Should I Hire a Professional Cover Designer and Formatter?

This guest post was written by Susi of Creative Blueprint Design.

Raise your hand if you go onto Amazon with your eyes closed and scroll down until you read the description of a book. Or if you go to a bookstore with your eyes closed.

They say don’t judge a book by its cover . . . but we DO!

The first thing you see is usually the spine or the front cover. And when you get through those two things, you flip the book over to read the description. And from there, you decide to buy the book or not.

The cover matters. Whether it’s the front or back cover or the spine. You might as well have a blank journal instead of 50,000 carefully thought-out and well-planned words on the inside if you can’t get your target audience to see and connect with your cover. Covers matter, and they need to be aesthetically pleasing and spark interest to get the viewer to either open the book or flip it over to read more about your book. You spend so much time writing your entire book, writing the blurb on the back of the book to entice people, having it copy edited, and then you want to cut corners on what makes someone want to even consider opening your book in the first place?

Book Designer Expertise

New trends have shown that book cover design can be very straightforward and direct. We see a lot of sans serifs, big bold words, and some background images. So, you might think, Why do I need to hire a designer for that? I can do that. But often it’s the simplest designs that are the hardest. Think about the Apple logo, the Nike logo. They don’t look all that hard to create, right? But the amount of work that goes into coming up with simple shapes that function as they do is where strategic thinking, professionalism, an understanding of typography and image placement comes in.

A professional book designer is more than just someone who puts a picture behind some big, bold words. A book designer listens to your ideas and visions, looks at competitors, and creates covers that connect your content to your audience. They understand how to create a hierarchy for the reader to read specific things first on the cover and lead the eye accordingly—whether you want your name to be the next thing to be read after the title or subtitle or a tagline or something else. They understand the margins necessary and how much bleed and resolution your images need to fulfill softcover- or hardcover-bound specifications to print your book. Book designers know how to create visually pleasing designs for the front, spine, and back cover. The last two are often overlooked when trying to DIY things. Even when you've created a successful cover by yourself, does the formatting of your back cover copy and the placement of the content hold up as well? Or are you going to start to worry your audience as to what to expect on the inside now, because if the back cover looks DIYed, how is their reading experience going to be on the inside?

Everything is connected. You lead your audience from the front cover or spine to the back cover and invite them into your book. Heck, book blurbs often literally says to open the book.

Doing It Yourself

And this is where professional formatting comes in. As a reader, we know what it’s like when we open a book and it’s hard to read the text because either the lines are too close together, the font is hard to read, the words don’t provide enough contrast or have too much contrast and all the letters blur together. Or when the paragraphs run too far to either side and we constantly have to shift our thumbs up and down or crack open the spine to read the book.

Some authors have a great eye for what their pages are supposed to look like and might be able to DIY the entire book themselves. There are many automated tools out there as well, but not everyone has the time or the want to add that to their long list of to-dos to learn all of the above. Your time is best spent on something you know how to do best: writing. You shouldn’t have to delay getting your book that you have worked so hard on out to the world because now you need to learn about typography, margins, book design, print specifications, and go line by line through the entire book again by yourself making sure the rags and paragraphs look good, that there are no widows or orphans, that there are no single lines at the top or bottom of a page, that there are not too many broken words or single character words at the end of lines of paragraphs, that your chapter pages, headers, and footers align and look consistent throughout. That is a lot of work and takes time.

Leave It to the Pros

When I try to paint a wall in my house, I have to figure out what the right paintbrush is to use, I have to buy paint brushes, trays, masking tape, then I tape up every wall, which takes forever, and when I do a good job painting the wall, I am still worried how to take the tape off correctly to now not mess up all the good work I have done, and then I am left with a mess to clean up. When you hire a professional, they have all the tools, and they don’t even need to spend time masking the walls. The same for a professional book designer. They have the tools, they understand how to do it right, so you don’t need to worry and spend extra time trying to figure it out. Your time is better spent looking for the right designer than teaching yourself another profession that might not be your passion, being frustrated along the way, and not feeling super confident to show off your book.

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About Susi Clark

I studied Graphic Design at the University of Maryland and worked as a Graphic Designer for a financial and book-publishing company for over a decade.

Now, I dedicate my time to helping a range of clients from individuals to small-businesses and even corporate companies that operate world-wide with my own company, Creative Blueprint Design.

I can’t wait to bring your visions to life!