Lulu covers just never work out

[Dasherwood]

I have tried several times with different formats to make the covers of the books I have on Lulu look right. They never really work out. The text I have on the back is hard to read and, well, actually, the text on the front is the same.  I've tried different sizes. Made my jpg's smaller ... bigger and it is still the same. Has any one else run into this?   

[Foxy]

For the purposes of print, covers need to be in CMYK colour and at a resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch).

[Dasherwood]

Ok ... had to do some reading up but I finally figured out what cmyk and the rest meant. I will have to work it all out. Things they don't tell you on the site. Thanks.

[ChrisHarrison]

Don't use jpgs for full size prints like book covers. Use the tiff format, or pdf. (Tiff is better because it's 'lossless', it doesn't compress the image to save on file size.) Make sure your artwork is the same size as the finished version and as Foxy says make the resolution 300dpi. Your font on the back shouldn't really be smaller than 14pt, that's a minimum size for people with poor eyesight, but you could get away with 12pt.

Computers use RGB colour from three dots (red green blue), printing uses CMYK from four printing inks (cyan magenta yellow black -don't ask!) Something like Adobe Elements is a cut down affordable version of Photoshop and should be able to make your artwork 'camera ready copy', that is correct for printing.

[HPvD]

I didn't have much trouble with the front of my front cover image
Since I already did have some experience with designing things like
Greeting Cards, that - as they call it in the Greeting Card Industry - need to
have 'Rack Impact',

Because of that I thought carefully about the Lay out of the Cover
and I used a pretty big letter type near the top of the Cover,
making the most important text (in this Case the word - Vision -)
rather easy to read. 

[510bhan]

This might amuse anyone considering a cover:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/lukelewis/19-book-cover-cliches