Is Amazon.com Missing your Book Cover? Here’s the Solution

If your book is listed on Amazon.com, but you get one of those "picture unavailable" blocks in place of your cover, use the following information to get your book cover image on Amazon.com.

If you send the cover by File Transfer Protocol (FTP), the image is often posted overnight. To send a file by FTP, you will need to have software such as CuteFTP or Filezilla, a free FTP application.

On your FTP program, input your hostname as ftp.amazon.com.

Your login name is "catalog" and the password is "N3ikmJ4r". These are both case sensitive (do not include the quotes).

host name: ftp.amazon.com
user name: catalog
password: N3ikmJ4r

Once you are connected, you will need to point your local directory to that on your computer whick contains your book cover image file. Select that file, and transfer it to the upload directory on the remote Amazon FTP site. Your image should be a JPG, 72 dpi image, or a TIF. Give the .jpg file the same name as the ISBN of the book then FTP the file. The Amazon computer will match the cover file to the book's page in a day or two.

Note that Amazon wants your cover to be identified by its 10-digit (soon to 13-digits) ISBN number (no dashes needed), e.g., 6004435678.tif or 1254545332.jpg.

The four important things are to save your cover image as:
- a flat image, no borders etc
- as a tiff or jpeg file
- measuring 500 pixels on its longest side
- named exactly as its ISBN. e.g. 12345678901.jpg

Details for standards and policies for Amazon.com can be found here.

For Amazon.co.uk, see this link.

These links will provide details on uploading new content and descriptors for your book, as well as adding your book to Amazon if it is not already listed.

Still too complicated? BiblioScribe.com members can request this be done for them for free at BiblioScribe.com.