Design your own book covers with Affinity Publisher: My unique piece of Joe Dever's Lone Wolf

I love beautiful books with all that comes with them, and my passion for fine book art definitely places me in a niche. On several occasions, I’ve designed a new dust jacket for myself — for example, when a book is only available second-hand with a worn or damaged cover. Once, I even had a book from the 1960s where the cover was intact but so ugly that I simply threw it away. I’ve also had a book bound myself and needed a cover for it. Today, I want to show you one of those books and outline how you can design stunning covers yourself. It doesn’t take much at all and can easily be done on a small budget.

Note: In the photos, I’ve blurred the cover image because I don’t own the copyright for it. The original is, of course, perfectly sharp. Still, you can see how elegant the book now looks — and my point here is the idea, not this exact book.

I love the gamebooks by Joe Dever, which enriched my childhood and teenage years, and even these days, I still enjoy flipping through one of them. Out of nostalgia — and because those adventures are wonderfully nerdy. Unfortunately, these books only exist as plain paperbacks, which does have its charm, since that’s how they originally came out. But a beautiful collector’s edition is, of course, a completely different thing.

During my university years, exam periods were always relaxed for me. That’s because I had already absorbed the material throughout the semester, so there was never a need for last-minute cramming. I used that time for relaxing things — watching South Park, playing MMORPGs, and other brain-refreshing activities. At the end of one semester, I digitized the original books from the 1980s — the first twelve volumes of the Lone Wolf series. It was a bit of work, but surprisingly quick and efficient. Then I reprinted them in a larger format and had one bound as a hardcover. As you can see in the image below, I went for a simple black cover.

For years, the book sat like that on my shelf, and somehow, I never got around to designing a proper cover. Not long ago, I got the Affinity Suite, which also includes Affinity Publisher — a desktop publishing tool that opened up completely new possibilities for me. The tool is just fantastic, it really is. I’ve already tried out quite a few things with it. Among them, I finally designed a nice cover for this book. The Publisher makes this process very smooth. Okay, I’m a power software development nerd and don’t need any onboarding — everything is intuitively clear, and for anything else, there’s always Google. Still, I’d say the Publisher is genuinely easy to use.

One major advantage of DTP software is that you don’t work in pixels or abstract units, but in centimeters and millimeters. That means you can design elements in exactly the size they’ll be printed. With a ruler, you simply measure the book and set up the layout in Publisher. The finished design looks like this:

I found the images online — the challenge is mainly getting them in a high enough resolution. Of course, you can use any kind of image here — hand-drawn, digital, or vector-based illustrations you create yourself.

The Lone Wolf books had a very distinctive cover design back in the day. It actually didn’t look too bad — though maybe that’s just nostalgia talking. Either way, I wanted to use the same font as on the old covers for the sake of recognition. So, I scanned one of the original book covers and uploaded the image to the online tool WhatTheFont to identify the typefaces. They also sell those fonts there — at absurd prices. But if you just Google the names, you can find all of them available for free download. That’s what I did, and I found fonts close enough to the originals to perfectly match that 1980s Lone Wolf vibe.

I had already designed some covers before — back then for my Balzac complete edition. That’s when I discovered the online printing service digitaldruck-fabrik.de, and I’ve ordered from them many times since. They’re a real insider tip, especially since their prices are very affordable. I designed the cover on a DIN A1 sheet, which costs around 5 euros. Shipping is quite expensive, so it’s worth printing several at once. I’ve also ordered stickers from them, which turned out great. For this project, I ordered the cover printed on MaxiSilk 135g coated paper. I had my Balzac books printed on the same paper back then, and the result looked fantastic — plus, it’s really durable. Here’s an example of my second Balzac volume, which I carried daily on the train for quite some time — aside from a tiny scuff on the back, the cover still looks almost new.

About a week later, I received the large printed sheet. I then cut out the dust jacket, and voilà — a custom-designed, stylish cover was done!

I have to say, though, that the Balzac covers look nicer — they’re brighter. For this Lone Wolf cover, the image resolution was just barely good enough for printing. But unless you hold the book right up to your nose, it looks great. At the top, you can see the result — the thick collected edition looks wonderfully elegant, and the spine with its font and logo is really striking.

And here’s a look inside the book. It exudes the charm of those classic gamebooks from back in the day but feels much more premium now. I had the book signed by Joe Dever at the RPC in Cologne back then — it even has a personal dedication, which makes it even more special to me. Sadly, Joe Dever passed away at the end of 2016.

When I had the book bound, I unfortunately forgot to include ribbon bookmarks. But they can easily be added later. I had already done this for my “pimped” Balzac books, but this time, I didn’t want to order large rolls of ribbon just for one book. On Etsy, I found a shop that sells ribbons in every color imaginable for very little money. I ordered two and attached them with tape to the top inside of the book block. It holds perfectly and looks indistinguishable from built-in ribbons.

The result is wonderful and definitely makes my bibliophile nerd heart beat faster. This project even inspired me to take on another book project of a similar kind. The Affinity Suite has been well worth it for me. Of course, you don’t do something like this very often — but when you do, it’s pure joy to hold such a book in your hands.

Have you ever made similar modifications to your books? Restored or customized any of them? Or do you not care about how your books look? Do you have unique editions or one-of-a-kind pieces? I’m curious — feel free to share in the comments!