7 Tools to Create Book Mockups Online in Less Than 10 Seconds (Free and Paid)

Are you wondering how to create beautiful visuals to promote your eBook in ads, pop-ups, subscription forms, and landing pages? Start with making it look tangible by creating a 3D mockup.  

The good news is you don’t need to hire an expensive designer or have skills in Photoshop to create your book mockup. All you need to do is to upload your book cover into one of these easy-to-use mockup creation tools.

In case you haven’t heard of book mockup generators before, here is a brief explanation. They’re online tools that let you easily place your book cover design onto an existing image. This can be a 3D rendering of one book or even stack of books, or a picture of a real-world setting (for example, someone reading a book). Usually online book mockup generators are really simple to use, but the main drawback is that you don’t have all of the customization choices that you would have with a program like Adobe Photoshop or other graphic design programs.

Create book mockup online with one of these FREE tools

1. Absolute Covers

A cool and free tool that generates good quality book cover mockups is Absolute Covers. Simply upload your cover image and get the mockup. Click the right button of your mouse to save it to your computer as a PNG file. You will get a result like this. Looks rather professional. Doesn’t it?

The downside is that your book will not have a real-world looking background. However, this is an awesome tool if it is exactly what you need.

2. Smart Mockups

Select one of the free book mockup templates, upload a high resolution book cover that is cropped to the front only, choose the highest resolution option and download your file. Easy as that! A cool advantage is that this tool has integration with Unsplash, which allows you to use their image database to change the background images.

3. Adazing

If you want to place your book mockup in “a real life environment”, or put your cover on a tablet or a smartphone screen, try the paid mockup tool by Adazing. This is the result you might expect. For an additional fee, you can get a lifetime access to many other mockups and visuals with your book cover.

4. MagicMockups

One of my favorite free tools is MagicMockups. You can’t create a book cover mockup here, but you can go one step further and visualize how your web page, online course, or even book mockup would look like on a desktop, laptop, or a notepad screen.

5. Placeit

A cool tool to create book mockup online is also Placeit. It offers more than 2800 templates to choose from – both free and paid. You can generate a mockup for your book, web page, online course, logo, t-shirt, or even a hat. Actually, there are many more categories. Simply check them out.

Of course, not all of the templates are for free; however, you can find useful resources also for zero cost. Just sign up and log in. Sure, free services won’t give you a large, high-resolution file. However, the quality will be good enough for your website and social media.

6. Canva

Create stunning and high-quality book mockups with the Canva Smartmockups feature. It’s super simple! Just upload your book cover to Canva and open it in the editor, then go to the Effects section and search for book mockups. Choose the one you like and click on it. Canva will automatically generate a 3D picture like the one below.

7. BookBrush

A simple and incredibly useful tool for authors. It puts your book cover on the screen of a tablet, smartphone or on a print book in many creative ways. This tool has a library of pre-made templates for BookBub ads, Facebook ads and a lot more. Therefore, you don’t have to guess about getting the correct dimensions for your visual. Moreover, if you need to create a mockup for your book series, you will appreciate its Box Set Creator tool that can instantly visualize several books.

Tutorial – Create a Book Cover Mockup with PowerPoint

If you want to be really flexible with creating your book covers and their mockups use PowerPoint.  I know, for some of you, it might sound weird… PowerPoint …. and book cover design?!? But it’s not weird at all. You will be surprised what you can actually do with PowerPoint, if you know how to… It’s just a tool. Similarly, like PhotoShop, Adobe Illustrator, Canva, GIMP or whatever… You can create a crappy book cover with PhotoShop and amazing one with PowerPoint. And vice versa. Everything depends on your skills and know-hows… For example, the book cover below and its mockups are created completely in PowerPoint. Who could tell that?

Are you interested? Click HERE to get access to 9 pre-designed PowerPoint templates that you can customize for creating mockups and promo visuals for your own books. Additionally, you will get access to a free eBook with 26 Tips for Creating Professionally Looking Book Cover Designs. Remember that it is important to create a good quality book cover before you start working on its mockup. Because having a poor one might significantly reduce your book’s success.