Typically, our designers will include the name of a book, the author and publishing logo on your book spine.
However, for books under 100 pages, spines may sometimes be left blank. Createspace do not allow text on the spine of a book under 101 pages. Lightning Source do not allow text on the spine of a book under 48 pages, but they don’t advise it under 100 pages either.
There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the text on such a thin spine would have to be very small, in some cases too small to sensibly be legible. Secondly, and most importantly, the manufacturing process for print-on-demand books means there is sometimes a bit of shift around the placement of the psine text. If the spine is very thin then even with tiny tecxt is it possible for the lettering to shift round onto the bend or front of the cover rather than appear on the spine. This would obviously look terrible so to avoid it both print houses have a lower limit for the page count they allow spine text for.