Within the next week or two weeks, you'll be able to attach cover art to your portfolio folder and/or to a specific work. If your folder has cover art attached to it but the work does not, then the cover art for the folder will be displayed.
This way, if you're writing a novel and all your chapters are in one folder, you can just attach the cover art to the folder instead of to each chapter. On the other hand, you may have a folder just for your short stories, which may be very varied in terms of content. So you'll also be able to have separate cover art for each work in a folder.
When viewing a work, the cover art will be shown in the sidebar area. The cover art will also be used for the Literary Spotlight on the front page, and a thumbnail version of the cover art may also be displayed when browsing literary works (not sure about this last part; it depends on whether it makes the literary area look better or not).
With regards to the Literary Spotlight, you'll notice that text is currently overlayed on top of the images. Obviously, your cover art may already have text, so overlaying the text could look really bad. Thus when you upload your cover art, you'll be given the option of whether or not text is shown on top of the cover if it gets featured.
Last but not least, the dimensions for the cover art will be: 256 pixels wide by 400 pixels high.
Anything larger or smaller than that will be automatically resized to those dimensions. It's roughly equivalent to a Trade Paperback, and it's also the same dimensions used by Wattpad. So if you're a member of Wattpad, you won't have to design two different cover sizes.
Anyhow, I'm announcing this now so as to allow people time to start designing cover art! This way, once the feature goes live, a significant number will be ready to immediately take advantage of it.
That is aaswgdfbjkthanks *totally not excited about it*