Secret of Great Book Cover Design and Layout

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In a former blog: “Becoming Your Own Publisher” the book production process, you can find lots of tips and links for your book layout, cover and formatting process.  Many new authors are complaining about the pre-print process at CreateSpace, other POD service companies or the printing company they use for larger quantities of paperbacks and books. They are suddenly confronted with fonts, typography, page and other book layout requirements. However, not only for printed books, but also for e-books it is essential to know a bit about the possibilities and rules.
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To familiarize yourself with this (often) completely new field, read Joel Friedlander’s beginner
articles

Understanding Fonts & Typography
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/understanding-fonts-typography/

Understanding Book Layouts and Page Margins
http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2013/08/book-layouts-page-margins/
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Joel Friedlander explains the basic building blocks that books are made of, and the typography:
type fonts and they way they are arranged on the page. He says: “There are so many tiny details
and decisions that go into formatting a book that you pretty much have to be someone who enjoys
working on that scale to appreciate book design. It may involve differences of a hundredth of an
inch one way or the other. That’s true for the decisions you make about margins, too.”
He cautions for example that “the “minimum” margin of .25″ that CreateSpace refers to is too small for most books. This margin measurement is meant to create a “safe area” so that nothing on your page is in danger of getting trimmed off.”
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Michael N. Marcus explains why book margins are so important: “One of my basic rules of thumb
is that the a book’s outside margins must be large enough to comfortably fit human thumbs without
covering up any text. It’s really annoying to have to constantly re-position pages while reading
through a book.” His blog is another great reading for new author-publishers how book-layout works. He also wrote a great cautionary book “How to NOT Get Screwed by a Self-Publishing Company“.
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Want to read and learn more about book design? If you are a writer working with a publisher (large or small) or if you are a small or first time publisher, these books will help you to understand the book production process and the principles of good cover and interior book design.

Book Design and Production
http://www.amazon.com/Book-Design-Production-Pete-Masterson/dp/0966981901

Basics Design Layout, 2nd edition
http://www.amazon.com/Basics-Design-02-Layout-Second/dp/2940411492/

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If you would like to get help in all things publishing, have your book intensively promoted and learn how to navigate social media sites: We offer all this and more for only $ 179 for 3 months. Learn more about this individual book marketing help: http://www.111Publishing.com/Seminars
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Hyper Smash

Pingate

 

How Publishing works – Part 1

New self-publishers are often confused about how the editorial process works. They want to know what takes place at each stage of their book’s development. It seems that if you have a map, it’s easier to understand where you are on the road to getting your book into print. Let’s take a look at the stages through which your book moves.

Although you are anxious to see your book in print, you realize you will have to go through a process to make sure you’ve created the best product you can for your particular market and the goals you’ve set for your book.

Keep in mind that the entire editorial process may be long, extending from before the completion of the manuscript through proofreading of the final page proofs. Self-publishers need to understand the whole process so they can hire people with the specific expertise needed to complete their project. This schematic is intended to be a simple and helpful “map” to the journey of your book from manuscript to printed books.

Manuscript: Developmental Editing
Before you even finish your book, perhaps before it’s more than an outline, a sample and an idea, you may start the editorial process. The first kind of editing you will encounter is developmental editing. Developmental editing, as the name implies, helps develop the author’s concept, the scope of the book, the intended audience, even the way elements of the book are arranged. The relationship between author and developmental editor is intimate, and their work is something of a collaboration.

It can require a great deal of time, as the author responds to the editor’s suggestions, and may require a good deal of patience and tact, since the editor may be instrumental in helping to shape the final work. Developmental editing can be assigned to specific editors, or some of these functions may be done by either the author’s agent or an acquisitions editor at a publisher. Self-publishers who make use of this type of editing will hire freelance editors to help with the development of their project.

Manuscript: Copy Editing
When the author and developmental editor have finished organizing the manuscript, and the editor considers it complete and ready to take the next step, it will go to a Copyeditor. Copyediting is accomplished by editors who examine the manuscript line by line, word by word. It takes people who are meticulous, excellent at spotting errors, and who mostly don’t mind working without interference or accolades from the world outside.

Copyeditors have vast knowledge of English vocabulary and usage, command over style resources such as the Chicago Manual of Style or other style guides in use at the publishing house. In reviewing the manuscript, they will be paying attention to and correcting:

• Punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and grammar
• Errors in word usage
• Subject-verb agreement
• Consistency in treatment of material
• Adherence to establish standards of style and formatting
  Ambiguity, incorrect statements, lapses in logic, libelous comments, etc.
• Accuracy and completeness of citations, references, notes, tables, figures and charts

When the copyeditor has finished her work, the manuscript goes back to the author for clarification of any remaining open questions, and then the changes are input into the manuscript.

Manuscript to Book Page Proofs: Production Editor
The manuscript is next routed to a Production Editor who will be responsible for the entire production process:

• Scheduling the project and tracking its progress
• Hiring and coordinating the work of the book designers, illustrators, indexers, proofreaders
• Getting estimates from printers or print brokers for the physical production of the book
• Making sure the books are properly printed and delivered on time.

Proofreading
The last stage in the editorial process is proofreading the book. This step can be easily overlooked in self-published books, to their detriment. The proofreader is the last guardian of the publisher’s reputation for accuracy and care, the protector of the author’s reputation for diligence, and sometimes the least noticed professional to handle the book in its journey. Proofreaders examine the book’s complete and final pages for more than typographical errors, although that’s a big part of the proofreading job. In addition they will be on the lookout for:

• Inconsistent line, word, or page spacing
• Mis-numbered list items and mislabeled captions
• Improper word breaks
• Page break problems like widows and orphans
• Irregularities in the use of the books type fonts
• Accurate and consistent page headers, footers and page numbers
• Accuracy and completeness of tables, figures, charts, and graphs
• Consistent use of abbreviations and acronyms

The End of the Line
When the proofreader is finished with their work, the book is corrected for the last time. Once the pages are set, the final page proofs can be sent to an indexer, if one is being used on the project, and the book will be ready to go to press.

Re-blogged in part from Joel Friedlanders article in http://www.thebookdesigner.com a great resource for writers and self-publishers. He is a fantastic teacher of everything book design, typography and book marketing, just to name a few.

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Hyper Smash

 

How Book Sales are Influenced

… by attractive front cover design.  Five tips how you can create appealing book covers.

Visit bookstores, your library, or go to the internet and research as many book cover designs as possible.  

You learn as much from badly designed books as from beautifully designed books.

In the Western world people read from left to right, top to bottom.

Position your text and image in appropriate levels of importance.

Put your title in the top half of your cover. 

Avoid centering all the text on your cover or title page, this looks pretty unprofessional.  

Right or left aligning creates much cleaner lines.  Never use more than three different fonts on your cover, to not confuse your reader – this includes bold, italic or underline variations.

Use bold or complementary colors, but NEVER use a white or a very light background.  Use light font on dark background for dramatic effects (novels, spiritual, etc.) and dark on light for easy readability (self-help, how-to, business books).

The elements should be clean, not cluttered and the font easily readable,  the text balanced in size and style to the graphics.  Allow at least 0.5″ in from the trim guides to place all your elements. This will ensure enough allowance around the cover’s edge and provide a more tailored look. 

Give your finished cover the thumbnail test.  Your front cover image should look crisp and polished when reduced to post stamp-size for display on online bookstores like Amazon.

Your potential book buyer looks first at the front cover; then turns to the back to read further. Draw her or him in with a catchy back header.        

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The UGLY Duckling

 

 

Book Store

 

I just read a marvelous book on self-publishing and I would have given it a 5-star review for its content, but it was – against the own advice of the authors – not copy-edited, not even spell-checked – and the layout was not done professionally. While reading these errors were so disturbing, that I will give it not more than a 3 or 4-star review.

“It doesn’t cost any more to produce a good-looking book than it does to produce a bad-looking one” Joel Friedlander wrote in his great blog about sloppy, self-published books:

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2011/10/theres-something-odd-about-self-publishing-books/

This is true for both, paper books and e-books that are often shambles from a book design point of view.

But not only that, these self-published books often lack the basics, such as putting them through word spelling, copy editing, beta-reading and having done a professional layout (and converting, if it is an e-book), rather than just smash-word it on the cheap.

Another blogger http://conversationalreading.com wrote:
“Needless to say, poor quality e-books are becoming something of an embarrassment for publishers trying to convince readers to pay a premium for downloads (as Kassia Kroszer recently pointed out in Publishing Perspectives: it is hard to justify higher e-book prices when the product simply isn’t up to scratch), and clearly it’s an issue publishers need to address sooner rather than later if they want win this argument.

The problem of substandard e-books partially stems from the fact that many publishers currently lack the means and expertise (and, to some extent, the will) to produce high quality e-book editions themselves. Their workflow and production process are set up for print, so the quickest way to create e-book files has been to outsource the job to third parties, inevitably with very little quality control.”

If self-published authors want to be taken seriously, and compete with paper books (both, hard and soft cover) from commercial publishers, they need to offer seriously edited book content and also a professional book layout.