Like many of us, your book cover works best if it has one job to do—and only one job. Book covers do not multi-task well. A successful book cover delegates everything that will not significantly contribute to book sales to another part of the book. Here are a few things you should not ask your book cover to do: 1. Promote someone else’s business. Your book cover is not the place to reference your designer, illustrator, editor, or publisher unless doing so will directly contribute to sales. A successful book cover is something like a spoiled child shouting, “Me! Me! Me!” It needs to be. Credit where credit is due is wonderful—on the Book Information page (where Library of Congress information appears, if that’s relevant to your book), on a separate thank-you page in the front or back, as a footnote somewhere—there are all kinds of tasteful ways to provide a business “bump” to those who have contributed to your book’s visual and verbal excellence. But the cover isn’t the place for it ...

I was having lunch with an old friend of mine yesterday, and the conversation turned to writing, editing and publishing. This was hardly surprising, since she's a professor of English at a nearby university, and I'm returning to contract teaching after a long stint as a book editor and designer. (I'm not quitting; in my life jobs tend to accrete rather than change. Now I'll be a book designer and editor who also writes books and teaches College Writing.) I had taken along a book published on CreateSpace, and as we talked she flipped through it. "Beautiful pictures," she said. And they were. Furthermore, the type was clean and crisp, the production values of the book (things like overall print quality, straightness of crops, color balancing, and so forth) were excellent. "I have a friend who might be interested in self-publishing," she said. "But it's just text. How does that compare?" I picked up one of the mid-grade paperback b...

We live in the days of Kindle. There's no denying that e-book readers have much to offer; users can carry thousands of books around with them. Cost of production is virtually eradicated. And the trees saved…well, as I said, there are many good reasons to invest in an e-book reader, and use it regularly. But here's another thing. The most popular e-book readers--like Kindle--don't support graphics. Users are offered a few simple type options, and a range of sizes, and that's pretty much it. The thinking is that this reduces file size, I think, and is supposed to enhance reading efficiency. It also strips books of their visual elements--their illustrations, their page layouts, and their font stylings. Does this matter? Well, yes. Quick now, which of these words is the "holiest?" Which of these was written by someone in tie-dye and a medallion, which by someone wearing barrettes, and which by men laying the foundations of a nation? A book's design--...

http://bit.ly/JaneGardamWritingRoom Though I have never read A Room Of One's Own, something in the very words strikes me as deeply profound. In order for creativity to thrive, there must be time and space for it to grow. Many enter "creative" professions--writers, designers, and illustrators, for instance--with the expectation that their creativity will grow and flourish in others' rooms. It's not so. Writers and designers in the communications and advertising industries--where I work--expend enormous amounts of creativity every day. And we should. We are paid to be creative. The hitch is, we are creating to serve someone else's dream--we are writing in someone else's room, so to speak, and they get to set the house rules. Often, those rules don't make a lot of sense to outsiders. Successful writers (and designers) have to learn how to offer up their best work and most informed opinions--and then smile and make the client's often less-infor...

The Diviner’s Tale Bradford Morrow ISBN 978-0-547-38263-0 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010 The Diviner’s Tale , by Bradford Morrow, is not what it appears to be. I knew this before I even started the book. “It’s by a man, writing from a first-person female point of view,” said Dani, one of the web mistresses here. “I’ll be interested in your opinion.” I’ll be honest: throughout much of the book I thought Morrow didn’t quite pull it off. The story was engaging. Cassie's parents, Nep and Rosalie, are well-drawn and engaging. Jonah and Morgan, the narrator Cassie’s two sons, are interesting and funny. The settings in which the story takes place are vividly drawn. But as I read I found it difficult to visualize Cassie. There are hints—she’s tall, thin, and has curly red hair—but even those details have a curious unreality to them. What is heart-wrenchingly clear about her is that she is very much her parents’ child—she is both a water diviner, like her father, and a schoolteac...

Building a book like The Real Alice in Wonderland involves not only creativity and design skills, but an impressive array of technical knowledge in an evolving industry. It sounds simplistic to say that a designer designing a book needs to remember that she is, ahem, designing a book, but it’s true—and it’s vital that the designer know not just that a book is being designed, but what kind of a book. Books demand design considerations that more typical designer projects—brochures, flyers, billboards, folders, even annual reports—don’t typically pose. Moreover, they’re not the sorts of things that any one is born knowing. Take, for example, the question of the gutter. Every book has one. It’s the crevice in the center of the book where all the pages are bound together. In books like The Real Alice in Wonderland the binding method means that type and critical images must be positioned so that they end before the page disappears down into the gutter. The thicker the book, the deeper the...