The Design Pines are a leg of the self-publishing book journey after line edits. This forest is where you gather materials and build tools to create the visual magic of your story. Unless you’re a skilled visual artist and graphic designer yourself, it’s wise to enlist one or more book designers. (If you’re publishing traditionally after a trip through the Querying Sands, your publisher will hire them.)
Because visual magic is usually less familiar to writers than wordy wonder is, this post is more detailed than the previous Book Journey Map explanations—and there are more free resources for more info at the end.
Cover Conifers
Your cover is your book’s primary marketing tool, so make sure you’ve got a skilled visual wizard working on it. For them to work their magic, they’ll need a thorough design brief from you. Some book designers will read a large portion of the book before they get to work, but those who do are usually more expensive and are often outside the budget of self-publishers. Instead, you’ll need to provide a solid design brief:
- A good description and pitch for the book
- A full summary
- 3–5 comp titles (recently published books that are similar to yours in tone, plot points, audience, etc.)
- Details about your ideal audience
- The trim size, or the end dimensions of your book in width x height (common trim sizes are 6×9 and 5.5×8.5 for trade paperbacks and cases and 4.25×7 for mass-market paperback)
- Any specific style preferences or requests you have
- Any other information the designer requests
It’s also important to know whether you are hiring a cover designer and a cover illustrator, a cover designer only, or one person who does both design and illustration. Illustrators create full pieces of art that are integrated into a cover design. Not all illustrators specialize in type layout and other graphic design skills; not all graphic designers have strong illustration skills. But not every cover needs illustration to be effective. (Check out the resources below for articles about illustration vs. photography vs. design.)
At this stage, a cover designer can create your front cover and a fairly refined concept for your book’s spine and back cover. But the spine width depends on how many pages are in the final book, and that number can vary depending on how the book is typeset. After typesetting, you’ll need to get the spine adjusted for the final page count before printing anything.
Page Layout Ponderosas
If cover designers are wizards, interior layout designers—or typesetters—are alchemists, combining a specialized set of ingredients to create visual gold out of the rough materials of your manuscript. Typesetting a book means considering margin widths, line length, text size, leading (line spacing), and more to create a balanced, readable, and inviting page for a specific genre and audience.
Some designers do both cover design and interior layouts, but some prefer one specialty over the other. Either way, your typesetter should have some idea of what your cover designer is up to before they do too much work. Your cover is your number-one marketing tool, and although the interior doesn’t have to align with it 100 percent, they should never clash.
At this stage (before your book is fully copyedited), a typesetter can create the base template they’ll use for your entire book once you finalize your text. They’ll usually create a set of sample pages for your review that includes the frontmatter and a chapter or two of text for your approval. To build this template, they’ll need many of the same things your cover designer does—the design brief material is useful for everyone—but they’ll also need a few other details:
- Information about any non-English letters in your book (accented letters, Greek, Cyrillic, etc.) so they can pick fonts that have the right character set
- The full manuscript as it stands so they can glance through and see how often certain elements—like letters or poems—appear
- Any other details they request (you can see Looseleaf’s basic intake information for design on our contact page when you start a design request)
Once you approve the design template, you’ll need to give your typesetter a polished, copyedited manuscript for layout. They’ll usually use specialized software—like Adobe InDesign, QuarkXPress, or Affinity Publisher—to fine-tune everything and provide a PDF to you for proofreading.
Help Along the Way
Graphic design is usually a bit further out of writers’ fields of experience than word-centered tasks like line editing and copyediting, so it’s good to learn a bit about what books need before trying to hire people for your team.
Types of Design Pine Denizens
- Illustrators
- Photographers
- Graphic designers (including both cover designers and typesetters/book layout folks)
- Ebook formatters
- Art directors
Resources About Art Direction
- “How to ‘Leave Room’ for Type” by Lauren Panepinto
- “Book Covers: Illustration vs. Photo vs. Design” by Laren Panepinto
- Book Covers Before & After series by Kelley McMorris
Resources About Typesetting
- “What Is Typesetting” by Kristy S. Gilbert
- “Creating a Well-Turned Page” by Catherine Forrest
- Book Design in the Wild: The Phlebotomist (video)
Resources for Stock Elements & Fonts
Depending your design choices and who you hire, you may need to purchase licenses to stock elements and fonts. (Some designers include these fees in their own invoices; some don’t.) Here are some of the many, many places online to find quality stock photos, illustrations, and fonts.
- iStock (primarily for photos and illustrations)
- Shutterstock (primarily for photos and illustrations)
- MyFonts (for fonts)
- Adobe Fonts (for fonts)
- CreativeMarket (for all sorts of design elements)
- Design Cuts (for all sorts of design elements; tends to focus on large packs of assets)
- BestBookTemplates.com (a Looseleaf project providing book layout templates)
There are also some amazing places to find free-to-use fonts that are still good quality (tip the designers if you can!). Be sure to read the licensing information—some fonts are free to use in some circumstances and not others, and it’s important to respect the boundaries these creators set on their work.
- The League of Movable Type (dependable open-source fonts, usually with robust character sets)
- FontSquirrel (free fonts, but with more variability in character sets and licensing permissions)
Where to Next?
While book design is happening here in the Pines, copyediting is happening over in the Red-Ink Woods. Once the book is fully copyedited, a designer can typeset your text in your page layout template and fine-tune it for publication. They can also finish your wraparound cover once there’s a final page count.
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