I know you’re a typographer, but I think interior needs to come third in line behind the cover and editing. If you’re on a budget and need to cut a corner, that’s probably where it will happen.

How much does interior design run generally compared to a cover? I’ve designed the interior on my two s-p books – not perfectly by any means.

I’m a firm believer in DIY, but I’ve seen the horrible results of that decision, too.

One of the requirements for my podcast novels is a “cover art” image and I think most people make a few common mistakes.

1. Too much detail. For our covers, they *must* be 144 x 212px. That’s a *tiny* picture. When you put a highly detailed image and a subtitle, plus your name, what’s left is mud.

2. Badly drawn people. You’ve seen ‘em. You know what I mean.

3. Too little attention to design. Picture-Text-Publish is a recipe for disaster.

For most of my covers, I use a high resolution Hubble photo (they’re space opera. space is good.) and then layer a simple title/author message on the top. My simple covers stand out in the mass and you can actually read the titles. Moreover, the government document photos are in the public domain, so free.

A couple of my covers use a combination of hand drawn and photo samples from my own work. There’s probably better choices but I like them.

Internal book design is something I haven’t had to deal with, but I expect to soon as the works go onto paper later this year. Color, white space, font, and layout are all subjects that are near and dear to me, and I confess a certain giddy anticipation.

Reading the endless threads on Lulu and CreateSpace concerning the mishaps that occur when people try to understand the technical formatting of a book (never mind the design) I have to say that sometimes it’s cheaper to pay with money.

Joel, the books are available through the iTunes Music Store, yes, but the standard size I have to work with comes from podiobooks.com where they established the size they want for cover art for their catalog. Publishing on Podiobooks pushes my work into iTunes.

As for chops, it’s a good question. I’ve had a lot of training in graphical design, typography, and layout. That’s undoubtedly an advantage. I also think anybody who’s competent in webdesign has the basics of layout down and the discipline to understand that the technology drives the bus.

Of course, given the number of really bad website designs, perhaps it’s a bigger hurdle than I imagine.

Nathan, that’s an interesting analogy between graphic design for websites and book design. I just came across a “self-published” book by 2 bloggers that was a pretty high-end launch. The bloggers hired a web designer to do the book, which (in my opinion anyway) was a disaster. Although both use typography, I don’t think there’s anything else connecting the two. I don’t mean that web designers couldn’t design good books, but that they typical web designer doesn’t know basic elements of book design, unless they take the time to find out. The article about it is here: http://bit.ly/6vOSwN

I’ll chime in here on priorities.

1) Editing – A poorly edited book can kill a good story. The whole golden spot of books is word of mouth advertising and if the book is an embarrassment from an editing standpoint it can’t be easily recommended to others.
2) Cover Design – even books sold only “online” will need a cover and a poorly designed cover will prevent people from “giving it a try”. A lot can be done with a good royalty free graphic and well placed text.
3) Interior Design – though I will say in many self-pub books you can tell this is where the corners were cut and I’ve read many…quite frankly most “do it yourself” interiors don’t look professional. If you are going to DIY then pick up your favorite book and try to mimic it. Look at the margins, the spacing between lines, the font being used, the size of the text. Where and what are on the headers, where are the page numbers. And please….never use a san-serif font (one that does not have little strokes at the end of characters) In other words chose Times New Roman or similar over Arial or similar.

Not trying to take business out of our moderators pockets but you MUST think about ROI and $650 on a 500 book sell through is $1.30 a book – if you can DIY or get this price down to $150 ($0.30 a book) by having a graphic design student doing it then I would recommend that approach.