How to hire a book designer

The first step to when you hire a book designer, is to choose one with experience. That experience will come in handy as book design can look deceptively simple, but there are many technicalities your designer needs to be skilled in for your book to be professionally designed.

Such technicalities include your choice of fonts, colors, text and images, bleeds, spine measurements, choosing the paper, complexities of fonts, choosing the right colours and being aware of costs. This also includes understanding how to prepare a file for printers and being able to collaborate with printers so you get the best printed job.

You want your design to be current, so hire a designer whose books look modern. Further, the design of the cover for your book also depends on what current design trends exist. Typefaces, sizes, placing of titles and the blurb all keep continually changing. Your book designer needs to be aware of these trends, while maintaining a design that matches the genre of your book.

A book designer, once the design is decided upon, can have the book ready in about a week. While novels are fairly straightforward, it could take anywhere from five to seven days to design a heavily illustrated book. A book with a complex layout, where the text and images flow in multiple patterns, or where each page is different, it would take an experienced designer a few weeks to complete.

A professional designer should offer you two or three preliminary designs. Once you indicate your preference for a particular design, you can ask the designer to perform two or three revisions using different elements and experimenting with colors and images. You may have to go through a few such revisions before you finally find a design that you think is a perfect fit.

Before you meet with a book designer, you should do adequate research on the kind of layouts that have impressed you. For many, it simplifies the job since they know where they have to start without having to waste too much time experimenting. If you like, bring along samples of books you like and explain every detail you want to be duplicated in your book.

Contact GoodBooks to get started on your book design.

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