Paper is flat, e-readers are flat (almost), but books look best in 3D.  Having a book printed up to sit on your shelf is a great moment, surpassed perhaps only by having it taking pride of place on someone else’s shelf.

What of that time before the book is complete?  The 30 days of NaNoWriMo, for example.  Playing about with cover designs is the ultimate procrastination, because it’s so much fun.  But a flat image doesn’t quite conjure up the same kind of magic as a book.

Using free software called Quickbox, it’s now easy to turn your 2D artwork into a fantastic looking virtual “book” – ideal for your website, blog, social media, or NaNoWriMo profile page.

First, download Quickbox from the DanceMammal website.  Extract the downloaded archive and run “QuickBox.exe”.

You can play with the demo covers/boxes supplied before messing about with your own cover.

On the right-hand side, you can click the images to change your chosen cover/spine, etc and load your own photos.  Check “Look More Like A Book” to give the impression of a back cover when you view the side (page edges) of your virtual book.

Drag the main window to rotate the preview until the 3D book looks how you would like it to appear.

The main controls across the top-left do the following:

The first button allows you to open a previous cover project. 

The next saves your current project.

The two most important buttons come next.  The one that looks like a pen creates the “snapshot” image – this is a 2D “photograph” of the 3D image you see in the main window.  Once you’ve created a snapshot, it’ll display in the lower-right panel.

The fourth icon, the arrow, allows you to save the snapshot to your hard drive as a .bmp.

You’ll probably want to load up the saved cover into your graphics software to remove the excess background and convert to something like a JPEG.  Then it’s just a simple matter of uploading the image to your blog/social media as you would do normally.

Have fun, procrastinate, but don’t forget to write!