I recently saw why all authors should invest in editorial review, cover design, and interior design. It is very sad when a book that has an essentially great premise is produced with editorial errors and poorly designed cover and interior.
So why do you need an editorial review?
Preferably you should have a proofreading review as well but if you are on a very short budget you can find editors who will also proofread for typos and grammatical/punctuation problems. Simply put, you need to have eyes that are not vested in content close to the heart to read your material. Superfluous prose is just that: superfluous prose. It adds nothing to the content, or story, and often detracts from it by making it more difficult for the reader to get to the point of the sentence/paragraph. Editors cut the fat and you need your book to be lean so it can be the impact you intended it to be.
A cover is just a cover, right?
No. I can show you a cover that cost $150 and one that cost $1500 and you’ll instantly know the difference. The former is usually an amateurish blended image by someone who thinks they know how to use Photoshop (or one of it’s cheaper competitors). Cover art shouldn’t use bevels and drop shadows such as you’d find on web pages a few years ago (most pages today don’t even use beveled bars and buttons or tiled backgrounds!). A well-designed cover will be a healthy attempt to convey the essence of the book in a smooth manner. The text will be fresh and integrate smoothly into the image (if an image is used it will also be a high quality piece of stock art). In other words the latter will be designed, not just web page art slapped on the cover of a book.
Right or wrong, when people are looking at your cover they are getting a feel for the inside. If your cover elicits the comment “what does the cover have to do with [subject of book]?” then you do not have the right cover on your book. Unfortunately you might not realize this if you are working with a company who uses templates and you don’t do a mini audience survey for reactions. A real cover designer will provide you with several concepts and you should ask for feedback from others who know what your book is about.
Does it matter how the inside looks as long as it can be read?
Well, I think so but then I’m a book designer. I do know however there are certain technical things that a designer should at least mention if they are absent in a manuscript they get, such as copyright page (which is more than a copyright symbol © and the author’s name) and includes Library of Congress information, Table of Contents, Index, optional pages such as Dedication, Foreword, Introduction, Author Biography, Colophon, and an Order Form. If these are missing, it is up to the designer to ask if it’s intentional or an oversight. Some authors just aren’t aware what the parts of a book are. Their primary focus is getting their book written, not on how it will be set up. That’s what a book designer should be doing for them.
Have you ever picked up a book and found it almost impossible to get into the content even though it was about something you normally enjoy reading? Of course it could be that it’s so poorly written you can’t but there’s also the possibility that it’s because it was poorly designed and the design is interfering with your concentration on the material. Poor design can alienate your audience and that, more than anything, is the best rationale for getting a good designer to do your book. Do not think because you are a whiz bang at doing mail merges with neat fonts and 1.2 linespacing that you can design a book—there’s a 99% chance you will be wrong.
Hopefully now, though you have a little more understanding why these are areas where you shouldn’t be cutting corners. The phrase, you get what you pay for is generally true. I’d hope that you believe your book is worth more than a $150 template layout with basic fonts, all done in Word, but no matter what you decide, I wish you best with your book.
Good writing—
