I was sent this from an editor who is so helpful I can’t tell you all that she has done for me. She is Christine Van Zandt at Write for Success. This information is published by Carla King’s Self-Pub Boot Camp news.
12 Places to Find Book Interior and Cover Designers
Book design and editing are what will make your indie book stand out. Don’t make the mistake of doing it yourself when you can spend as little as $100 to hire a designer who knows what they’re doing. I wish I had a list of every great book designer, but they vary genre by genre, and a designer in the romance category won’t be appropriate in the sci-fi category and so on. If you can’t get a personal recommendation from an author you know, here are 10 great places to find book interior and cover designers.
- Book Design Templates is a really popular tool for do it yourself book designers because they’re Word templates and so easy to use. There’s a big selection of interior book design templates including trade paperback, full-color and even children’s book templates. They look just as good as designs created in InDesign for a fraction of the cost, with single-book licenses for as little as $37. Designer Joel Friedlander also has a book cover design template in Word, plus a media kit template and even a nonfiction book proposal template. He provides generous discounts for multiple purchases at the same time. Publishers, author co-ops, and publishing professionals can buy discounted licenses for creating quantities of books. Check it out!
- Mark Coker of Smashwords maintains an updated list of book interior formatters and cover designers. Here it is.
- BookBaby and Vook are full service ebook publishing and distribution services who will handle book cover and interior design for you.
- The PressBooks publishing platform is free but pay a bit more and you get to choose from a set of truly lovely CSS-driven interior book designs that export to both print and ebook formats.
- BiblioCrunch is a membership site with a list of designers and other publishing professionals and they make sure they’re professional before they’ll list them on their site. It costs a little for membership to BiblioCrunch but it’s definitely worth it as the caliber of professionals there is guaranteed.
- Writer.ly is a free service, kind of a craigslist for authors and publishers.
- 99Designs is a crowdsourced design site and they have a whole section devoted to book cover designers.
- Fiverr might seem a dubious place to get book cover design and interior book formatting, because sometimes you get what you pay for. That said, I’ve had a few experiences with Fiverr sellers now and have found all but one really good at what they do. So take a look at ebook cover designers and other services. Some services just start at $5 to entice you into higher-quality work.
- Tumblr is a blogging platform that lots of artists use and a great place to browse the work of book cover designers.
- See Joel Friedlander’s “The Book Designer” site for his Book Cover Design awards category where he critiques designs submitted to him for comment. You’ll get an education on what makes a good cover and you might also find a great designer.
- Derek Murphy goes down a different path than Friedlander with his DIY book cover design templates. He’s supplied art, photography and graphics paired with typography so that you can plug in your title and author name and you’re good to go.
- Last but not least, there’s Kit Foster Design in the UK who, like Murphy, has a suite of DIY covers along with full-service cover design for very reasonable prices.
Sharron Grodzinsky Author 