The cover design of a book needs to convey a number of elements well. The title and the author’s name are obvious, but it also needs to grab the potential readers attention. A good cover design will also convey the contents of the book.
The interior of the book is often secondary but requires just as much attention. There are a number of factors to consider. What font style to use? Will there be an index? Should the end notes be placed at the end of each chapter or at the end of the book? The answers to these and many more questions can easily be determined depending on the type of book.
We have worked on family history books, local history books, school year books and memorial books to name a few. Every book is unique and we treat each book as such. We meet with the author at the beginning of the design process to understand the book and the message the cover is to convey.
Are you thinking of self-publishing? We can advise you and help you set up your ISBN and barcode, we can even help you market the book to the public when it is ready to go.
We have a number of printers in the local area that we use and highly recommend. If you would like us to help with design, self-publishing and printing of your book please send us a message.
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This is a very common question. Generally a serif font is better for use in academic books or novels, books where there is a lot of content. Serif fonts, like Times New Roman, form links between letters and are less tiring for the eyes.
Sans serif fonts, for example Arial, are suitable for headings and short books or brochures.
This can be up to personal preference. There are some common book sizes like A4 (297mm x 210mm), A5 (210mm x 148mm) and 230mm x 150mm, which is the most cost efficient for a short run book. Ultimately it is up to the author. We have produced books in all three sizes listed and can provide examples when you are ready to discuss your books size.
For the content of your book we can work with most computer files. Including Microsoft Word, Pages, Excel, Publisher, Adobe InDesign, PDFs and more. If you are using a program that is not listed please send a message to discuss.
For the photos and imagery we can work with JPEG and PNG files. We prefer the images are supplied separate to the content, but if you supply them inserted in a Word document for example, we can also work with this.
Photo editing is more often than not required for each book design. Simply put, the larger the image you supply the better. We will be able to edit the image to ensure it is in the correct format for printing. For printing, images are required to be 300 ppi resolution and in CMYK for colour printing and grayscale for black and white printing. If you have any questions regarding your images please give us a call, we have worked with low resolution images before and achieved surprisingly good results.
The majority of authors we work with self publish, the process is so much simpler than it used to be. To self publish you will need an ISBN and barcode from Thorpe-Bowker. Once this step is complete you can register your book with the National Library of Australia (NLA) and complete the prepublication data form. The form can be found here. When your book is printed send a copy to the NLA and local libraries in your area. If you would like more information on self-publishing and where to start read Peta’s article for tips here.
Generally we like to supply two options. During initial meetings we will ask if you have any ideas or visions for the cover. If you have a design in mind or have even sketched out a rough design please let us know. We will provide this as a design option and an alternative.
If you are not sure where to start, I always like to start with the images that are being included in a book. More often than not there is a favourite photo or diagram that inspires the cover.
The big one! Our quote will depend on a number of factors, we don’t have a hard and fast per page price. Some books and mostly text with photos kept to a small number of pages. Others have many images scattered throughout the book amongst the text, these take a little more time to typeset. When you make contact with us we will ask a number of questions and then send through a quote. To give you an idea some of the questions include: what is your preferred book size, what is number of pages in your document, the number of words, how many images are you including, what format you will be supplying the content and images in, etc.
We are more than happy to discuss your options with you and provide a free quotation when you are ready.
