How to Make an eBook Cover and a Paperback or Hardcover in Canva

THE STEM MAJOR’S GUIDE TO THE UNIVERSITY

How to Make an eBook Cover and Paperback or Hardcover in Canva

Follow Jonathan David as he designs the Math Monthly journal cover in Canva, adjusts the typography and alignment, prepares the physical book cover, adds a QR code, and writes the back-cover description.

Watch this lesson on YouTube

What This Lesson Covers

• Designing the Math Monthly eBook cover in Canva.
• Adjusting fonts, text boxes, spacing, and visual alignment.
• Choosing the volume number and publication date.
• Working with a print-cover template and production margins.
• Rebuilding a design on a new page to remove an unwanted element.
• Adding and testing a QR code for MathMonthly.com.
• Writing the journal’s back-cover description.
• Proofreading by listening to the writing read aloud.

Starting the Math Monthly Cover

All right, kids. I just want to show you how to make a book cover in Canva. I’ve already made it, but I want to show you how it works while I fine-tune it. This is for Math Monthly.

Damn it, I’m in the wrong one. Okay, let me get that one out of there.

I could make something like “Publication One.” Let’s try Times New Roman. Should I do this one or that one? No, definitely not that one. Hold on. Why is it so spaced out? It shouldn’t be spaced out like that. Let me make a new box.

I’m going to be showing you guys a lot of stuff in here. This is part of the miscellaneous file. It’s probably spaced out because I did that. No, I don’t know for sure.

“Publication One.” That looks better. Turn that white and get rid of the bold.

Okay, so the question is, how do I want to align all of this? I think I want this down here and this up here.

Creating the Artwork and Checking Alignment

What I did for this book cover—I’m not using any AI anymore. I like the AI stuff; however, it’s making me slow. I’d rather not listen to people being like, “You’re using AI.” I’m going to use AI for some stuff, but I’m going to do all of my artwork and everything in Canva.

Which is funny, because 20 years ago people would be like, “You’re using digital art. You can’t even use a paintbrush. My mom still wipes my booty.”

I’d rather just not hear from teenagers who are uneducated. If you don’t have at least a master’s degree, you shouldn’t say anything to anybody. You guys don’t know anything. I mean, you shouldn’t act like you know something. You shouldn’t talk to people like you actually know something.

“This is not true.” And I’m like, “See? You’re proving my point. Thank you.”

Okay, so I’m not entirely sure I want that. First of all, I would like to get this box aligned here so that stops. What I did was take this image and overlay it with a unit circle, and it just looks cool. One of the things you’re always looking for when you’re first learning math is a unit circle.

Oh my God, they’re dropping things up there. The design of this building is just terrible.

This is not centered. It looks centered, right? It’s centered, but is it centered-centered?

When you do this in Canva, you see when you get the bold line? Now it’s centered. The dashed line means it’s centered with other things, and the bold line means it’s centered with the page.

I like the way that looks. Then, “Publication One.” I guess people know what PLEM means now. It’s an acronym that I came up with, and I’ll do a podcast here in a second, too.

Actually, I’ve got to do something else. I’ll do that in a second.

Choosing the Font and Volume Label

Should I keep that the same font? Cambria. I think I’ll keep it the same font, but I’ll italicize it.

It still doesn’t look right. You’ve got to get that solid dot. Sometimes you’ve got to squeeze in there. It’s like right—come on.

I guess it’s telling me it’s aligning with the one above it. But you know what? I’ll just call this “Volume One.” I’ll unitalicize it and put it right here. How about that? What do you guys think of that?

“Volume One.” The question is, when I get out to something like 30, is it going to look bad?

All right, I’ll get away from the Roman numerals because I don’t like the way that looks either.

You know what I’m going to do? Since each one of these books is going to have a different cover, what I’m going to do is—actually, I kind of like the way that looks. Just like that. Let’s take a look.

When you’re making a book cover in Canva, there’s only so much I can show you. You’ve got to play around with it until it looks the way you want it to look. They have some predesigned things that you can use, but if you use one of these predesigned things, why not just use AI, right?

Adjusting Margins, Spacing, and the Date

When I look at it, this one’s a little thinner. I know what to do. I just want a little more space.

These bars here are margins. See that margin right there? That margin is there for physical paper cutoffs and things. If you’re publishing a physical book, those margins come into play. I aligned that right in the margins.

Let me show you them again. See that? That’s not the margin. That’s the margin right there.

That looks good. See those numbers? They tell you that it’s evenly distributed between the words. I think that looks pretty good. There’s only so much you can do.

For this, I think I’m going to say “First Publication.” No, “First Edition,” because that means something different when you say it like that.

That also means something different. What month is it? November. First edition—volume. That’s what I want to do: volume. November first.

Damn it, get out of the superscript. See? There’s a problem right there. November. There we go.

We’ll call it “Volume One — November 1st, 2026.” How do you like that? I like that. It’s good. I’ve just got to move this down here.

I kind of want to call it “First Volume.” Just keep it at “Volume One.” I want a dash instead, or a hyphen.

I kind of like the longer hyphen. Not necessarily grammatically correct, but it looks better. We’ll keep that. That’s going to be the cover.

I have my own research, but I want “Physics, Language, Engineering, Mathematics.” Let me see what that looks like here and make sure I spelled everything right. Sometimes it’s hard to see it in there.

Yeah, I like that. That’ll be the official Math Monthly journal. I need some ibuprofen. Be right back.

Moving from the eBook Cover to the Print Cover

All right. Okay, we’ve got Math Monthly.

Now I made the eBook cover. I’m going to make the print cover.

If you guys are doing this with IngramSpark, IngramSpark will send you this image right here where you can line everything up. They’ll likely send it to you as a PDF.

Do not set it as the background. You want to drag and drop it so that it is lined up. If you set it as the background, let me show you what happens.

You want to drag and drop it like this. If you set it as a background, do you see how the margin changed there?

Now it’s like this again. Let me hit Control-Z, just so you know if you’re using IngramSpark or another platform.

I print my own books, so I’m going to be using my own printing setup, which is right here.

Once you see how a person works with it, there are a lot of little tricks that you might have to learn. For the most part, it’s relatively simple to figure out.

Working Around a Troublesome Design Element

I was calling this “The Ultimate Crash Course,” but I’ve decided to change it.

Here’s a line I can’t get rid of that I accidentally locked—or I don’t know. Is this locked or unlocked? What is that? Oh, it’s a text box. Can I move it? It’s behind this picture. That’s why. Unlock.

That is some sort of glitch right there. I cannot get rid of that. What in the world? Oh, I see. It’s a line that I’ve got to unlock, but it’s so small it won’t let me unlock it or something.

What the heck is a drop? Let’s try this. Okay, the line comes back.

I’ll make a new page here. I’m going to move it up so it’s by that page, and then I’m going to take all of this stuff right here.

It’s not locked. Okay. I’m going to take all of this and put it down here. Change the background to black. I want the darkest black.

Okay, that got rid of that. This will be Math Monthly.

I’ll pull this out, and I’m going to keep it exactly centered. I’ll fix that in a second. When I put the white bar in there, it’ll put the white bar in there. Is this locked? Unlock.

This is perfectly aligned for my printing setup, so I have to alter the shift here.

“Math Monthly. Volume One. November 1st, 2026.” That looks good. Bring it up. That makes it centered perfectly.

But I don’t necessarily want it centered this way perfectly, because you see how there’s space between this part and this part? I need it to be more centered. You might have to eyeball it a little bit.

Oh, there she goes. What do you hear, girl? She hears something.

Adding and Testing the QR Code

Now I’m going to put a new QR code in here for MathMonthly.com.

I use the Adobe QR generator. I pay for it. It just does it perfectly. You try to have ChatGPT do it, it might mess it up. It might get it perfect. It’s gotten better at it.

Which one looks better? I guess I’ll go that way this time and take that red for now.

Screenshot it here. Actually, I need more.

See the little numbers at the bottom? I can make it a perfect square. See that? 318 by 318 pixels.

Now I’ve got my new QR code here. Then we take it out and test it. Make sure it all works. We’re good. Okay.

I’m changing that font, aren’t we? Actually, I wanted to call it “Math Monthly Publishing”—“Publications.”

It does not look right with that QR code. I know; that’s why I was taking a closer shot at it.

I made it a perfect square, but I didn’t measure the left side before I did the right side. Let me do that again. Just eyeball it.

The margins are so small that the discrepancies are not noticeable to the average human eye. It’s not necessary to waste time. That looks better.

Now I want it to match the color, so I’m going to detach the image and go up here. I want it to match my document color—the red. I don’t have the red on there. Never mind. I don’t need to do that. I’ll show you guys that later.

“MathMonthly.com.” That’s fine. Make this bigger. “Math Monthly Publications.”

Writing the Back-Cover Description

I always have an issue with the spell-check—the little squiggly red line. I always have an issue with that on here.

I’m writing all this myself. “Part of The STEM Major’s Guide to the University.” Read it.

“Math Monthly is a journal that is written in front of a live audience.”

Get that in there. Did it keep the font? Yep, it kept the font. I don’t need to write “part.”

What’s up, Tiger? I’m recording a video right now. Damn it, I’m recording a video right now.

As I’m doing these live sessions, I’m also making lessons. This is a miscellaneous lesson. I’m redoing the whole channel the way you said you wanted it, back the way it was. It’s coming. Let me finish the description for the back.

All right, just disable that. I’m a pathological saver. I keep hitting Command-S.

It’s okay, girl. I know. I heard the neighbors, too.

All right. Still there, Tiger? One second. I’ve got one more line, then I’ll talk to you.

Showing the Handmade Book Prototype

This is the back of the book. This is a video that I’m doing right now, showing people how to make a book cover. I’ve shown them how to make my book cover.

This is the eBook cover. I did the eBook cover, and now I’m showing them how I make my cover for publishing my physical book. I’ll show you guys what that looks like.

This is the first prototype. It’s really cool when you feel it in your hands and know you were part of this one way or another.

This is what you’re seeing me make right now. I physically print this myself. I cut it, bind it, and everything. This is what it looks like on the inside.

This is what we were trying to do, Tiger, all summer. But I was really stressed out with my fiction book stuff because of the police shooting that happened. It caused a huge problem.

Remember this stuff that we did, “The Road to Maxwell’s Equations”? That’s also part of the journey here.

I’m showing people how to do this and showing them my technique. I’m recording this at the same time, and this is going to be classified as a miscellaneous video on my channel.

Let me finish editing this so you can listen to me editing it. Then I’ve got to print a copy out.

Let me make sure this all looks good here. “The STEM Major’s Guide to the University.” Now, instead of PLEM Academy, it’s called Math Monthly.

Discussing the Website and Live Sessions

Every single day, I’m going to treat it like a full-time job. I can’t play games anymore with the fiction stuff. I’m still doing fiction on the side; I’m just separating everything.

After this summer, I lost half a year’s income. I can’t play games with it anymore, so I’m going to be doing this full-time. This will be every day.

If you want to join the Zoom, I’m going to be setting that up next. We’re going to be structuring the website after I finish this. I’ve got to plug my charger in.

After we finish this, I’m going to be structuring it and putting in the price plans. This is not the price plan; I’m changing it. There’s going to be a cheaper version, and you can join the live Zoom session and talk directly.

I’m going to stream on YouTube at the same time, but the people who join Zoom are going to take precedence in conversation. I’ll show you guys that shortly. I’ll be online for a while tonight.

I am Professor Tullis, also known as author Jonathan David.

Proofreading by Listening to the Writing

Let me make sure this is all looking good, because I’m also going to be printing a first prototype of this tonight. I want to have it in the background.

Actually, I might wait until tomorrow to print this out. In fact, I probably will wait until tomorrow because it’s already 5:30, and I don’t know how late I’ll stay up. I’ll finish editing this tomorrow.

For those of you watching this to learn how to make a book, what I do in the editing process—I wrote all this. I did not write this. What I do, how I edit, is use Siri to read it out loud to me, like this:

I use Siri, and then I use the editor here. See? I typed all this. You guys want to see what it looks like to be a professional writer? I just wrote all of this, and it says I did it 100%—no issues. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect.

I highlight it and have it read to me.

We’re not doing a scholarly MLA or APA paper. If you’re an author, this is a piece of art. You can do whatever you want.

When it comes to mathematics, there’s a structure. When it comes to English, it’s about coherence. I have it read to me because, if somebody wants to hear the audiobook or something, I want to make sure it sounds right.

I think it’s more important that it sounds right than that it’s written the way you think it should be written.

“You didn’t put a comma there. You don’t know how to spell there.”

I love it when people come up and try to correct the punctuation, and I’m like, “What format are you talking about?”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you talking MLA? APA? What are we talking about?”

Their jaw just kind of goes.

For those of you watching this to learn how to make this cover because you’re making a book, remember that it’s a piece of art. If you’re not in college doing a scholarly paper under dictation, you can do whatever you want. There are no rules to writing.

If you’re a lawyer, though, you’d better write it correctly. Lawsuits have been lost because of commas. Okay. All right, I’ll end this video now.