book design — Blog - Carrie Muller

Last week I had a meeting about book formatting and cover art. IT WAS VERY EXCITING.

…By which I mean it was Totally Normal since, as a Modern Businesswoman, I am Entirely Accustomed to Taking Meetings…with Professionals…about Business Matters.

Anyway.

It’s a bit intimidating, this part. This is where it goes from being an idea in my head to a tangible thing that exists in the world for other people to look at and pick up and put back on the shelf and thumb through with sticky fingers and shove in a backpack and callously dog-ear and drop in a puddle and set in front of a fan to dry and press under other heavy books that will never quite straighten out the wavy pages. Maybe someone will hollow it out to use as a book safe to hide Secret Things. A girl can dream, anyway.

My point is you want to get it right if you’re aiming for book safe status. You want the font to be readable, you want the running head not to trip, you want the cover to look professional and enticing, like a petit bonbon in a French patisserie.

But writers, for the most part, are not designers. We don’t know how to achieve any of those things. All we know about are stupid words, which are only worth 1/1000 of a picture. So we have to bring in a professional artiste and try to paint a word-picture that they can then translate into a picture-picture.

It’s hard to let go of control and trust someone else. It’s like getting a tattoo—you don’t want to put yourself in the hands of someone who says, “Gimme twenty bucks and a ballpoint pen.” But a talented designer knows what they’re about, and writers can still influence the final product. A cover brief outlines writers’ preferences, ideas, thematic elements…all the Word Stuff that helps the designer do their Mysterious Art Things and magic up a cover that makes you go, “AWWWW YEAH” and then cough quietly because that was a very unprofessional reaction.

While I won’t tell you what we discussed in the meeting because I don’t want to spoil the cover reveal, I will suggest some phrases you can use to communicate effectively with an artist:

I don’t know what I like, but I know what I don’t like, so maybe you could just show me some ideas and we’ll go from there.
I want a font that feels playful, but also a little sullen? Like a teenage girl who goes to get ice cream with her dad but then the cool kids from school show up. You know what I mean?
Yeah, I watched a couple YouTube videos about Photoshop. I could probably do your job.
I really like the cover of this book here. What if we just take it and replace the words with my title?
Can you get this done by tomorrow morning?
You know the feeling when you’re on a boat and the sea air rushes through your hair, and it stings to open your eyes but you do it anyway, and the sun on the water makes you feel a little dazzled and dizzy, and your breath catches at the sheer vastness of the ocean? That’s the sense I want people to get when they look at the cover.
Just make it look good.