Self Publishing - Design
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| Straun, self-published by Richard Brown |
Rightly or wrongly, I fancy myself a bit as a whiz with design. The illustration here
shows a book cover I created for my account of the origins of organised Scottish skiing. The
back cover had another picture, a blurb about the book and some
friendly quotations from people who know the scene.
For most self-publishers, the costs of hiring a professional designer might be
daunting. If you don’t feel confident enough to do the job yourself,
maybe it would be worth asking an artistically-minded friend to
put some ideas together. The truth is that it’s not that difficult to
produce something that serves quite well. Much will depend on the intended market for
your book. If you want to compete in a commercial field then professional help
with design is probably essential.
There’s also the question of the layout of the text itself; typeface size and style, indented paragraphs or not? speech quotation marks or none? and so forth. You may want to take professional advice on this too but to save money, just look at as many books as possible and pick the features which you like.
Whilst looking at books for these details, take note of the introductory pages where the name of the publisher (your company name!) and title page, acknowledgements, copyright warning and so forth are. Use whatever features appeal to you (but be careful not to infringe copyright!)
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