How Does a Manuscript Become a Book?
A book designer creates the cover and visual pieces for a published book. That process includes using creative skills, taking the time to understand the content of your book, having knowledge and experience in the book publishing industry, plus some research and marketing skills.
Some book designers just do covers, some just the inside page layout, and others do all of it. {I am a book designer who does all of it.}
A book designer walks a line between the world of graphic design and the publishing world. We use graphic design to create the work, but it’s a different land when you’re preparing to work with a manuscript
Many self-publishing authors opt to cut expenses and design the book themselves. You’ve budgeted for a proofreader and perhaps an editor, and you feel like you’ve got a good eye and could probably put together the design yourself and save some money.
I totally get that. But…
Unless you have some experience with book design or graphic design in general, I wouldn’t recommend it. You’re the writer, your expertise is writing. Writing and also knowing who your audience is. A book designer will help you bring your book to life, create a cover design that will speak to your audience, and use their marketing and design skills to create a cover—and an interior layout (if you hire them for that too).
A question I ask writers a lot when they’re on the fence about hiring a designer is: would you hire a butcher to bake the cake for your parents’ 50th wedding anniversary? If not, then don’t hire yourself to design your book.
For those of you who are worried that creative control may be taken out of your hands and the book designer will just go ahead and do whatever they want with your book—do your research, find a designer whose work you feel an affinity with, interview the designer and get a sense of how they work. A good book designer is going to want to work with you, listen to your thoughts about the design and they’ll do their own research into the genre of your book, and book design trends.
And if they’re like me? They’ll read your manuscript before they even think about sketching out ideas.
Timing Tip: Don’t wait until your manuscript is done to start looking for a book designer. Do your research and start contacting designers you think you’d like to work with as soon as possible. That way you’ll be working with the designer on the covers, while you’re doing your final edits you’ll have finished cover art to use for pre-sale announcements.
The Main Design Pieces
The Front Cover of a book is designed to draw attention to the writing inside. To be effective it needs to persuade the reader to pick up the book and examine it (or, online, to seek further information). The strength of the design, the quality of the illustration and the printing are all factors in its success. The book designer’s job is to create a cover that gives your book the best chance to be noticed and sold.
We all like to say “don’t judge a book by it’s cover” but I think that phrase should maybe be applied less to how we judge people or events, and it really, really should be reserved for book covers.
A well-designed cover will draw your reader to your book. Whether they’re shopping online or in a book store, a cover draws someone in, and the psychology says you have about 4 seconds to make an impression on a possible buyer, so the cover of your book needs to communicate a few things to a buyer. Quickly:
Genre. Book buyers are more often than not shopping for a type of book—fiction, non-fiction, memoir, etc.—so if you’ve written a teen romance you don’t want your cover looking like historical non-fiction.
Tone. Is your book a fast-paced spy novel or a collection of poetry? The cover needs to help the potential reader figure that out.
Scope. Perhaps especially with nonfiction, readers need to know what’s included in your book but also what’s not—is there a time period, setting, or focal point that your book is coming from? Is it a scholarly work, and if so what kind of knowledge is the reader going to need to read the book? The cover should reflect these things, or in some way speak to them.
Interest. A strong cover design creates interest and attracts a reader’s attention. Perhaps there’s imagery that’s cleverly used to create that interest, or perhaps there’s skilled use of fonts used to create it. However the interest is created? You want that for your book.
Market. Your book cover will help browsers by letting them know where your book fits in with other, similar books they may be familiar with. That’s your book’s market. Is it a reference book, or a story about mermaids, is it scientific, an art book? What do other books in your genre look and feel like?
The Back Cover often clinches the sale. So, I told you that an average of 4 seconds is spent looking at the cover, the other piece of important info is that an average of 14 seconds is usually spent reading the back cover. So, it’s the front cover that attracts the potential buyer, and the back cover that often clinches the sale.
Given that you’ll want to work with your designer to figure out what to feature on the back cover to give a potential reader a deeper understanding of what they’ll be buying {and reading}. A strong summary, combined with imagery that works with the front cover, advance praise for your book, and what else have you seen on books in your genre that you’ve thought about for your own book?
The Interior of your book should be inviting to your reader. You want her to know instantly if reading your book will be a pleasure or a chore. Good design helps makes it a pleasure. The essential factors that go into that are
appropriate and strong font selections,
proper column width,
good margin width (not too narrow),
an ideal amount of space between the sentences and paragraphs so your eyes won’t tire.
You’ll want to think about how to handle any informational pages like:
the table of contents,
the interior title page,
the copyright page,
a dedication page,
the foreword, and the introduction,
the acknowledgments,
and is there a bibliography or footnotes?
A great interior design is intuitively understood by the reader. If done right, it allows the book’s narrative voice to lead and the design of the book becomes nearly invisible. And those things? Make the book a total pleasure to read.
If you are interested in collaborating with a book designer who cares deeply about representing you and your book through cohesive interior and cover design, please contact me. I’d love to hear about what you’re working on.
Perhaps you’ve got a project in process now, and want to talk with me about it? Click the button below to schedule a call to talk about YOUR book!
