Checklist for redesigning your book cover – and maximising the marketing opportunities

I recently changed the covers of my Nail Your Novels … and got myself a nice long to-do list as a result. But as well as refreshing the look of the books, a redesign is also a chance to smarten up the covers’ marketing potential. Here’s how.

Don’t miss the opportunity to tweak your sales wording

I’ve already blogged about changing the cover design to target readers effectively (the last time I changed the cover of book 1, as it happens). But revising the book doesn’t have to stop at the visuals. Since you published the title, have you had any standout reviews? Work them into the redesign – on the front as a teaser or the back as part of the sales blurb.

Indeed, could you add punch to the back cover copy?  Sometimes reviewers sum up our books much better than we can ourselves. A reader who really got the book might have written you a brilliant logline. Search your reviews in case.

If you have an ‘about the author’ paragraph on the back, should you update it? Perhaps you’ve published more books, or won a prestigious award.

What about your author photo? My Nail Your Novels had three different author photos according to the years they were published (and the hue of my hair), but with this reboot I decided to use a new image to make them look more current and uniform.

I also found I had room on the back for miniatures of the other books in the series – a good visual way to let readers know they’re part of a set.

Read all the copy!

Even if you change only the fonts, you should proof-read all the cover material anew. Any time a change has been made, even if it’s just cosmetic (fonts etc) there’s a possibility for a letter to be deleted or a copy-and-paste to go wrong. If the new font doesn’t behave like the old one, you might find the copy doesn’t fit – check that the final sentence of your blurb or author description hasn’t disappeared into a mysterious limbo.

Read the spine too. Mistakes can happen anywhere. Especially there.

If you’re upgrading an entire series, be alert for copy-and-paste mistakes between the books! A designer who is working on several covers at once might paste an element in from another cover as a placeholder or to copy the style, and forget to type the correct wording. Check each book has its correct title and description, and not a pasted bit from another book in the series.

Picture and artwork credits

If you’ve credited the designer on the cover, you might need to update this. And if you’ve used photo library artwork, the T&Cs might require you to credit the originator – either inside the book or in a convenient place on the artwork. Sometimes, font originators need a credit (if they do, it’ll be in the T&Cs when you acquire the font). Don’t forget to credit your author image photographer as well. So: remove outdated credits and add new ones as necessary.

Inside the print book

I’ve already mentioned updating credits for the cover images and design. What about the design of the title page? My title pages continue the design from the cover font, so I updated those too.

If you have images of your books in the back matter, they’ll need updating.

In the ebooks

If you have image and design credits in the ebooks, don’t forget to update these. Or images of your other covers.

Other admin

My books’ facelift also generated a number of other itty bits of admin

• Website headers
• Blog badges
• The books’ pages on my website(s) (why did I have so many sites?!)
• Excerpts on preview services (I use Bookbuzzr)
• Headers on Facebook, Twitter, my newsletter sign-up, G+ …. Everywhere, really. I don’t think I’ve found all mine yet. (If you spot one, let me know!)
• Business cards, bookmarks, postcards, posters for events

And if you smartened up the back cover copy or logline, don’t forget to update your sales descriptions on Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, Ingram … everywhere. But you don’t have to worry about your Amazon author page or the Look Inside feature – those update automatically but you have to allow a week or so for the changes to filter through.

Is there anything I’ve missed? I’m sure there is. Tell me here!

How to make a print book using Word – first of a series at Writers & Artists

Gosh, this is grown-up. After I gently pointed out to Writers & Artists that some self-publishers are as adept in print as in e-publishing, we got chatting. They were interested in my background (running an editorial department, writing, editing, book production and this blog!) and the result is I’m doing a series at Bloomsbury’s Writers & Artists site on fundamentals for good self-publishing.

This first piece is on turning an ebook file into a print edition. It’s an expanded version of a pair of posts I wrote when I released the paperback of My Memories of a Future Life, and hopefully a little more simplified for first-timers. If you want to know more about how to make lovely-looking books, come on over.

How to prepare your Kindle text for a print edition – Part 2: chapter head styles and cleaning up the text

Yesterday I discussed how to choose the size of your book and the typeface. Today, we finish your book’s interior  

Fancy stuff like chapter heads

You can leave the chapter title in the same font as your body copy, or you might want something eye catching to draw the reader to the first line – maybe a motif or a drop capital. (Designing this deserves whole posts by itself; there are trillions of ways to do it, but the short answer is to find a book you like the look of in a similar genre and copy that). You might want a different font (not too fancy, please). I used Copperplate Goth BT.

Unless you have a fantastically good artistic reason, don’t use more than one heading font besides your body copy. Books look better if typefaces are inconspicuous and style is uniform. A little contrast is allowable in chapter headings, but if you have more than two typefaces it looks like it was made by someone under a responsible age.

Chapter titles don’t usually begin at the very top of the page. You’ll want to add line spaces, both above the chapter heading and afterwards, before the actual text starts. Experiment until you find an arrangement you like. Then write down exactly what it is – eg 3 carriage returns above and 2 below. You need to do it exactly the same in all the chapters. Properly typeset books are consistent about everything.

Similarly between sections that aren’t chapter breaks you’ll need a gap. How many lines do you want them to be? Do you want a little motif in the middle to delineate them? What about the paragraphs? Do you want them full out after a section break? Full out (ie not indented) is the usual option but I have seen indents work nicely as well. Make your decision, write it down – and do the same thing every time.

Then go through the manuscript and put them in.

If you formatted for Kindle you probably put page breaks in for chapter endings. If you formatted for other strains of epub you probably didn’t use page breaks. Go and put page breaks in for chapter endings now. If you try to split the book with carriage returns instead of page breaks, the next stage will do your head in. And make you resort to far more flabbergasted language.

Blank pages and front matter

Use page breaks to make blank pages too. And strip off the folio on blank pages if your program allows, or change the text colour to white so it doesn’t print.

Where do you want blank pages? Certain parts of your book must begin on right-hand pages, so you might have to put blanks in to achieve this – especially at the front.

Before you get to the text proper you need a few bits of set-up copy, known as front matter. Look in any published book and you’ll see. Usually these are:

• half title (right-hand page) – where you can put biographical info too
• copyright notice and ISBN etc (left-hand page)
• full title (right-hand)
• either blank or acknowledgements (left-hand page)
• start of book (right-hand page) or part 1/section 1 title page (right-hand page, then blank, then text proper on right-hand page)

Widows, orphans – the mysterious faffing I was leaving until last

Now you have the biggest, dreariest task of all. You have to look for bad breaks at the tops of pages – widows, orphans and stumps.

Widows and orphans are short lines in places you don’t want them – at the very bottom of a page or the very top. Stumps are words broken by a hyphen so that the first half of the word is on one page and the second half is on the next. All these can look ugly, although sometimes you can get away with one if there’s enough text on the rest of the page – it’s very much a matter of personal taste what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

Get this line back or make it longer…

… but this is okay

All on their own… take these lines back or push a few more over…

… like this

You also have to look for section breaks in awkward places. If you have a section break, you want more than one line below it or it looks weird. And you don’t want a page with just 1 or 2 lines hanging in mid air and then the chapter end.

NB – most word processing programs have auto settings to get rid of these pesky widows and orphans. Turn it off. It results in short pages, which in a text-heavy book like a novel looks dreadful. Yes, you have to do this bit by hand.

How?

NOT by squeezing the fonts together – that looks awful. NOT by sneakily changing the point size or the leading – it shows. You have to alter the text itself.

Remember when I said this isn’t about the text any more, it’s about how it looks? That’s what I mean.

Close up paragraphs, make new ones, cut out extraneous words to pull a line back, add a few to push one over. If you have sub-headings (weird in novels but de rigeur in non-fiction) put one in or take one out. If there’s no scope to edit on the page you’re on, go back a page and see if you can do it there. Sometimes you may have to go back a few. And keep checking the results.

This is the drudge. You have to do this for every single page. It’s fiddly. And this is why you want to have established all your other design decisions before you get here. Because you don’t want to have to do it all over again. And this is why you need to separate your chapters with page breaks, so that any change you make is confined to just a few pages. If you use carriage returns instead of page breaks, every change you make will affect the rest of the entire book.

You might wonder how you spot all these things. I do it automatically because I’ve done it for years. I can read the text and see all these things at the same time. (Hell, I scan for them when I’m reading other people’s books.) I can adjust the text so that it’s true to what I want to say and also looks typographically acceptable. In fact, because I knew I’d have to do this, I made my last major edits of My Memories of a Future Life in PagePlus so that the text would be identical to the Kindle version.

If you’re not practised at this it’s best to do several passes through the book, looking for one problem each time, until you get your eye in. And this exhaustive level of nit-picking might be one of the reasons you decide to hand this part of the project over to someone who can do it much faster than you can, and more thoroughly.

Once each of your pages looks typographically beautiful, proof-read it one last time, remembering to check that your chapter breaks are consistent – and your text is ready to go.

If you have a Kindle book you’ll have a front cover but you won’t yet have a back one. And you’ve probably got quite enough to do for now – so I’ll tell you how I designed mine in a future post.

Have you released one of your books in print form? Did you do the production yourself? If you have any tips to add or nightmares to share, I’d love to hear them!

HELP IS AT HAND… If reading all this has given you an intolerable migraine, I can format your book for you! Email me on RozMorrisWriter at gmail dotcom.

My Memories of a Future Life: episodes 1 and 2 available now. Episode 3 on 12th September. Print edition end September. Do you like podcasts? You can listen to or download, free, the first 4 chapters

How to prepare your Kindle text for a print edition – Part 1: book size and typeface

While making an ebook is pretty straightforward, putting it into print is a pain. In traditional publishing houses, it’s an entire department’s job – because there’s a lot of invisible fiddling you need to do. (It used to be my job too, which is why I know.)

But it is possible to do it well, given the right instructions. I’ll walk you through what I did to get the text of My Memories of a Future Life ready for print. Be prepared – this will get pathologically nitpicky. And this stage is not about how the text reads – it’s about how it looks. Yes, to writers that’s the tail wagging the dog. Get over it now.

It’s quite a big job so I’ll split it in two posts. Today: choosing the size of the book and the typeface.

What size do you want the book to be?

Choose this first, because that governs how much you get on a page. Nail Your Novel is a short book at 40,000 words, and the first time I put it out was at 6×9. That made it look flimsy, so when I redesigned the interior I sized it down to 5×8 where the thickness and size feel just right.

My Memories of a Future Life, on the other hand, is a whopping 103,000 words. It would be rather chunky at 5×8 and expensive to produce because of the weight – which means I would have had to charge a lot more and everyone would think I was being greedy. Many literary novels are now being produced in 6×9 size, or even bigger – so it fits nicely with the genre.

If you use CreateSpace you can download a Word template for the interior. It sets up page sizes and margins so that everything looks right and you can do your fiddling in Word. Catherine Ryan Howard’s book Self-Printed has a detailed section on how to do this. There are other POD companies besides CreateSpace, but they’re not as easy to use. I used CreateSpace but with a design program, PagePlus, because it’s what I do my covers in and because my version of Word doesn’t make PDFs. (For CreateSpace and Lulu you submit your book on a PDF.)

PagePlus sets automatic margins as well, but the default ones are too narrow so I customise them. If you’re using anything other than CreateSpace’s template I suggest you check your margins too. They may have been set up for leaflets, not paperback books.

Before you finalise your margins, whack some dummy text onto the page, print it out and put it over an existing book of the same size to check it looks okay.

Important: get your margins right now. If you change them later you’ll have to redo a lot of tedious checking.

Text

When you formatted the Kindle or ebook edition you probably established a style for the book…. didn’t you? You’re consistent about when you use single or double quotes, proper em dashes and so on? You checked you had curly quotes and not ticks, including on the apostrophes? You’ve never thought about it? Go and fix them now. They’ll make your book look a lot more professional.

Typeface

Choose this next. And make your decision final. Every typeface is a slightly different width, even if it’s the same height.

Don’t use Times, it makes a book page look like a business proposal.

Obviously don’t use any of the fancy curly things that seem to have been supplied to design party invitations.

Get down a few novels in your genre (tastes in typefaces may vary between genres) and choose typefaces that look like them. I used Century Schoolbook BT for My Memories of a Future Life.

Italics: flat feet bad

Check what the font’s italics look like. A lot of computers come with the Roman version of fonts but not the italics, and when you hit the little I icon it slants them. True italics have curled serifs (the little feet), and slanted feet look wrong. If you haven’t got the italic version of your font there are free places to download it – I found my itals here.  Do this now too, for the mysterious tedium-avoidance reason I will explain.

Italics: curly feet good

Typesize and spacing

Most books are set in 12pt, or 11.5pt. Again, compare with other published books in your genre (for instance, literary can afford to go slightly smaller than YA).

If your book is 6×9 the page is quite wide, so you might want a bigger typeface or wider leading (space between the lines) to make it more readable. You can fine-tune this by editing the paragraph style – I set the leading as a percentage of the pointsize. So I had 11.5pt type on a leading that was a niftily precise 14.375pt – or 125% of the point size.

And each typeface has different properties. Some have tall ascenders and descenders (vertical strokes). So if you change from one font at 11.5pt it might look much smaller and less readable than another, so you might need to use it bigger. Before you finalise, print a page out and fold it around a book of the same size to see how it looks in the flesh.

When you’ve decided, run your text in and typeset it.

Part 2 tomorrow: chapter heads… and the really nitpicky stage

Have you released one of your books in print form? Did you do the production yourself? If you have any tips to add for this stage, I’d love to hear them!

HELP IS AT HAND… If reading all this has given you an intolerable migraine, I can format your book for you! Email me on RozMorrisWriter at gmail dotcom.

 My Memories of a Future Life: episodes 1 and 2 available now. Episode 3 on 12th September. Print edition end September. Do you like podcasts? You can listen to or download, free, the first 4 chapters