Book Design is absolutely crucial to the success of your book. It is unfortunate but no one follows the adage ‘don’t judge a book by the cover’ which means every author needs to create a good first impression.
When a customer sees your book they follow specific steps, only moving on to the next one if the first one passes the test:
- Look at the front cover.
- Look at the back cover.
- Read the back blurb (this is very important and often forgotten)
- Flick through some pages (noticing fonts, spacing, chapter headings – without really seeing them)
- Read 1-10 pages
- Buy the book (hopefully)
- Read the book
What this means is that people don’t buy the book because of your writing, but the impression of the cover and the small parts they do read. To take advantage of this you need to invest in the first impression.
How much does book design cost?
Design is functional art, and as such it is hard to price and value. We have found it is best to offer standard packages – the majority of work will fall reasonably neatly into one of these. We do however reserve the right to re-quote once we have received all files and have gone through the briefing process. So take a look through the options and decide which will be the best for your project. Remember to check out our Money Back Guarantee and Launch Success Guarantee further down the page.
With all of our cover designs you will receive commercial print PDF files, with two spine sizes if required, allowing you to have a cover for Amazon/CreateSpace and local printing.
Note: New Zealand customers please add GST (15%) to the costs
Templated cover design
$129 (with supplied image)
$209 (we source the image)
Templated cover design is an image or background graphic with overlaid text. It includes barcode generation, front cover, back cover, and spine title. Using stock imagery or supplied imagery, with multiple font options. There is an additional charge of $15 per licence for the use of any stock imagery.
- Choose which option you want, there are three looks above to choose from.
- Decide if you would like to use your own image or have us source one.
- Supply us with: title, author name, back cover blurb and if applicable a subtitle and your image/photo.
- We can generate and place a barcode from your ISBN.
Custom cover design: Basic
$340. With the basic custom cover package you will get a more curated cover and it enables the time to do image adjustments and combine visual elements with a bit more finesse for those books that need to pop off the shelf.
Custom cover design which includes 1 hour of Photoshop and Illustrator work as needed, combining up to 3 visual elements, and custom typesetting. 1 stock image licence included. There is an additional charge of $15 per license for the use of additional stock imagery.
Custom cover design: Full Monty
$680. With the full monty custom cover package, you can expect a totally unique cover built from the ground up to have your target market eating out of your hand.
This is the option you need if you want your book to stand out on a bookshelf. Custom cover design which includes Photoshop and Illustrator work, combining multiple visual elements, and custom typesetting. This option also includes the use of a single licence of fonts not already in our font book, combining elements from multiple supplied and/or stock imagery with 4 licenses included. There is an additional charge of $15 per license for the use of additional stock imagery.
Money Back Guarantee
Custom Cover Design: Full Monty includes a full money-back guarantee until you have approved the final concept.
Typically a final concept is when you are seeing a cover design that has used multiple assets and type/copy elements, combined into a cover per your brief/communications about the desired look and feel. After this, the concept is tidied and finessed in the Adobe suite, and all final elements are added and perfected.
