How to Make a Hardcover Book Mockup Without Photoshop

How to Make a Hardcover Book Mockup

Many authors, those that are new or experienced, get excitement from creating a book. The hardest part is putting ideas for the design of the book onto paper. With the power of the internet, anyone can virtually create their book, from the manuscript to the book covers. But, how do you create the perfect hardcover book mockup?

How do you make a hardcover book mockup on Placeit.net? To make a hardcover book mockup, experts choose Placeit.net as their choice to create their mockups. Placeit offers multiple templates for book mockups, and also has easy instructions to guide you to your perfect design for your book.

This article will demonstrate how to use Placeit, what the site offers, and why choosing the right book mockup is important for selling your published work. While judging a book by its cover is usually not suggested in life, a stellar book cover can make all the difference in sales.

Using Placeit to Make a Hardcover Book Mockup

Placeit is a website that offers thousands of templates to design anything, from logos to designs to videos to mockups. While designing mockups generally is difficult and daunting, Placeit makes it easy to put them together through their templates.

Getting to the Book Mockup Page

When you get to the front page of Placeit, you will click on “Mockups” on the bar at the top of the page. Below that is a smaller bat with sub-categories for mockups. Scroll to the right and you will find “Books” in the middle. Clicking that link will take you to hundreds of templates for different kinds of books, including hardcover.

This webpage will take you to 20 pages worth of templates for books. On the left sidebar, you can make customizations to your mockup. Some of the customizations include narrowing down which model you want, gender, and age. You can also change the template to the book size you want if you’re making a horizontal hardcover book or a normal one.

Another way to get to book mockups is to scroll down on the front page until you see the left sidebar, and then click on “Book.” It will take you to the same page for the mockups, but a different filter is added: “Mockups.” Here, you can use your book mockup to turn it into a Facebook advertisement, among other options.

Creating the Mockup

Many of the mockups come in various ways. For example, users can choose to have a singular book or multiple books stacked on each other in different poses. Backgrounds are customizable in most of the templates too. It’s all a matter of which design you think will look the best.

After scrolling through the templates and narrowing down the hardcover options, click on the template to take you to the customization page. The most basic hardcover mockup design, “Mockup of a Hard Cover Book Casting a Shadow,” is a good place to start.

From there on, you can click the upload design button on the left-hand side, which will pop up a window of downloads on your computer. Choose your design for your hardcover book in your saved downloads, and using the bar at the bottom, drag horizontally to determine how much of your picture you want in the boundaries. Hit “Crop” to complete or “Reset” to start over.

Start Customizing

Customizing the text on your book is full of endless possibilities. This feature is also on the left-hand side and comes with dozens of font choices along with font colors and backgrounds. To enter text onto the book mockup, type inside the box that reads “Change Me” and it saves instantly. Click the box right below on the left to change the font, and on the right, you can change the color of the text and its background.

Hover over the text box to shrink or expand the size of the text. If you’d like your text to be in separate boxes, or if you want one line or word to be different to stand out, click “Add Another Text” to create a new text box and follow the previous steps accordingly.

The sidebar on the right-hand side features options to change the book color if you don’t have a full background downloaded onto your computer. Simply click on the book color arrow and it’ll drop down dozens of different colors to use. The same method goes for the background on the book mockup if you’re using those kinds of templates.

Don’t Forget the Background

The background, when you’re choosing, has the option to be transparent, so you can customize your own background on your book mockup. You can upload a printed background or choose anything that fits the theme of your book. You can customize your own colors also if you have the hex number of a certain color not on the default setting on Placeit. Just click the “More” button, copy, then paste the number in the box below.

Users have the choice to place a graphic onto their book mockup. Click on the “Add Another Graphic” button on the right-hand side to add one to your book mockup. If you’re looking for a specific kind of graphic, use the search bar to look up keywords. However, if the graphic you’re seeking isn’t available on Placeit, click the “Custom Image” box in the graphics to upload your pre-made graphic onto the mockup.

To make sure you don’t lose your work, or if you’d like a saved copy of your finished book mockup, go towards the top and click on the “Save Draft” button on the right-hand side. A saved draft will appear below the mockup workstation to be accessed at any time. The two buttons next to the “Save Draft” button are of viable use also.

Add It to Your Favorites

The heart-shaped button called “Add to Favorites” allows you to save your mockup to your favorites section on your account. To find your favorites, go up to the top of the page and spot the heart. Click that, and all the favorites will appear there. The last button is the “Share” button, which generates a custom URL to share on social media or elsewhere. Placeit allows options to share directly with Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and LinkedIn with ease.

Lastly, to save your copy onto your computer, click the blue “Download” button at the top. To save your work from Placeit, you have to purchase it. There is a couple of options on how to do this:

  • Purchase the single mockup for $7.95. For that, you get a high-resolution PNG download without a watermark and legal commercial use.
  • You can also purchase a subscription for Placeit for $14.95/month or $99.95/year. Benefits include unlimited mockups, designs, videos, and logos, along with access to all the templates Placeit has to offer. Discount available here.

From there, you have completed a hardcover book mockup to use and share on social media!

Conclusion

The ease of making a hardcover book mockup for your next best-seller is possible through Placeit.net. Programs like Placeit make every aspect of creating a hardcover book simple, especially the design process and the promotional side of the book that comes along with it.

With hundreds of book templates to choose from on placeit.net, which one is the right for your book? That depends on how creative you want to get with your mockup. Placeit has multiple avenues of creativity, from customizing backgrounds to changing colors of the books to uploading your personal graphics to add uniqueness.

Social media sharing is easy with placeit.net. The Facebook Ad design lets you control the promotion of your book, and sharing mockups through Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and LinkedIn drives people not only to your book but to Placeit for their design needs.

BONUS: Placeit was kind enough to extend a 15% off discount to All Free Mockups readers. You can find the coupon here.