cut off. Yikes! Not having the crop marks visible on my document is a serious problem. It's my visual cue for knowing exactly where the top of my page will be will be cut off. Yeah, I get it that I can add the crop marks when I export my file. However, I need to see the printer's marks while I'm CREATING my book cover. I've tried everything I can thnk of to figure out how to do this, and coming up empty. Any suggetions would be very much appreciated. 

Thank you for your suggestions. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I assume you mean you're using KDP?

KDP layouts should be exact size, without crop marks. If the template generated by the spine width calculator says the width needs to be 13.24 inches, the PDF should be exactly 13.24 inches wide, bleed to bleed.

The simplest thing you can do is generate a new template and download it in PDF or JPG format, then lay it in as a locked layer of your document. Your page size should exactly match the covers and spine (that is, with a 6x9 trim size and a 1 inch spine your page should be exactly 13x9 inches), and your bleeds should exactly match the overall template size. Put the template layer on top and fade the opacity to 20% or so, lock it, and finish your layout to exactly match all of its guidelines.

But you don't need any crop. bleed, or other marks.

—

It is a bit more complicated, but the three-page spread model is more flexible for cover layout, especially for services like KDP. You can find a completely annotated InDesign template on my site, here.

[gaylem24939371]

Hi James, and thank you for answering my question. What you're saying makes perfect sense, so I will give it a try. I'm using both KDP and Draft2Digital templates, which are very similar, although next time I'll probably just use the D2D template as they can distribute the print edition to Amazon, and I'm finding that I prefer their template over the KDP template. I publish all my print edition books as 6 x 9 trade paperbacks, and I use InDesign for all my covers as well as the interior pages. I'm still on the learning curve with these new-to-me book cover templates, which is why I ordered print proofs instead of digital proofs. If there is a problem you will know it with a tangible 3-D proof, where it might not be so obvious with a digital proof. This made it well worth the extra time and expense. Next time it should be much easier. Thank you again. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay. Three quick notes —

• Most digital printing doesn't use crop marks, as (traditional) offset or sheet printing does. It relies on precise placement of the image on the paper and doesn't need human guidelines for trimming. Nearly anything you're likely to deal with from here on will be digital and that means they want an 'exact size' layout with no extra edges, crops, anything.
• You should never use templates or guidelines from one source for another provider. Generic templates or measurements, or ones from Provider A, may not match what Provider B wants. This is extra-true for KDP, which is beyond fussy about its notions of bleed, live area margins, spine width calculation, etc. (I've lost count of the folks who have come along saying "but I followed the template exactly!" only to eventually find it was something they found on the web somewhere.) Use each provider's specific rules and templates.
  • If a template generated according to precise input "doesn't fit" your layout... your layout is wrong.
• Purely editorial, but you might find there's little point in placing your book with anyone but KDP these days. Sales of e-books from other providers are usually modest, and for print, unless you have a truly robust marketing and promotion scheme, orders from secondary providers like Ingram, Lulu and D2D rarely pay for the effort and cost of placing stuff there. (Not saying that's good, just book selling reality in 2024.)

[Derek Cross]

For those InDesign users who regularly produce book jackets, I can thoroughy recommend this script: https://www.danrodney.com/scripts/makebookjacket.html