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

To ensure that your cover design is not destroyed in the process, here are a few objective elements that every cover must have.

1. The title should generally be large and easily readable (with a few exceptions).
2. There should be good contrast between the title and the background. Simply put, this means a light title against a dark background, or a dark or colorful title against a light background.
3. The simpler the design, the better. Covers that are too “busy” or that contain overly ornate fonts or too many elements will confuse the buyer. The cover must tell the story in one quick glance.
4. The title should be readable when the cover is used in very small sizes and/or in black and white, as it may appear online or in catalogs. Print out the cover about an inch tall in both color and black and white to test it’s effectiveness.

While these four “rules” aren’t the only considerations to be kept in mind when creating a successful cover, they do form the basis upon which a solid cover design is built. So when your Aunt Matilda, who graduated from art school in 1940 insists that the background should be purple because it’s her favorite color, you’ll be able to explain why this isn’t a good idea.

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

“Huh?” you may ask? “I’m paying good money for this cover, and it’s my book. Are you suggesting I’m not entitled to “like” the design?

No, not exactly. What I am suggesting is that before you change your designer’s concepts, it’s important to understand that a book cover has one job—to capture the attention of the buyer. Period. End of story. There are a thousand ways to accomplish this and they all have one thing in common. The book cover must be simple. Breaking this cardinal rule can hurt your sales, big time.

You might think of your book cover as a billboard. Just like vehicles on the freeway, your buyer is speeding by. Statistics show that buyers look at a book cover for only 7 seconds, on average, before making a decision to buy, or not. That’s not a lot of time to convince him/her that your book is the best choice.

Ask a busy buyer to work too hard, by adding complex graphics, too many words, or too many messages to your cover, and they will simply stop looking…and buy another book. Focus is the key. The front cover must drill down to your core message. Save the details for the back cover and flaps, so your book cover will be the effective sales tool it was meant to be.

In the next post, I’ll make the cover evaluation process a little easier by listing what you must have and what you may have.

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

• Provide a manuscript, or at least a synopsis, of your book (a draft version is OK).
• Provide the final title and subtitle of the book and the author’s name (including any professional designations).
• Provide any logos that are to appear on the front cover.
• Decide on the book’s trim size and the number of print colors. If you’re not sure about these issues, your designer can help.
• Share your vision for the cover.
• Share information about your intended audience/market.
• Tell the designer whether this book is part of a series. Series covers need to be developed with future titles in mind.
• Share any other information you feel will help the designer understand your book. There’s no such thing as too much information.

Once the above items are known, most designers will research other books in the genre and create several concepts of the front cover for your review.

This is a good place to discuss what a cover concept is, or should be. Cover concepts provided by your designer should be very different from one another to give you a clear choice of directions. The purpose of cover research is to identify and develop three major design directions that are represented in current bestsellers for your genre. A cover concept is not one image shown with three different title fonts. Those are variations. It’s important to ask your designer whether they plan to show concepts or variations.

Naturally, concepts take more time than variations. Time is money in every line of work. Allowing your designer to spend the necessary time to develop truly creative solutions will benefit your book many times over. Why? Because humans are programmed from birth to look longer at things we haven’t seen before. In prehistoric times, this instinct saved us from the saber-toothed tiger prowling outside the cave. Today, it means your buyer will look longer at your cover if it’s interesting and different, and the longer buyers look, the more likely they are to buy.

If you look closely at low-cost covers, you’ll see they are really template-driven; they are all the same. Designers who produce this type of cover are taking care of themselves, not you. They’re telling you what you want to hear — that you can get a cover for a few hundred dollars — but they’re not giving you what you need to succeed. Boring covers are just that, boring. Buyers will gravitate to and buy books with covers that are visually compelling.

In the next post, I’ll talk about the next stage of the design process: working with your designer to develop one cover concept to the final stage.

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

1. Start with your network

• Ask friends and colleagues in the publishing industry who they would recommend (and who they would not recommend).
• Talk to designers at meetings such as your local chapter of the Independent Book Publishers Association (formerly PMA). If you feel comfortable talking to your designer in a casual setting, it’s likely that you’ll work well together later.
• Gather printed book covers that appeal to you. Oftentimes the designer is listed on the copyright page or in the acknowledgments.
• Explore designer websites. Search for book designers. View information about their services and samples of their best work.
• When evaluating website samples, try to look through the subject matter and evaluate the underlying design skill. A qualified designer can design a book on any subject, so don’t disqualify someone simply because their samples don’t happen to match your subject matter.
• Beware of friends and relatives who claim to be artists. They may not understand the complexities of preparing a book cover for print. If you do want to use a friend’s painting or sketch, take their artwork to a cover designer who knows how to integrate it with a title for maximum impact.

2. Request proposals

• Once you have narrowed the field to a few qualified designers, call or write to request a proposal.
• Be prepared to discuss the trim size of your book, the approximate number of pages, the subject matter and your wishes for the cover. Do you want a custom illustration on the cover? A royalty free stock photo? Or will you provide artwork? Do you need printed books in time for a scheduled event? Your designer needs this information to give you an accurate price.
• Note how long it takes the designer to respond to your request. Slow response time may indicate slow service later.
• You should receive a specific, written quote that clearly lists the services that are included in the price. The estimate should also specify the amount of revision time that is included, and the hourly rate for revisions that exceed that time.
• Ask questions about the quote. A professional designer will be happy to explain anything that is unclear and will not become impatient with you. We want the job to go smoothly, too!

3. Choose a designer who offers:

• Book cover design experience. A graphic designer experienced in ads or brochures may not understand the technicalities of book cover design. Book designers work with clients all over the country and the world, so it’s not necessary to choose between location and experience.
• Quality of work. Are the covers comparable in quality to bestsellers at Amazon.com?
• Professionalism in communications with you.
• Interest in your subject matter and in your publishing goals.
• Price is always a consideration, but should never be the primary one. Quality design takes a lot of time and interaction between designer and client. Be suspicious of low bids. Instead of a unique, creative cover, you may wind up with a template that has been used hundreds of times before.

In the next post, I’ll discuss what your designer needs from you to help the project go smoothly.
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

(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

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.

Calendar Top: Before

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?

Calendar Top: After

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

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

To digress for a moment: Unlike most people, I’ve spent most of my professional life obsessed with typos. When I owned my “old-fashioned” typesetting business from 1980-1993, I used to track the efficiency of our proofreaders, and anyone who scored under 99% was sure to be summoned to my office for a little chat. After all, 99% meant that one typo slipped by for every hundred words, and in those days, this was not an acceptable level of quality. 99.99% was.

My favorite typo story from that former life involves the Greyhound Corporation. We were hired to typeset and lay out a quarterly 8-page newsletter for their Internal Auditing Department. Since this work was performed before the invention of word processing and desktop publishing, we retyped every word of the client’s manuscript into our dedicated typesetting system, and then proofread the long strips of type (called galleys) before they were manually cut and pasted up into newsletter pages. (Yes, it’s hard to believe, even for me.)

This newsletter probably contained about 2,500 words. When we didn’t hear from the client the following quarter, I called Clarence (yes, I even remember his name) to find out when the next issue would arrive. “I’ve found another provider,” he said, in a very unfriendly tone. “There was A TYPO in the last issue, so we just can’t use you again.”

Can you imagine anyone making that statement today? No, thank heaven, but sometimes I do wish that at least some of the old quality standards were still appreciated, if not enforced with an iron hand.

I’m prompted to write today because this past weekend I was viewing a website for a really cool new product/service. I had seen an ad in the paper. I was already “sold” truth be told, and I logged on with every expectation of placing an order. The site was loaded with great information, enticing pictures, and a very effective sales pitch. It was also loaded with typos and misspelled words (in nearly every paragraph). My expectation of satisfaction suddenly turned into serious doubt about the competence of this business. I had to wonder, if they were this careless with their own website, were they also this careless with their product/service? And if so, what consequences might result?

I decided to think it over a little longer. I ultimately placed an order, which, some may argue, negates my argument. Not really. Instead of feeling reassured and confident about this new product/service, I’m now primed for a mishap. If the delivery is late or the quality is anything less than promised, I probably won’t be as forgiving as I otherwise might have been, because this, you see, won’t be the first mistake. It will be the 20th.

I’m sure the new business owners would be horrified to learn that they are leaving this impression. Perhaps they are young and have been educated into the belief that creativity and self-esteem are more important than accuracy and spelling. Perhaps they are unaware of the availability of proofreading. Perhaps they simply don’t think it’s a big deal. I’m here to tell them, yes it is.

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

Is your cover free of the Top 10 Cover Design Mistakes? Get a comprehensive 10-point evaluation at http://covers.1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

I can be pretty sure that others, like myself,  who have worked in publishing for most of our lives, particularly book editors, book designers and typesetters, are about to go mad at the misinformation about self-publishing that is regurgitated, and unfortunately widely accepted, today.

Let’s have a little fun with words for a moment. You go to the doctor. She says you need surgery and it’s going to cost a lot of money. You leave her office and drive directly to the library to check out a medical textbook. A few moments later, at the local medical supply store, you buy a scalpel and a few other supplies. You hand the book and the scalpel to a friend and say, “This is easy. Just hand me that bottle of bourbon and we can do it ourselves. The step-by-step instructions are right there…there’s nothing to it!”

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? And yet websites abound that promise uninformed authors that they can self-publish a book, without editing, without design, without quality typesetting, if only they will give XYZ Company a little money. XYZ will take care of all the hard work. XYZ will make their book available in bookstores nationwide. XYZ will market their book. Soon, the author will be as famous as Stephen King or Dean Koontz. It’s easy. Just upload your Word file, they say. Just use our easy cover templates, they say.  You don’t need experts. You can do everything yourself. No training, no experience, no talent required.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of self-esteem. It’s an unparalleled source of courage that propels us forward toward a goal when everyone else thinks we’re crazy. But really, does it seem sensible to you that anyone’s first-time efforts at book editing, design and typesetting will compare to the results that professionals can achieve? Apparently so, judging by the many thousands of authors who use these services.

In some cases, people just don’t know there’s a better way. If you search on “self-publishing”, the first 20 results will unfortunately be “self-publishing companies”, who are in reality, nothing more than vanity presses. Unless you drill down through many pages, you won’t even find out that there are competent editors, designers, printers, and publicists who offer far better services, and results, albeit at a higher cost.

While it may be tempting to use a vanity service that promises to do everything for a price you can afford, there are more important numbers to consider, namely book sales. The largest of the so-called “self-publishing” companies report that the average author sells 50 books. Yes, 50. I can’t imagine that selling just 50 books is anyone’s goal after spending many months or years on a manuscript. So what does that tell us? That something is very wrong. And, whether it’s welcome news or not, we experts — the ones you’ll almost never find in search results — know what that something is.

Self-publishing is hard work. As Dan Poynter says, “If you want your book to sell like a book, it has to look like a book.” No matter how proud you may be of  your own beginner’s efforts at editing, typesetting and design, the truth is an amateur job will never be more than an amateur job. That’s why reviewers won’t even open a book from most of the self-publishing companies. Reviewers and retailers know that these companies don’t serve the author; they serve themselves. By allowing anyone to publish anything with no quality control, they make their money on the front end, not from book sales. Yes, they make their money by selling YOU a fairy tale.

Even worse, some very, very, very big companies (that I cannot name and who should have more integrity) have now begun to offer these services. We complain about the culpability and greed of Wall Street in the recent meltdown. How is this any different? Line ‘em up, take their money, laugh all the way to the bank. Forget about the fact that someone’s dream of writing a book and sharing it with the world has been cruelly converted into a nightmare.

Here’s what we experts are shouting from the rooftops to anyone who will listen. Your book needs professional editing, professional cover design, professional typesetting and professional marketing and publicity to stand out in a crowded marketplace. This costs money. There’s no way around that. Not if you want a quality book that has the best possible chance to sell. You can believe the fairy tales if you want, but that won’t make them true.

Writing a book is an awesome accomplishment. Self-publishing is a steep hill to climb, for anyone.  Please, hire pros who can help you create a product that the market will accept.

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design • Main site: http://www.1106design.com