Book cover: the first threshold for those who read
How to upload your book's cover in Narraya and why it's worth having one even during writing. Typical styles and practical tips.
"Don't judge a book by its cover" is one of the most quoted phrases in the English language. It is also one of the most false. Everyone, without exception, judges books by their covers: readers in a bookstore, critics when they get the press service, writers themselves scanning a shelf. The cover is the book's first sentence. There's no pretending otherwise.
The cover as first promise
In Narraya, every book can have its own cover: an image uploaded in JPG, PNG, or WEBP, up to 5 MB. It appears in your library, on the book page, as the cover page of the EPUB and PDF export. A simple thing, technically. An important thing, in terms of writing experience.
Uploading a cover even when the book isn't yet published — even when you're at chapter three of the first draft — is a gesture that makes more sense than it may seem. It gives concreteness to the project. It turns a text document into "a book". It makes it exist in the eyes of its first reader: you.
How to upload it
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Open the book page.
From the library, enter the book. Top-left, where the cover placeholder appears, click "Upload cover".
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Select the file.
Choose a JPG, PNG, or WEBP file. Maximum weight is 5 MB. Narraya warns you if the image is too small (we recommend at least 1,600 px on the long side).
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Crop and confirm.
A simple cropping tool lets you choose the portion. The default ratio is 2:3, standard for novel covers.
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Replace whenever you want.
You can change the cover as many times as you need. Useful if your book evolves: a novel born fantasy and become dystopian deserves a new cover.
Three typical styles
Not all covers work for all books. Without giving a design lesson (not our trade), three cover families recur across the market, each with its own logic.
Literary novel
Often dominated by an evocative image — a detail, a texture, a partial portrait — with classic, restrained typography. The cover "speaks softly" and lets the title call the reader.
Genre fiction
Thriller, fantasy, romance: the cover is more direct, less interpretable. Genre icons (silhouettes, settings, recognizable color palettes) help the reader quickly identify what they're buying.
Non-fiction
Typography in the foreground, geometric or minimal graphics, confident colors. The cover conveys authority: the subject is at the center, the author is the second most important element.
If you don't have design skills, don't improvise on Canva at two in the morning before a launch. There are dedicated services for indie author cover design (many in every country, specialized in genre fiction) at affordable prices. A designer specialized in novel covers sees things that escape us writers: title-to-image relationship, legibility at thumbnail size, coherence with the genre.
The provisional cover
Throughout the writing — months, perhaps years — your cover can be provisional. An image that evokes the tone of the book, a texture you like, a portrait that resembles the protagonist. It doesn't have to be "the final one". It just has to help you remember, every time you open the book, that you're writing something concrete. Something with a face.
Many writers use the provisional cover as a "mugshot" of the novel: something that captures the climate of the story, not the title. A photograph of Trieste at night, for a noir set there. A detail from a Renaissance painting, for a historical novel. An abstract image, for a book that resists classification. There's no rule: there's just the psychological usefulness of having an image, any image, that accompanies you.
How it appears in the export
The uploaded cover becomes the first page of the EPUB and PDF file. For DOCX, we insert it as the opening page with preserved quality. If you later send the manuscript to a publisher who only wants text, it's easy to remove from the file: it's not embedded intrusively.
The cover doesn't make a book. But it gives a dignity to the writing process that, curiously, improves the text. Those who take care of the outer form often also take care of the inner one.
See how a cover appears in Narraya in the live demo, with a fully laid-out sample book.