The two images above are from the same post on Twitter but on different devices. With cropped landscape posting, both will be lost.īut alas, when it comes to mobile devices, once again, Twitter crops the cover image. When you are designing your book cover, it is common practice to have the title at the top and the author’s name at the bottom. If you are posting from your blog that has Twitter Cards enabled, you will find that image posts are always cropped to landscape.

However, to achieve the same result using automated posting, I had to invest in an expensive paid plugin for WordPress that forces Twitter to accept and post a full portrait image. On Twitter, you can successfully post portrait images in full if you compose your Tweet manually. Your front cover art fairs a little better on Twitter. It also depends again on what device people are using to view your post. However, if you share a Facebook post on Twitter, the small square image suddenly becomes landscape. In this form, it can hardly capture the essence of your book cover. If your cover image is large, it will be in landscape, but medium and small images will always be cropped to a square. Let’s look at what happens to book cover design on different social media platforms.įirst, let’s look at a sample book cover–Facebook handles book cover images in two different ways.įacebook is by far the most restrictive of all social networks. So imperfect that it is common to find a book cover cut in half. Not only are there restrictions on the size and orientation of images, but these specifications can and do change depending on what device people are using to view your social media account.

Unfortunately, even though you might have a great book cover design, social platforms like Facebook make the rules, and fitting a portrait peg into a square or landscape hole is not easy. I am forever tearing my hair out, trying to find ways to promote books with a high-quality full cover image.īut showing book covers on social media in full is not easy. The only books that sometimes have a square cover are children’s books. Most times, when you start designing a cover, it will be in portrait. It doesn’t matter if you have made your book cover for free by using an online book cover maker, or paid for a pre-made book cover template, or have a professionally designed cover.

Pinterest cover photo