The Demise of the Book? Not a Chance!

It’s hard to escape the current tidal wave of predictions that “the book” is dead. As happens so often when something new is invented, enthusiasm tends to outpace common sense, until the dust settles and we all take a closer and more rational look.

When TV was invented, everyone predicted the demise of radio. It didn’t happen, of course. TV simply took it’s place along the spectrum of ways to receive content.  We watch TV while relaxing at home, and listen to radio in the car or at work. In similar fashion, social networking and e-books are vying for their rightful place now. We can celebrate the appearance of e-books, but we don’t have to talk about the demise of traditional books. Both will continue to exist, and we will all find the information we need in different ways at different times.

Before you accuse me of being a Luddite, please note that I would certainly cheer if they stopped delivering five printed telephone directories to my home every year. It would be good for the planet and good for the trees if they didn’t. But I find it difficult to believe that the sensory experience of flipping through a photo-filled coffee-table book in front of the fireplace will go away anytime soon. There will always be a place and a time (and  yes, a need) for relaxation, reflection, and beauty, and books deliver that experience in a way that no ugly-text electronic device can, at least at this writing.

We now have a chaos of content coming at us from all directions at ever-increasing speeds. Eventually, when half of everything we read is filled with typos, and the other half contains opinions not backed up by a shred of evidence, we’ll remember that proofreaders, indexers, and editors exist for a reason. When our eyes tire of endless streams of ugly, gray, back-lit text, we’ll remember that book design, quality typography and cover design also fill a need.

Everyone I talk to feels overwhelmed at the amount of information we feel pressured to process on a daily basis. While we now have a variety of choices in the way we receive information, I believe at some point we’ll again value quality control, organization, and visual and mental peace. What do you think?

What do you want to know? What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Four Requirements for an Effective Book Cover

Staying on track is important when evaluating concepts presented by your cover designer. Chances are, when you show the concepts around to your circle of acquaintances, everyone will suggest changes—partly because they want to help, and partly because it’s just plain fun to participate. Read more

How to Evaluate a Book Cover Concept

One of the biggest mistakes that new publishers make when evaluating book cover concepts is to focus on what they “like.” Read more

How Authors Can Help Book Designers

There’s quite a bit of misinformation floating around about book designers and the book design process. Some folks think designers are creative psychics who somehow just know what to do, without any help from the client. Nothing is further from the truth. There are thousands of ways to design a book cover. A competent book cover designer will start by gathering information that will help him/her design your cover in an appropriate way. Here’s how you, the author or publisher, can help before design begins: Read more

3 Steps to the Perfect Book Designer

Many clients tell us that they found the process of finding a designer very difficult and frustrating. Not for lack of options on the internet and elsewhere, but due to the overwhelming amount of information available. So how do you determine whether a designer is qualified or if they will provide good customer service? Read more

On Book Design and Tacos

In this morning’s Arizona Republic, I happened across the obituary of Glen W. Bell, Jr., the founder of Taco Bell. Referenced in the article were three of Bell’s 60 “recipes for success” that were developed over decades:

(1) You build a business one customer at a time;

(2) Find the right product, then find a way to mass-produce it;

(3) An innovative product will set you apart.

It occurred to me that these three statements perfectly illustrate everything that’s right about working with an individual book designer, and everything that’s wrong with working with a “POD publisher.”

All good graphic design, including book design, involves a surprising amount of collaboration between the designer and the client.  On book covers, there’s just no substitute for offering concepts, receiving client feedback, and adjusting those concepts, sometimes many times, to arrive at exactly the right solution for the job. And when it comes to book interiors, there’s just no substitute for the fine typesetting produced by professional page layout software in the hands of an experienced designer who knows how to finesse the settings for beautiful results. And no substitute for the professional proofreading that follows.

To say that book designers work hard to build their businesses one client at a time, while offering innovative products that will set their client’s product apart, is an understatement.

Which brings me to the Bell’s second “recipe” for success above, “Find the right product, then find a way to mass-produce it.”

POD publishers are mass-producers of books. They are very successful, and that’s the problem. THEY are very successful…their authors are not. By their own reported numbers, the average author who works with one of these firms sells 50 copies of their book. Why?

Because good books can’t be mass-produced, even when very big companies offer the tools to do so to unwitting authors who have not educated themselves about the proper way to go about it. Cover design software and Word templates will never produce the same results as an experienced designer, no matter how fervently the author may wish it to be so.

Bell succeeded beyond his wildest dreams mass-producing tacos. But I live in Phoenix and I can tell you that a Taco Bell taco bears no resemblance whatever to a REAL taco. And subsidy-published books designed and formatted by inexperienced authors are no better than than low-grade ground beef compared to a carefully edited, designed, typeset, and proofread book.

With books, as with tacos, progress isn’t always real, and it isn’t always good.

What do you want to know? What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

What Typesetters Do: A Before-and-After Example

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about the craft of typesetting. Now that virtually everyone has word-processing software, it’s easy to believe that very little skill is needed to put words on paper. Of course, software is just a tool, and while we can all become adept at using it, the fact remains that advanced training leads to more professional results, no matter what package we’re using.

I’m a guilty as the next person of this offense. Like a lot of small business owners, I use QuickBooks to create invoices and pay bills. In a ham-fisted sort of way, I’ve added items to the default chart of accounts as needed, and in more than a few instances, I’ve created quite a mess when entering more complicated transactions. Once a year, I hand a disk to my accountant and run for the door, so I don’t have to hear what he is surely muttering under his breath as he reviews my complete lack of accounting skill. So I’m not criticizing anyone for trying. I’m just saying it’s important to know what we don’t know.

Here’s an example of a bit of text created for the top of a calendar in Word.

Not bad, right? All the information is neatly centered and readable. But how can it be better? This is where training comes in. Here are the problems with the image above:

1. There is very little emphasis and grouping of the elements. Except for the first three lines at the top, everything else runs together. While it’s all there, the reader really has to try hard to find what he/she may be looking for.
2. The underlines are probably meant to bracket the names of the church staff, but they’re misplaced. The top underline seems to be emphasizing just a part of the phone number; the bottom underline just a part of the name.
3. The word Phone is overused, possibly in an attempt to help the reader focus on the necessary information in a sea of sameness.

Below is the typeset version. See the difference?

1. Minor adjustments in spacing now group like information together for easy navigation.
   The most important information (the name of the church) is the largest, followed by two levels of slightly smaller text for church phone numbers and service times.
2. While it’s a little difficult to discern on a monitor, various levels of boldness were used to add emphasis, and italics were used on email addresses and web URLs to help them stand out from the rest of the text.
3. The repetitive use of the word Phone was eliminated and replaced with a tabular arrangement using leader dots to bring the reader’s eye from the name to the phone number.
4. A background color that coordinates with the artwork was added, and the text was aligned to the top and bottom of the graphic for a nice, neat, look.

Is this little example going to win any design awards? Of course not. But it is a very basic example of the thought process that goes into every typesetting and design job.

Turning the first example into the second took 30 minutes of experimenting and adjusting…a fact that would probably surprise some people. Do you think the results are worth the time?

What do you want to know? What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

A Design Nut…and Proud of It!

This week, I came across what I’d hoped would be really useful advice to pass along to clients…a program from successful authors willing to share their thoughts on book writing, book marketing, and a better, more profitable way to self-publish.

As an introduction to participation in the program, the authors offered their book for review. The table of contents contained quite a useful list of information, but then, as oh-so-many times before, came the inevitable section telling authors that they really, really, really don’t need to spend money on design…they can do it “on the cheap” by doing it themselves.

As proof of the validity of this advice, the authors pointed out that they had formatted their own book pages using Microsoft Office products, and then, to add insult to injury, they declared that only a “design nut” would notice the difference between their results and professional design. I beg to differ.

The cover of their book was just awful. The title was rendered without any typographic skill at all. The design (if you could call it that) looked no better than a homemade flyer that you might find on your front porch. The interior text formatting…you know, those details that only a “design nut” would care about…was filled with loose lines. Just about every other typographic convention that book designers and editors so carefully follow was ignored.

If this book reflected only one consultant’s opinion, I wouldn’t be concerned, but it seems to have become the ONLY message that is disseminated these days to authors learning about self-publishing. The inmates have taken over the asylum, it seems, and in my view, the victims will be book buyers.

Not very long ago, when you purchased a book, the price included a reasonable expectation that experts worked to make the product worth your money. You know, little things like fact-checking, assuring that the author was an expert, careful editing, careful design and typesetting to ensure maximum reading comprehension, and careful printing.

What happens when these standards are completely thrown to the wind? How will buyers react when they’re just as likely to receive a terrible book as a good one? Will they decide that it’s just not worth spending hard-earned money on books?

Is the “success” of these consultants (at least by their own description) confirmation that it is OK to release work that would never pass muster in an earlier day? I can’t answer that, but I can say for certain that 1106 Design is a team of “design nuts” and “editing nuts” and “typesetting nuts” and we will continue to offer top-level work to our clients. We hope you agree.

Tell us what you think! What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

Self-Publishing Lies

It has been said that if you tell a lie loud enough, or often enough, it begins to sound like the truth. It’s happening every day in self-publishing articles in major newspapers and on self-publishing websites and blogs everywhere, and it’s hurting a lot of really good people. Read more

Quality Book Design More Important Now than Ever

When we spend money, on anything, we want to feel SAFE. That’s why it’s more important than ever for publishers to invest in quality book design. Read more

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