Ever wondered how to add lines right below another? What looks best for line spacing? Styling your text? This book covers it all! After doing some extensive searching for these and other questions and coming up empty for up-to-date information, I th...
That's right, folks, this gets its own chapter. Everything here comes down to personal experience and what I've found works best. You may find even better ways/dimensions for your work, but this is a good general rule.
1: Covers
Your book cover is so important. Let's face it, we totally judge books by their covers. Before you design yours, think about what you want your book to say just on the surface. Do you want a clean, simple design to draw in your readers? A photograph to convey a message? What works best for you? Once you decide, I recommend Canva for creating (not an ad.) Not only is it linked right to your book editor, there is so much you can do for free. Every one of my book covers, headers etc. has been made in Canva. The desktop app is the best way to create as it has the most features, even above the website. Another great resource for creating covers and headers for your stories is Pexels, which has an enormous library of images you can use freely. Pexels is the source for Canva's photo library, but I find it easier sometimes to find pictures from the website and import them into Canva as there is a more in depth search feature there, so it is easier to find what you're looking for.
Once you're ready, you want to create a canvas that is AT LEAST 1630x2560px. You can of course go bigger, but keep the proportions. This will fit your cover to the exact shape of the Wattpad cover. From there, go to town! As you edit, try viewing your page both close up and at 10% or so view so you can get an idea of how it's going to look zoomed out as it does on Wattpad most of the time. Is it readable? Interesting? Eye catching? These are all vital to your book's success.
Finally, remember to follow Wattpad's Community Guidelines!
Note regarding dimensions: Other books/sites seem to recommend images smaller than 1000px wide. I do not. The larger your image is, the better it will look when scaled. As you never know what you will need your header for, it is better to have it be huge originally and duplicate it into smaller sizes as needed than to make it small to begin with and need a larger one later. No one likes a pixelated image!
2: Novel Headers
These are much more subjective. The bar seems to stretch no higher than 500px. Anything taller is scaled to fit 500px height. That being said, on mobile screens, the bar goes very narrow in width, while mostly maintaining height. So, if you want your header content visible on all screens, I suggest putting the most important aspect (ie: the words) in the centre of the design. On large screens, a blurry version of your book cover fills in the space between the margins and the edge of your image.
Important: I recommend saving headers as .JPEG files instead of .PNG because headers do have a size limit of 2MB. The larger the file is, the more often it tends to fail uploading. If you don't have that problem, go for it, but remember that 2MB is the limit, and most 1500x500 .PNG headers are too big!
I use a couple of different sizes depending on my needs. For books like this that have text in their headers, I design them at 720x330px. That is the exact dimension of the header in this book; see how it all fits on your mobile screen? See here how I view stories on desktop:
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