Loving the Look of Your Book: Working Well with Designers

There's a job in the copyediting departments of mainstream publishers called "Production Editor" that doesn't exist in the new paradigm of the self-publishing realm. To the detriment of self-publishers, what they don't know leads them to believe that the tasks handled by production editors are not necessary. Many hope and pray and anticipate that the freelance designers they hire to do their covers and interiors will intuit an appropriate design (because they are competent in their specialization). I have found that this is wishful thinking.

So what is it that production editors do which self-publishing writers could emulate that's going to get you the excellent results you want from your interior design?

Some of this is pure timing. When does the designer begin designing? If you want a cover that you can post on your website to announce an impending book launch and stir up some excitement, this can be prepared many months in advance. It isn't necessary to complete your manuscript to get a cover. All you need to know is the correct title, subtitle, and author, and have a sense of what type of imagery appeals to the targeted book audience. That last bit matters as much as the title/subtitle combo.

Back in the day, we were taught that a book cover is a poster. Online a cover is more like a postage stamp. A key question is: Does your cover work when viewed small as well as large? (Have a look at your art samples in the realm of 25% of the size of your 5x8 cover before finalizing.)

Try explaining your marketing strategy to your cover artist and involving them in finding the right symbolic representation of your subject matter. A cover can be like a pictorial dreamscape or floating words. It has to follow sound design principles, and evoke an emotional response in potential buyers.

The interior design is another matter. It cannot be successfully completed prior to the manuscript being completed. When you deliver a manuscript to an interior designer it should be fairly stripped down--not busy with added elements--which gives the designer fewer embedded problems to solve.

A key step in production that most self-publishers skip is pulling out some pages from the manuscript for the designer to prepare a sample design. These must contain each of the basic elements of design that will be present in the final book from bulleted and numbered lists, to chapter headings, running heads, running feet, subheadings at every level of hierarchy (A, B, C), boxes, borders, call-out quotes, captions, figures, regular prose, italics, bold faces, and anything else you might dream of. You need not see whole chapters in your samples, but you do need to see each element proposed to imagine them all together.

When you skip this step, believe me, something is likely to go wrong. Designers are not mind readers and they are certainly not as fully invested in your project as you are as an author. A designer could either nail it squarely on the head or could miss the mark and spend hours going down a wrong path.

Save yourself money if you're paying by the hour. Save the designer time spent on false starts. And give yourself the chance to consider a few alternatives if you aren't certain of what you're asking for.

Great things to communicate in your instructions to a designer of either a cover or an interior are color schemes, tone and mood (sophisticated, playful, modern, old-fashioned, witty, authoritative, youthful, etc.), shapes (round, wavy, boxy), subject matter (romance, history, science, spirituality), and also preexisting books that you would like to emulate in some way, meaning you responded well to them and think there is something appealing about them in the abstract that could be echoed in your book design.

Ask what the designer would prefer to know from you; get a sense of best practices for their work process that would help them help you to get the result you want.

Once you have approved your sample pages, then the next step is implementation. This should only be done from the final manuscript after word choices are complete.

Remember to proofread not only the words but the design once it has been set into type. Mistakes can and do occur. And sometimes designers (especially those not originating professionally from within the ranks of the traditional book world) make poor decisions. For instance, I once saw a designer deliver a "final" (not really) version of a page layout where a bold heading was the last line on a page. To my eye, this clearly should have been caught and corrected. A heading should never be separated from the text in the section that it leads into. It looks terrible otherwise. She was a lazy or ignorant designer.

Many authors try to implement designs themselves prior to copyediting. Then when the notes come back--red lines and line length changes--the design falls apart and the author is frustrated. It's sweetly naive to do it this way unless you intend to follow through all the way to the finish line. Who are you trying to impress? Yourself! The editor doesn't give a hoot about design at the stage of word play.

Where an editor can help you with design issues is in setting up the format and visualizing how long sections of text can be (paragraphs included) without making navigation hard for the reader. They can make sure the hierarchy of your contents is properly structured so that the design won't fall apart.

I was surfing the web yesterday evening for wonderful design sources to send you to look at, and the following ones caught my eye. Visit the AIGA Design Archives, Best Book Covers 2010. This site really is expressing high artistry. Also have a glance at The Book Cover Archive, for the purpose of appreciation.

Read the Wikibook on Basic Book Design to get a breakdown on terms that are used and some of the issues that professional designers think about.

A fun article that impressed me was "books with no label on the cover" on The Book Design Review Blog. It just proves that some images are so iconographic that we can "grasp" the whole thing without needing a title.

Inksie Blog: Ten Principles of Good Design is about universal design principles, not just for books. This is for connoisseurs really.