Making a Hardback Special Edition with Bookvault

An Indie Author’s Guide

Are you an indie author that’s really wanted to make a hardback special edition of your book? Yes, you can publish it through Amazon KDP and get a nice hardback edition, but what about foil embossed, wraparound dust covers? Or end papers? Or sprayed edges?

I recently took the plunge and put together a bespoke, hardback special edition of my new novella Mask of the Hare, via Bookvault, who offer all these additions as a bespoke, print-on-demand service. The portal is self-service, so if you want all of these bespoke options for your book, you’ll need to get to grips with the file templates, making sure everything is in the right place and sized accordingly etc.

It sounds a little scary, but thankfully Bookvault make it easier by allowing you to generate templates for each of your files, so as long as you know a little about how to use a digital tool to work with your art files, you should be able to create everything necessary to make this work.

I’ll run through how I made mine:

First, the artwork. For all of my covers, I like to do the artwork myself, by hand, but if you outsource the work, as long as you have digital versions, you should still be able to make this work yourself.

For my special edition, I wanted a full wraparound sleeve, custom end-papers, and some nice foil embossed fonts on the front so I had a few new pieces of artwork to create before diving in to the Bookvault sizing templates.

I wrote recently about how I made the lino-print front cover for the eBook and paperback editions and I wanted to keep this as the main cover for the hardback too. However, with a wraparound hardback jacket, you also have the option of creating images on the inside flaps. For this, I wanted to keep things simple as I planned something more complex for the end papers (more on that shortly). So after some sketching, I settled on a simple ink line drawing:

For the end-papers, there are a a few different options you can take as you need an image for the front inside cover, page 1 and page 2, as well as the last two pages and the back inside cover. For a lot of hardbacks, I often see repeated artwork or patterns on all of these pages, or some will have a double page character art or something similar for the front and back inside covers. I decided I wanted a repeated pattern on the inside covers and then some character art for the first and last inside page.

I’ve been working a lot on my pencil portraits recently so jumped at the chance to use my Blackwing graphite pencils for the character art, and after a LOT of trial and error, I’m really happy with the images I ended up with:

For the inside covers, I wanted a repeated pattern. The story is about witchcraft after all, and I settled on a design of a protection sigil dating back to Reginald Scot’s 1584 text The Discoverie of Witchcraft. Inside, he draws a circular sigil which has the accompanying invocation:

“Who fo beareth this figure about him, let him feare no fo, but feare GOD.”

The book itself was particularly ground-breaking at the time as it’s widely considered to be the first major sceptical account against witch trials written in English, which was written to expose what Scot saw as the cruelty, fraud and mass hysteria of the early modern witch trials.

The symbol has become something of a protection sigil in the modern day, and one that I felt would work particularly well with the themes of Mask of the Hare.

So, that was the fun bit. Next comes the templates!

For each feature you want to create for your hardback, Bookvault require you to upload a specific PDF file for each. In my case, I need to create the following files:

For the text, I usually use Reedsy as my formatting tool which I’m pleased to say, worked fine with Bookvault, so I uploaded the print ready file in exactly the same way as I would for publishing through KDP or Ingram Spark.

When you setup your new title on Bookvault, you put in your book dimensions and number of pages etc. which Bookvault then uses to generate a file templates for each of the book components, which you can use as a size guide for each of the files you need to create and upload. Below is the generated file for the wraparound dust jacket.

The key to these is to keep all of your images within at least the light blue areas (called the bleed). Anything outside of this will be trimmed off in the printing, so as long as the most important images are within the white areas, you should be fine.

I use Clip Studio Paint as my digital tool, but the same thing can be achieved in Powerpoint, Photoshop, Procreate or free tools like Krita. As long as you can overlay your images to the template size guides and export as a PDF, it should work.

Similarly for the End Papers, you have a multi-page template for the inside front-cover, page 1, page 2, second to last page, last page and inside back-cover.

For the repeated pattern, I took a scan of my ink drawing, and repeated it in clip studio, making sure it fit the appropriate template.

For the foils, things are a little more complex. For mine, I only wanted the title and author name on the front cover to be red foil, so for this, I needed to upload the same file as the dust jacket, but with only the text of the title and author name, blocked out in black. This is more complex if you’re using something like PowerPoint as you need a file with the same canvas size as the dust jacket, with the foils in the correct place, but everything else needs to be transparent. For this, you need to use a tool which allows you to work in layers. This way you have a blank canvas of the correct size, with all other layers switched off apart from where you want your foils to show on the cover:

Once you’ve uploaded all of your files, Bookvault’s validation tools will help show you if there are any problems, but make sure to also check the 3D rendering and virtual tools before approving.

It was certainly a learning curve putting all of these files together, but one I’m glad I went through. It’s a process I’ll definitely want to do again in future!

Happy to answer any questions if you’re also navigating Bookvault’s templates!

Alex

Mask of the Hare: A Folk-Horror Novella is released on October 1st 2026 available from all the usual platforms. Signed copies can be found at www.darkfellwrites.com

Look out for a special edition hardback, coming end of October 2026 only at www.darkfellwrites.com