Canva has become the go-to design tool for people who aren't designers. It's free, it's drag-and-drop, and it makes things look decent without any real learning curve. So when authors ask whether they can just use Canva to make their book, the question makes complete sense.
The honest answer is: it depends on what kind of book you're making and what you're trying to do with it.
What Canva Is Actually Good At
Let's start with what works. Canva is genuinely solid for certain parts of the book creation process.
For covers, it's a reasonable starting point. The template library is large, the design tools are intuitive, and if you have a good eye, you can put together something that looks presentable. A lot of authors use Canva to mock up cover concepts before passing them to a professional designer — and that's a completely sensible workflow.
For eBooks that are more visual than text-heavy — think workbooks, planners, short guides, lead magnets — Canva does a decent job. You have control over layout, you can mix text and images freely, and the PDF export is usually clean enough for digital distribution.
If your book is short, simple, and primarily going to live as a digital file, Canva can get you to a usable result.
Where Canva Starts to Fall Apart
The problems show up when you try to use Canva for something it wasn't built for: a full-length book going to print.
Long-form text management in Canva is genuinely painful. There's no real paragraph style system, which means if you want to change your body font across a 200-page document, you're doing it manually. There's no baseline grid to keep your text aligned consistently from page to page. There's no proper widow and orphan control, which means you'll regularly end up with single lines floating awkwardly at the top or bottom of a page.
The export situation is also a real issue for print. Commercial printers and platforms like IngramSpark require PDF/X files with specific bleed settings, embedded fonts, and CMYK color profiles. Canva's export doesn't reliably meet these requirements. The cover trim and bleed dimensions need to match your exact page count and paper weight — Canva doesn't dynamically calculate this for you. Authors who try to submit Canva files for print often find their files rejected or their printed books looking nothing like what they saw on screen.
The Thumbnail Problem With Canva Covers
One more thing worth mentioning specifically about covers: Canva templates are designed to look good on screen at full size. They're not always optimized for what actually matters in self-publishing — which is how the cover looks at thumbnail size on Amazon.
A lot of Canva covers have intricate details, multiple fonts, or busy backgrounds that collapse into visual noise when shrunk to a product listing thumbnail. Readers can't read the title. The image becomes indistinct. The cover blends into the grid instead of standing out from it. A professional cover designer thinks about this from the start. Canva templates generally don't.
So Should You Use Canva for Your Book?
If you're making a short digital product, a simple eBook, or you need a quick mock-up to visualize your cover concept — yes, Canva is fine for that. It's free, it's fast, and it'll get the job done at that level.
But if you're publishing a full-length book — especially one going to print — Canva is going to create more problems than it solves. The formatting limitations, the export issues, and the lack of professional typographic controls mean the end result almost always looks like what it is: a book that was designed in a tool that wasn't built for books.
That gap between "looks okay on screen" and "looks professional in print" is exactly what separates a self-published book that readers trust from one they quietly put back on the shelf.
What the Alternative Looks Like
At Literary Lab, we use Adobe InDesign — the industry standard for book design and layout. The difference in output quality is significant. Proper typesetting, print-ready files, and a design built specifically for your book rather than adapted from a generic template.
If you've been trying to make Canva work for your book and running into walls, that's the most common sign it's time to bring in a professional. We handle the whole thing — interior formatting and cover design — and deliver files that are ready to upload and publish.
Reach out to us here and we'll talk through what your book needs.
Canva is a great tool. It's just not the right tool for every job — and book publishing is one of the places where that distinction really matters.
Literary Lab is a book design and formatting studio for independent authors.