Imprint — Free Publisher Website Template
Imprint gives a small press a site that looks like its books. Covers are typographic and built in CSS on a shared grid: vermilion for fiction, cobalt for poetry, yellow for essays and black for translation. The catalogue filters by series, season, genre and format, searches titles, authors and translators, and switches to a table you can sort by title, author, date or price. Writers get reading periods that open and close by date, reply times and a submission form with a manuscript upload.
Key features
- Book covers designed in HTML and CSS on one series grid, with ten geometric motifs and a colour per series
- Catalogue with search plus series, season, genre and format filters, and a grid or table view
- Sortable table view by title, author, publication date and price, with aria-sort on the headers
- Quick-look dialog for each book with format, pages, ISBN, price and publication date
- A–Z author directory with jump links, a name filter and typographic initial portraits
- Reading periods that show open or closed from today’s date, with a year timeline and countdowns
- Submission form with genre-aware word-count limits, character counters, a drag-and-drop sample upload and an agent yes/no
- Home page lead-title hero with a native dialog extract, a pausable title ticker, news and prizes, and a newsletter form
- Rights and translations enquiry section with its own validated form
- Palette, fonts and series colours set as CSS custom properties at the top of css/style.css
Best for
- Independent publishers and literary presses
- Poetry, translation and essay imprints
- Literary magazines that publish books
- Author collectives and small university presses
At a glance
- Bootstrap 5.3.8 with vanilla JavaScript, no jQuery
- 4 pages: index.html, catalogue.html, authors.html, submissions.html
- 24 CSS-designed covers across four colour-coded series
- Archivo display type with Newsreader body text, loaded from Google Fonts
- Inline SVG icons, no icon fonts or image covers
- Free for personal and commercial use; attribution optional but welcome. Full terms: uicookies.com/license
How to use it
Unzip the folder and open index.html in a browser. Edit the copy in each HTML page; each book’s details live in the data attributes and text of its card in catalogue.html. Colours, series colours and fonts are CSS custom properties at the top of css/style.css. Reading-period dates are data attributes on each period. The forms validate in the browser; connect them to a form service or your own backend before launch. Upload the folder to any static host.
Frequently asked questions
Is Imprint free for commercial use?
Yes. Imprint is free for personal and commercial projects, including a real press or bookshop site. Attribution is optional but always welcome. The full terms are at uicookies.com/license.
What is it built with?
Bootstrap 5.3.8 for the grid and the mobile menu, one css/style.css design layer and one js/main.js file in vanilla JavaScript. There is no jQuery and no other JavaScript library. Icons are inline SVG and the only external request is Google Fonts.
Which pages and sections are included?
Four pages. The home page has a lead-title hero, the frontlist, catalogue highlights, a series strip, featured authors, news and prizes, a submissions call-out and a newsletter. The catalogue, the A–Z author directory and the submissions page with its form and rights section make up the other three.
How do I change the book covers?
Covers are HTML and CSS, not images. Each one takes its colour from its series and its artwork from a data-motif attribute, so a new title is a copied card with a new title, author and motif name. The series colours are custom properties at the top of css/style.css.
Do the submission and newsletter forms send anything?
No. The forms validate in the browser, including word counts, file type and size, and then show a success message. To receive submissions, point each form at a form service or your own server script.
