Markdown can include an image. That is not the same as a cover. A cover has no margins, no page number, no body type sitting under it, and it is how the file is judged at thumbnail size before anyone opens it. Getting from a manuscript to that object is a production step, not a syntax one.
A cover is a page, not an image in the flow
If you write this at the top of the file:
# The Quiet Hour
A short book about leaving the phone in another room.you get an illustration, then a heading, then a paragraph, all sitting inside the page margins. The image will be scaled to the content width, it will not reach the edges, and a page number may well sit under it. That is a title page with a picture. Stores, printers and readers all treat it as the first page of content.
A real cover is a different kind of page: zero margin, the image filling the sheet, no footer, a page break after it so the title page or chapter one starts clean. The manuscript should not have to describe any of that.
What size to make the artwork
Match the page, at print resolution, or slightly above. For an A4 PDF that is 210 × 297 mm. At 300 pixels per inch — the number a printer will ask for — that is roughly 2480 × 3508 pixels. RGB is correct for a digital PDF; a commercial printer may ask for CMYK, which is a conversion you do to a copy, not to the file you also use on screen.
| Destination | Cover size | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| A4 PDF, digital or desktop-printed | 2480 × 3508 px, RGB, JPEG or PNG | Fills the sheet at 300ppi |
| Ebook stores (Kindle, Apple, Kobo) | 1600 × 2560 px, 1:1.6, RGB, JPEG | A different ratio — see cover dimensions |
| Print-on-demand paperback | One spread: back + spine + front, at trim size plus bleed | Not an A4 page. Ask the printer first. |
The ebook cover and the PDF cover are usually two files. A4 is 1:1.41; store thumbnails are 1:1.6. One image cannot be both without letterboxing or cropping, and you do not control which the store will do. Make the tall one for the storefront and the page-shaped one for the PDF.
The mistakes that read as amateur
- A white border around the art. That is the page margin showing. The cover was placed as content, not as a cover page.
- A page number on the cover. The footer leaked onto a page that should have suppressed it.
- The title set twice — once in the artwork and once as a Markdown
#under it. Pick one. The artwork is the one that survives at thumbnail size. - Low-resolution art stretched to the page. Anything under about 150ppi on paper looks soft, and readers blame the book, not the image.
- Tiny type in the artwork. Shrink the cover to 150 pixels wide. If you cannot read the title, neither can a shopper.
A back cover, if you have one, is the same object at the other end of the PDF: full-bleed, no number, no body text leaking onto it. Ebooks do not have a back cover — the metadata and the store page do that job — so a back-cover file is for print and for a PDF you hand to someone as a finished book.
What each route actually supports
Pandoc will put an image on the title page with -V titlegraphic: and a bit of template; making it full-bleed is a LaTeX problem. Browser-print and most "paste Markdown, get PDF" sites have no cover concept at all — you concatenate a one-page PDF in front with a separate tool, and then the page numbers of the whole file are wrong. InDesign and Affinity treat the cover as page one of a layout, which is correct and is also why people open them for a cover and then feel they have to typeset the book in them too.
The clean split is: write the book in Markdown, make the cover in whatever you already use for images — even Canva is fine for *this* job, see where Canva actually stops — and attach it as a cover, not as an inline image.
How bukpress attaches one
On Essentials and above, you upload a front cover and optionally a back. The front becomes PDF page one, full-bleed, no footer; it is also the native cover of the EPUB, so the same file is what a Kindle shows in the library. The back becomes the last page of the PDF. Neither is written into the Markdown, so editing chapter four cannot disturb them.
The free plan typesets the interior and leaves the cover off — a limitation of the plan, not of the file format. The sample book shows the interior those covers wrap around.