Earlier this week I promised some help for authors who want to create their own book covers in Microsoft Word, but who find getting all the technical parts right a bit of a challenge. Today we’re launching a brand new tool to help get this right. It’s part of our series of templates to help you create books in Microsoft Word.

And, I have to say, this new Cover Template is kind of magical. Because I really didn’t think you could do this in Word, period.

Ensure that the proper label format is chosen in the lower-right part of the dialog box. Click the label thumbnail to change the format. Type the label’s text into the Address box. Ensure that the item Full Page of the Same Label is chosen. Click the New Document button. A sheet of identical labels is created. The next steps add the graphic. (Watch in 1080p for best viewing) Watch as we adjust the spine width and live elements on the spine of our cover template for print.

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Part of the reason is that you have to be able to adjust the size of the cover based on how many pages are in your book and what kind of paper you’re using. This need to adjust the causes a lot of grief for authors trying to create their own book covers. And it also created problems for the talented, who developed the cover template. But the solution turned out to be amazing to see, and that’s part of the magic.

In this cover template, when you re-size the spine, the entire template re-centers itself, like magic. And it really works. We’ve already field tested the cover template by printing books whose covers were created with it in Word, and they look great. Both CreateSpace books and Ingram Spark books, in fact. (From the top: “blank” cover template, template with artwork and copy in place, books printed from the template.

Neat, huh?) Here’s What You’ll Get Like all our we try to take the frustration and delay out of creating your own books. With this new template, we’ve taken the same approach, and more. MaryAnn and Jason, The text layer in the template is separate from the image layer, so you can use effects on the type with no problem. For multiple images, it would be easiest to composite the images in a photo editing program into 1 file, then place that file in the template. Keep in mind that Word doesn’t contain the kind of functionality to allow control of blending properties the way a graphics program would. But within the bounds of what it can do, covers produced with the template can be quite good, like the sample shown in the photos in the article.

And even the “placeholder” text has a soft shadow on it, as you can see in the enlarged detail at the top of the post.