Of course, Goldilocks forgot all about her preferences as soon as the three bears came home, when she rightly bolted out the door to save her life. The Goldilocks character is a pretty good metaphor for clients, I think.

To switch stories for a moment, a few weeks ago I was listening to a financial advisor on the radio. “Visit my web site and fill out the contact form,” she said. “I’ll be in touch to learn about your needs and explore how my company can help you.” She seemed knowledgable and genuinely interested, so expecting a personal follow-up, that’s exactly what I did.

Instead, I received a postcard in the mail, inviting me to a restaurant torture session, where I and a hundred others would be bribed by a free lunch to endure a “one-solution-fits-all” lecture. What a letdown.

Like Goldilocks, or any prospective client, I was looking for a financial advisor who was “just right” when I contacted this company. No matter the product or service being purchased, isn’t that what every client seeks…and deserves?

Too many companies today, especially the dreaded “self-publishing companies,” cruelly peddle one-size-fits-all solutions to hopeful authors. Instead of a custom analysis of the author’s needs by a publishing expert, a phone room full of high-pressure sales consultants use carefully crafted scripts to steer authors into pre-defined package deals that maximize company profits.

What on earth has happened to American business, and why aren’t we all bolting out the door just like Goldilocks did?

1106 Design is a publishing services company that

* appreciates the value of a one-on-one conversation;
* will honestly tell you when you don’t need one of our services;
* works with you to craft a top-quality book that will help you achieve your unique publishing goals; and
* offers the convenience of project management.

If that sounds good, contact us today. 1106 Design is small enough to deliver quality work with all the hand-holding you need, and large enough to get the job done quickly and conveniently. As Goldilocks might say, “1106 Design is just right.”

A professionally-designed book cover is absolutely essential when it comes to marketing your book. If your book looks good and stands out from the crowd, it has a better chance to sell.

The exact same principle also applies when prospective buyers are viewing the marketing materials of your publishing company. It’s imperative to cut through the clutter, establish credibility, and help busy buyers pay attention to your sales message.

A “corporate image” is a graphic “plan” that  begins with a professional logo and carries on with consistent use of type fonts, colors, even the arrangement of elements on the page, that will identify your publishing company to the prospective buyer before they have a chance to read one word. For an example of this, notice your own response to printed materials, and how you instantly recognize that a flyer or insert is from a particular store, without the need to actually see the store’s logo.

The same principle can be employed to your benefit as a publisher. It doesn’t matter if you publish one book or a hundred, buyers will likely see your marketing message more than once before they buy. They want to do business with a company that will be there tomorrow. Since they can’t meet you personally, the only way they can judge the reliability of your company is from your marketing materials.

Every contact you make with a potential buyer sends a message about your publishing company, whether it is a postcard, bookmark, sell sheet, book signing announcement, letter, or website. If  all of your materials are designed with a “family look,” you can maximize recognition of your company and communicate to your prospective buyer that you are a stable, reliable source for the information they seek. Plopping a professionally designed cover on a homemade flyer sends the opposite message.

Corporate Image Step One: A Professional Logo

The first step to a professional corporate identity is to design a logo that reflects the vision and purpose of your publishing company. The best logos are simple and should be designed to look contemporary for a minimum of 10 years. Your designer will present a number of ideas and refine them until you are delighted with the result.

A logo isn’t just a design for one purpose today, but also for many purposes in the future, so there are some considerations to discuss with your logo designer as work proceeds. A logo should be designed to look good in black and white first, because that’s how it will often be seen (on faxes and invoices, for example). Color enhances, but is never a substitute for, strong design.  If your logo doesn’t work in black and white, it simply doesn’t work. A strong logo design can be printed in black and white or one color, saving you money on printing down the road.

Logos should also be designed so that they can be used anywhere: on a book spine, on a billboard, on a banner, even engraved in metal for an office sign. Once the basic logo design is established, publishers generally need two or more versions of a logo — a vertical logo for book spines, and a horizontal version for brochures and correspondence.

If you’re tempted to acquire a logo on the cheap from a contest site or $99 logo design sites, be careful. Many customers have presented such logos to us, only to be disappointed when we tell them that the type is unreadable on a book spine, or that the logo has been created in a format that is not easily adjustable for other purposes.

Corporate Image Step Two: Written Graphic Standards

Step two in the establishment of a professional corporate identity is to write down design standards so that all of your marketing materials will have a consistent look. These standards define the size and position of your logo, as well as type faces and colors to be used consistently, so that your marketing materials won’t drift into uncharted territory every time a new item is designed. Your designer can write a graphic standards manual that explains how your logo is (and is not) to be used. With this document for reference, every marketing piece you produce now or in the future, either in house or with the help of an outside designer, will be consistent.

How Can I Minimize Costs While Projecting a Consistent Corporate Image?

A professional corporate identity consistently applied needn’t be expensive. While it’s convenient to call a quick printer every time you think of a new marketing piece, planning ahead can save you significant money on printing. Designers can suggest ways to stretch your printing budget that will still allow you the flexibility to update materials on your desktop whenever the need arises.

For example, if you know you’ll be sending out mailers every two months for the next year, you can realize savings by printing “shells” in color and then updating the message in house on your laser printer.

Another way to save money on printing is to produce bookmarks and postcards at the same time that your book cover prints. Not all book printers will do this, but even if they don’t, you can get the most for your printing dollar locally by “ganging up” your printing jobs instead of ordering each project individually.

Someone once said “the most expensive brochure is the one that doesn’t work.” Reserving a portion of your production budget for a professional logo and designed marketing materials will pay for itself many times over.

Follow Michele on Twitter.

1106 Design works with authors, publishers, business pros, coaches, consultants, speakers . . . anyone who wants a beautiful book, meticulously prepared to industry standards. Top-quality cover design, beautifully designed and typeset interiors, manuscript editing, indexing, title consulting, and expert advice. All available from one convenient source. All offered with our most important service, hand-holding. Attractive pricing choices to fit almost any budget. Prompt, personalized service. Satisfaction guaranteed. We’ll take better care of you and your book than any “self-publishing company.” How may we help you? Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

1106 Design works with authors, publishers, business pros, coaches, consultants, speakers . . . anyone who wants a beautiful book, meticulously prepared to industry standards. Top-quality cover design, beautifully designed and typeset interiors, manuscript editing, indexing, title consulting, and expert advice. All available from one convenient source. All offered with our most important service, hand-holding. Attractive pricing choices to fit almost any budget. Prompt, personalized service. Satisfaction guaranteed. We’ll take better care of you and your book than any “self-publishing company.” How may we help you? Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Most of these articles offer marketing strategies that begin too late. They teach the author how to spend his or her time and money to promote a book that has already been published (or at least prepared for printing). Often, due to the overwhelming amount of bad advice available online, the book has been prepared in a substandard way, and all the marketing in the world, at any price, isn’t going to help it sell.

Book marketing should start before the writing begins. Budding authors should savor that wonderful, initial “Aha!” moment, of course. But then, they should take off the “author” hat and put on the “publisher” hat to conduct some critical analysis. What is my book about? Why am I writing it? Does it solve a problem? Does it offer unique information, or at least a creative twist on an existing topic that will capture the buyer’s imagination? Will anybody but me think it is worth spending money on?

It’s tough to be objective about our own work. We love our own ideas because…well…they are our own ideas. That’s why it’s imperative to seek out objective advice, in publishing and any other business endeavor. When authors decide (or are told by subsidy publishers) that they don’t need developmental editing, copyediting, professional cover and interior design, professional proofreading and a useful index, they are making a decision to produce a terrible book.

Somehow, in all the noise, everyone has forgotten that marketing cannot sell a bad book. Marketing can only bring a book to the prospective buyer’s attention. In an instant, with a quick glance at the cover and perhaps a cursory flip through the pages, the buyer decides whether or not your book is a fair trade for hard-earned dollars. If the buyer decides in your favor and is rewarded with a good book, he tells everyone he knows. If he is disappointed, he also tells everyone he knows, perhaps at Amazon, where millions of others will use his opinion to buy someone else’s book.

If your reaction to the above paragraph is, “I can’t afford these things because I don’t know if my book will sell,” then please reread paragraph three.

The demise of the gatekeepers in publishing is hailed as a good thing. I agree, but only to a point. No good book idea should die simply because it can’t earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for a major publisher. But with freedom comes responsibility. Self-publishers have a new obligation to produce the good book their readers expect and to deliver real value to the buyer. If your book is meant to promote your business or your career, then quality is even more important. A quality book can land you a new client, a speaking gig, or a consulting contract. A bad book can send just the opposite message to your prospect.

Quality book development and design costs money, but it’s money well spent. A solid book concept, carefully planned and edited, with an eye-catching cover, a beautiful interior design, and a useful index will get good reviews and be recommended by buyers to others. Your quality book is your 24/7 sales force, convincing people to buy when you’re not around. Big publishers have their problems to be sure, but this is one area that they always get right, and one area that self-publishers should emulate.

1106 Design works with authors, publishers, business pros, coaches, consultants, speakers . . . anyone who wants a beautiful book, meticulously prepared to industry standards. Top-quality cover design, beautifully designed and typeset interiors, manuscript editing, indexing, title consulting, and expert advice. All available from one convenient source. All offered with our most important service, hand-holding. Attractive pricing choices to fit almost any budget. Prompt, personalized service. Satisfaction guaranteed. We’ll take better care of you and your book than any “self-publishing company.” How may we help you? Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

I just came across this post by Irene Watson, owner of Reader Views, a long-time and well-regarded source for book reviews in the publishing industry. In it, Irene describes how she was taken aback by an author’s accusation that her staff was not professional for offering an objective opinion about the book:

http://www.bloggingauthors.com/blogging_authors/2011/3/13/authors-tell-the-truth-and-you-will-gain-brownie-points.html

Don’t feel bad, Irene. Welcome to the club. The same thing happened to us last month.

We were hired to design a book cover. It was to be the first in a series, so naturally we  wanted to make sure this first book was as strong as it could be to establish interest in future titles.

As always, we began the job by asking the author for his thoughts. After all, we want to design in the right direction from the start, and nobody can know  a book better than the author, right? Well, in this case, not so much.

The author’s first mistake was a misleading title. It had nothing to do with the content of the book, and it contained a word that any reasonable person would associate with the offerings of  a very large company. Perhaps not a trademark in the legal sense, but certainly an association that could pose a problem. When  I brought this up, his response was, “It will be good publicity for my book if a big company goes after a little author like me.” Hmm.

The author’s second mistake was to choose a cover graphic that had nothing whatever to do with the subject. And I mean nothing. We’ve seen a lot of strange choices in cover graphics over the years, but this was beyond the pale.

Shortly after our conversation, I received an email from the author’s business partner. “Tell us what you really think,” he wrote. “We’re new at this, and we want to be sure we’re heading in the right direction.”

Silly me, I believed him.

I wrote back that we had discussed his title and cover graphic and we didn’t get the connection between the two. We were promptly fired, with the accusation “Well, if you don’t get it, we’ll need to work with someone who does.” Hmm.

I won’t tell you the name of the book, because the author is an attorney, and I’ve got better things to do with my time than defend against a lawsuit. But really, was this response even remotely sensible? Why did he ask for an honest opinion, if he didn’t really want one? And further, why did he hire us if he planned to tell us what to do?

When I was growing up, my parents were in awe of experts: doctors, lawyers, priests. They never would have questioned, let alone argued with, the advice of someone far more educated than themselves.

Today, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction. Self-esteem has become so inflated that many people won’t believe the advice of others who really do know more.  Like authors who write their own titles, choose their own cover graphics, design their own book covers, and insist that laying out a book in Word is sufficient. A curious blindness sets in, and the amateur results are judged to be “as good as” professional work.

I’m not saying we should go back to the days when experts were all-powerful people who regularly intimidated their clients. But can we take just a few steps back in time, and recognize that we all have different areas of expertise? I think Irene would agree, and I hope you do, too.

As to the author of the above book, you can bet I’ll be watching Amazon to see what happened.

1106 Design works with authors, publishers, business pros, coaches, consultants, speakers . . . anyone who wants a beautiful book, meticulously prepared to industry standards. Top-quality cover design, beautifully designed and typeset interiors, manuscript editing, indexing, title consulting, and expert advice. All available from one convenient source. All offered with our most important service, hand-holding. We’ll take better care of you and your book than any “self-publishing company.” How may we help you? Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

1. Not recognizing you’re going into business, you’re not just writing
2. Being undercapitalized (examine the basic costs, $5-10K)
3. Not knowing the last 10% is 90% of the job; you don’t finish, you declare an ending
4. Failure to write a one liner, one graf and one-page description prior to completion
5. Failure to market early and get advanced orders
6. Forgetting you don’t have to write ’em to sell ’em—and not offering a line of books
7. Using small artsy cover text instead of a large and easily readable title
8. Using a local printer instead of a book manufacturer (insufficient margin, do math)
9. Using POD instead of making inventory, limiting (eliminating?) profitability
10. Not identifying your audience carefully in advance
11. Going after general audiences instead of target-rich ones
12. Designing the cover by yourself instead of working with a pro
13. Working in isolation (as in, without your industry’s groups)
14. Picking the wrong cover price (too much or too little)
15. Keeping acknowledgments short instead of recognizing all supporters
16. Forgetting to overrun the covers for promo use
17. Putting out literature, instead of handing out literature
18. Failure to give away books like mad
19. Failure to get Kremer’s book, 1,001 Ways to Market Your Books
20. Failure to have books and promo with you at all times
21. Failure to put your book out where people can see it everywhere you go
22. Failure to inform any interviewer of your one-liner bio and website
23. Failure to write and issue “White Papers” to establish your expertise
24. Referring to your book without using its title
25. Waving your book or failing to hold it next to your face during video interviews
26. Running out of business cards
27. Not having a ready-to-go bag for appearances
28. Not having extra books, promo and biz cards in your trunk always
29. Having no name badge made from your book cover, spare in car
30. Having to fumble to get to a business card
31. Stumbling on your elevator speech, or not even having one
32. After initial-release announcements, make all PR s/b subject not book oriented
33. Remember to get spine width from printer, and use all the real estate for your title
34. Stack book cartons at home in tight piles, wrap in cloth like gifts, use as furniture
35. Get TextExpander and conserve your time and fingers

This list is generally framed as mistakes publishers frequently make. It can easily be reversed and framed positively, as things you should do to help ensure your success. Trying rewriting it mentally, it’s a beneficial exercise.

Alan Korwin
BLOOMFIELD PRESS
“We publish the gun laws—word-for-word, and in plain English.”
4848 E. Cactus #505-440 • Scottsdale, AZ 85254
1-800-707-4020 Orders • 602-996-4020
info@gunlaws.com
GunLaws.com

Do you have a book inside you? Are you wondering where to start and how to get published? Come find answers at the Arizona Book Publishing Association introduction-to-publishing conference on Saturday April 16, 2011, from 9:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. at the Fiesta Resort in Tempe.

Called Manuscript to Marketing: Publishing in the 21st Century, the day-long program offers step-by-step advice from experts in editing, cover design, book layout, production and promotion. Join other aspiring authors and prospective publishers who are looking for tools to guide them in the constantly-changing world of books, e-books, apps, and online reading communities.

Eight information-packed sessions will provide an overview of the complete publishing process, drawing on the expertise of the 100+ members of the Arizona Book Publishing Association. Topics will include:

• What Is Your Book/Who is Your Audience?
  Does your idea need tweaking? How do you get organized?

• Writing and Editing Your Manuscript
  Do’s and Don’ts of getting your manuscript ready for publication

• Cover and Interior Design
  Where to splurge, where to save

• Brainstorm with Experts (lunch program)
  E-mail your questions in advance for the lunchtime session

• E-Book Basics
  Digesting a big topic by taking small bites

• Printing and Distribution
  Moving your books to readers

• Website Essentials
  What you need first, what your future goals should be

• Marketing to the Media and Your Audience
  Getting the buzz going and keeping it humming

Plenty of time will be available for meeting vendors of publishing services. Bring your idea, draft or manuscript for expert reviews. Space is limited to 60 attendees, so sign up now.

The conference will be held at the Fiesta Resort, 2100 South Priest Drive, Tempe, with sign-in starting at 8:15 on Saturday morning. Cost is $75.00 for members of the ABPA and $95.00 for non-members, until April 4. After that, registration is $90.00 and $110.00 respectively. To register, pay online at www.azbookpub.com or call 480-777-9250.

Register

Members Register Here

Nonmembers Register Here

About APBA

Founded in Phoenix in 1992, the Arizona Book Publishing Association’s mission is to advance and promote successful book publishing in Arizona through education, community involvement, cooperative effort, peer recognition, industry advocacy, and the support of first amendment rights.

1106 Design works with authors, publishers, business pros, coaches, consultants, speakers . . . anyone who wants a beautiful book, meticulously prepared to industry standards. Top-quality cover design, beautifully designed and typeset interiors, manuscript editing, indexing, title consulting, and expert advice. All available from one convenient source. All offered with our most important service, hand-holding. Attractive pricing choices to fit almost any budget. Prompt, personalized service. Satisfaction guaranteed. We’ll take better care of you and your book than any “self-publishing company.” How may we help you? Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Experienced book designers don’t just “click a button” that makes the text automatically snap into final form. We work line by line, word by word, and sometimes letter by letter to achieve optimal spacing between words and letters to maximize reading comprehension and minimize reader distractions.

Here are just a few of the issues book designers attend to during the formatting process to give your book a professional appearance:

The first step in designing the interior of your book is to create a sample chapter. A good book designer doesn’t use a template. We always choose fonts and images that are in keeping with your subject matter to give your book a unique (and appropriate!) look.

Normally, several samples will be developed, because there are multiple ways to design any book. These samples will include subtleties in the use of font styles and sizes that make a book look like a real book, and not a word-processed document. Once these initial concepts are presented, it’s necessary to work back and forth with the author/publisher on this sample until all the details are hammered out. Only then is the rest of the book layed out to match the sample.

Here are just a few of the things book designers attend to during the layout process:

We ensure facing pages end on the same baseline without the first line of a paragraph landing on the bottom of a page, or the last line of a paragraph landing on the top of a page. When the text doesn’t cooperate with these rules (which is often), we rework previous paragraphs and pages as needed.

We fix paragraphs that end in a word with less than five characters (including punctuation) or a word fragment (the stub end of a hyphenated word).

We banish “ladders” (too many hyphens in a row) and find and fix hyphenated compound words, both of which distract the reader.

We eliminate word stacks—when the same word falls one above the other on several consecutive lines of text.

We adjust any overly tight or loose lines that software often allows to slip through.

We watch for rivers of white in the text—when word spaces fall in a pattern that is distracting to the reader.

We eliminate hyphens at the bottom of a right-hand page so that the reader won’t have to hold a thought while the page is turned.

We make sure the last page of a chapter has at least four lines of text.

These items are only the beginning. Software out of the box only goes so far . . . it is this level of human intervention that turns your manuscript into typographic art, and when you see the results, we know you’ll agree that this time is well-spent.

1106 Design works with authors, publishers, business pros, coaches, consultants, speakers . . . anyone who wants a beautiful book, meticulously prepared to industry standards. Top-quality cover design, beautifully designed and typeset interiors, manuscript editing, indexing, title consulting, and expert advice. All available from one convenient source. All offered with our most important service, hand-holding. Attractive pricing choices to fit almost any budget. Prompt, personalized service. Satisfaction guaranteed. We’ll take better care of you and your book than any “self-publishing company.” How may we help you? Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

George would just shake his head and get back to the work he loved, crafting the tastiest varieties of bread, rolls, cakes, cookies, pies, and pot pies that the neighbors had come to expect. Each afternoon, when he left for the day, he said to himself, Someday, I’ll open my own bakery, and I’ll bake whatever I want. He saved his money and waited patiently for that day to arrive.

At long last,  the perfect building for George’s bakery became available. It was located on a busy street, near a bus stop, a school, a factory, and many homes. This is wonderful, thought George. I’ll have customers all day long, and maybe during the factory’s night shift, too.

For weeks before the grand opening, everyone in the area eagerly anticipated the breads, rolls, cakes, cookies, pies, and pot pies they’d be able to buy. The factory workers and tired commuters looked forward to a savory, ready-to-eat dinner; the schoolchildren waited for a sweet after-school snack; everyone looked forward to their favorite varieties of breads and rolls.

George was more nervous than he expected, so he played it safe. On grand opening day, customers streamed into George’s bakery, but curiously, the only item for sale was pumpernickel bread. Dozens and dozens of loaves of pumpernickel bread. Nothing else. Oh, well, they thought, it’s only the first day. Maybe tomorrow there will be more breads, rolls, cakes, cookies, pies, and pot pies. Some customers bought a loaf  of pumpernickel bread, because they had waited so long for George’s bakery to open, but most customers decided to return the next day.

The next day, and the next, and the next, they gave George another chance, but again they found only pumpernickel bread. Each day, one or two people bought a loaf. Finally, an exasperated customer asked George, “This is a bakery! When will you offer white bread, rolls, cakes, cookies, pies, and pot pies?”

“It’s expensive to bake those things,” he replied.  “I want to make sure my bakery is a success first.”

“Oh,” said the disappointed customer.

Gradually, the flood of new customers slowed to a trickle. After a few visits, the factory workers went back to brown-bagging it and the schoolchildren realized they would find no cookies at George’s bakery. Everyone else reluctantly accepted that George would only offer pumpernickel bread, no matter what they wanted.

Finally, the day came when not one customer showed up. George was puzzled. Isn’t my pumpernickel bread any good, he wondered? So he walked out front and stopped a gentleman on the street. “Why don’t you come in to my bakery,” he asked?

“Because I don’t like pumpernickel bread,” the man replied simply. “I buy quite a lot of white bread, cakes, and pies.”

“Oh,” said George. “But I can’t afford to bake those things. At least not until I make some money from my pumpernickel bread.”

“Very well,” said the gentleman.

We know how this parable ends, don’t we? Poor George’s bakery failed. He went back to work for his grumpy, demanding boss who understood that it was necessary to give customers what they want.

New publishers who decide to test the market with only an eBook are making exactly the same mistake that George made. They rightly offer their eBook on Amazon and other online retailers where millions of customers can see it 24/7, but then fail to offer the book in other formats that customers want to buy.

It’s undeniably attractive to publish only an eBook. The costs are minimal and it’s scary for any new publisher to invest in cover design and typesetting when they don’t know if their book will be a success. But guess what? Plenty of people still prefer a printed book, no matter how much eBook devotees bend and twist the statistics. No business owner can lock out a significant portion of their potential market and hope to succeed.

Today, publishers are not just book providers, they are content providers. Consumers want to receive information in different ways at different times. Some people buy printed books to read at home, a welcome change from looking at a computer screen at the office all day. Others buy Ebooks to read at the airport. Others listen to audio books while driving. Some consumers buy the same book in multiple formats. It’s risky to provide content in only one form. Publishers may sell some books in that format, but it’s impossible to count the number of sales that were missed.

My advice? Offer that eBook, but also print POD at Lightning Source. Yes, there’s the one-time charge for cover and interior design, but at least  you will be offering your book to everyone who may want it. If and when the day arrives that you are selling only eBooks, you can always stop printing.

As Dan Poynter, The Book Futurist, says: “Some writers plan to publish digitally only—to save money. This is a mistake. If you publish an eBook, you are perceived as a writer. If you publish a pBook (paper), you are regarded as an author. Paper books are retained; PDFs disappear in a click. Self-publishers should offer editions to fit any lifestyle: Paper, eBook, LARGE PRINT for the visually impaired, audio book, etc. Give the buying customer what he or she wants.”

Just like George’s very smart boss.

1106 Design works with authors, publishers, business pros, coaches, consultants, speakers . . . anyone who wants a beautiful book, meticulously prepared to industry standards. Top-quality cover design, beautifully designed and typeset interiors, manuscript editing, indexing, title consulting, and expert advice. All available from one convenient source. All offered with our most important service, hand-holding. Prompt, personalized service. Satisfaction guaranteed. We’ll take better care of you and your book than any “self-publishing company.” How may we help you? Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

It’s understandable that people would be misled. A Google search for “self-publishing” returns page after page of companies, some small and some very large, who offer “do-it-yourself” publishing solutions.

Major newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal in this recent article, correctly emphasize the benefits of self-publishing, but instead of writing a balanced article that includes the tried-and-true way to turn a manuscript into a quality book, they focus only on the cheesy companies who  encourage people to do exactly the opposite.

It should not be a surprise that professional book publishing takes a team of experts. Book editors, book cover designers, book interior designers and others combine their talents to produce a product that makes a terrific first impression, and then keeps that promise with quality information and easy-to-read text inside. What business owner would want any less than that, when a book is being used as a business card or as an introduction to sell consulting services?

Unfortunately, the self-publishing companies encourage clients to design their own book covers, and upload a Word file for the book’s interior. This may seem like perfectly sensible advice to anyone with a computer, until you compare the results to a “real” book.

Here’s an example of a typical self-published book that came to my attention last week. I never met the author of this book, Dave Cooke, but I’m certain he put a tremendous amount of effort into this project, and has high hopes for its success. (If you see this post, Dave, I hope you’ll accept the following analysis as an offering from one business owner to another, as a sincere effort to help.)

First, let’s look at Dave’s cover and compare it to one released by bestselling sales guru, Zig Ziglar. Zig’s images are screen shots from Amazon. See the difference?

The photo on Dave’s cover isn’t bad. It needs a little color adjustment (his face is too red), but otherwise it’s a nice, open pose with attractive negative space around his figure. This negative space could have been used to make Dave look even more friendly and approachable, but instead, it boxes him in, not once, but twice with the blue corners. Then the photo is placed on an olive drab background. With a rainbow of colors to choose from, why olive drab?

The type faces used on Dave’s cover are old fashioned, and the use of all caps with a drop shadow gives the cover a homemade look. (Designers use drop shadows, too, but usually in a more subtle way, so that they are barely noticeable.) The dark blue text on the olive background is difficult to read. The “Sales Cooke” play on the author’s name is clever, and since the cooking theme is carried throughout the text, it’s appropriate. But using it four times (title, apron, author name, and subtitle) is a wee bit overwhelming.

Now look at the Zig Ziglar cover design. Zig isn’t in a box. Here’s there in the room with you. His dark suit causes him to almost, but not quite, blend into the dark background of the cover. His picture is small, which leaves maximum space for the title and subtitle.  The typography on this cover is top notch, and the subtle ornamentation gently guides the eye from title to subtitle. The use of caps and small caps says “first class” and the author’s name in a wide red band at the bottom anchors the design.

Now let’s compare the interiors of both books. Dave’s chapter opener is on the left, Zig’s is on the right:

Dave’s chapter opener is rather dull. The chapter number and title start high on the page, and barely stand out from the text below. It would be easy to miss the fact that this is, indeed, a chapter opener, and not just another page of text. Dave’s text is set ragged right instead of  justified, which is one mark of a self-published book. The gaps on the right side are huge. Much of this is due to the inadequacy of Word for the job.

Zig’s chapter opener is much more eye-catching and attractive. The chapter number is small and placed at the upper right hand side of the page. The chapter title is large and the chapter subtitle is smaller and italic, with a line above to divide the two. White space is used beautifully in this design. The space between the chapter number and the title is slightly smaller than the space between the chapter subtitle and the beginning of the text, so it looks open and airy, but with a purpose. The text is justified, and it begins with a drop cap. The first subhead toward the bottom is beautifully set in slightly letterspaced text for an overall classy appearance. There’s no doubt that this is the beginning of a chapter.

Now let’s compare two more interior pages:

At the top of Dave’s page on the left, look at the downward angle of the text in the first paragraph. The sidebar below is much too dark, and the type is practically crashing into the edges of the box. You can’t see it here, but this sidebar continues on the next page, and on to a third page for a few lines. A book designer would have started the sidebar at the top of the page above, and made the text fit on two facing pages. A book designer would also make the gray background much lighter for POD printing, due to the limitations of the equipment.

Zig’s interior page is much cleaner and more organized. Even though his sidebar text is much smaller than Dave’s, and not a direct comparison, the text wraps around it in an interesting way, to keep the reader engaged.

Not visible in the above examples are the typos in Dave’s text, or editing that leaves quite a lot to be desired. All in all, this book doesn’t make Dave look like a professional consultant,  even though the advice in the book is very good. That’s a shame, and I’m sure it’s not what Dave intended.

Dave was misled by a company that didn’t want him to “go away” once he found them. They lied and told him he could do everything himself, rather than encourage him to search for the right experts to help with his book design. Why? Because those experts would have told Dave to run away and never look back; that there are better, more profitable ways to self-publish.

Every designer and editor I know is frustrated about this situation. We’re not sure how to make ourselves heard against the overwhelming noise produced by the self-publishing companies, but we’re working on it. If you’d like to  help, please share this post.

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