Designing Your Book
Every author gets involved in the design of their book in different ways. For a start, every single author has ideas about the design of their book. If this is you, then bear in mind that while this may be the first time you?ve worked on a book, your book designer (and possibly a whole company behind him/her) will have worked on many books. You need to merge your best ideas and priorities with what they think will work in the market.
This advice is invaluable; you need that professional opinion and insight. There are so many factors such as colour, fonts, styles, placement of the text versus imagery and much more, but you the author must let professionals do what they do. What you like simply might not be the best thing for your book. Instead, write down the things that you would like and leave a lot of space in your thinking for the expert opinion, for that angle and that professionalism that designers will bring to the table.
The key word here is Professional. A professional design is so important it can make or break the success of a book. Seriously. It is what makes your book look the part; it will stand up next to any other book on the shelf and it will really make people sit up and take notice. In fact, it should look so professional that it makes people think, ?Wow, is that one of those best-sellers that I keep reading about?? Any book can look that way, no matter what the sales figures look like.
My last tip: even if your son, daughter, nephew or niece just graduated with a degree in art, don’t let them design your book or even your book cover. It’s doing your book a disservice and if you’ve worked that hard on it, the last thing you want is for it to fall at the last hurdle. Hire professional designers for their creativity and let them come up with ideas that you might not have thought of. Let their professional design attract people to buy the book and want to read it.
A good and professional design is something that?s very attractive and exciting and that?s what you need, that?s what you deserve and that?s what you can have. Don’t settle for anything less.