We’ve noticed that there’s a lot of demand for designing e-book covers. And as with all books there is quite a range of quality among the books. Many, if not most, e-books are not very well written. But maybe that’s also true with printed books if one counts all the self-published titles in existence. (There are some very good self-published books, but I think everyone knows that there are also a lot of bad books, too). Some of the e-books we’ve seen are nothing more than Word document files of less than ten pages.

And some e-books are just outright scams. There seems to be a lot of that floating around on the net. And, yes, you can waste money on printed books, too, but at least with print you can see what you buying in the bookstore before purchasing the thing. Most Web sites selling e-books don’t provide previews of any inside pages or even tell you the number of pages.

This brings us to the trend in designing e-book covers where an image is created to make the e-book resemble a printed book, appearing three dimensional with a spine.

We’ve done this ourselves for clients when requested. Here’s an e-book cover and Web page that we’ve designed:

This isn’t a post to promote that particular e-book, which is why we’re not linking to that particular Web site. We just wanted to address this trend in designing e-book covers. Since we believe in design, we believe all books deserve a good design. There’s an interesting philosophical question as to whether design should be used to promote certain activities but we’ll leave that discussion to the pundits.

But we would like to call for e-book authors not to request an e-book cover that resembles a printed book. You don’t need that. If you want that, then we’ll design it for you but think about why you feel the need for it. What you need, as with any cover, is a compelling design. Indeed, with an e-book you also need a very well designed Web page. Far too many e-books are promoted from poorly designed Web sites.

Also, we would like to see more e-book authors pay attention to the layout and formatting of their interior pages. There is a lot that can be done in PDF. And e-book authors should also provide a preview of a few pages to prospective buyers. With just a little more work, by making a quality product, a quality e-book, you surely can sell more than if you just go for the quick buck from the unsuspecting, naive consumer. Let’s see more quality from e-books.

While there are a lot of literary blogs and a quite a number of blogs by literary agents, I’m not familiar with many blogs examining the internal operations of a publisher. One site that does a very good job is by Mark Long, a publisher specializing in textbooks: TSTC Publishing.

His blog postings are in-depth and informative. In one posting Mark talks about university presses, which have been facing financial difficulties for years:

if you look at the history of for-profit ventures in higher education, which is what our kind of publishing operation is, you see that many of the people behind these efforts have little or no business experience. In particular, too many people in higher education see collecting money for a service rendered or a product delivered being the same as inevitably making a profit. (This is speaking from my own experience, as well, by virtue of having an MA in English when, at this point, I often wish I had an MBA.) Making money in any business is hard work and if you don’t have the right mindset going into a venture it’s easy to lose a lot of money. Certainly, it’s a little unrealistic, just a little, to expect higher ed professionals, who have a long history of being subsidized in a variety of different ways, to suddenly understand how to turn a profit at the drop of a hat.

He’s absolutely right. I spent 15 years working in higher education in the U.S. and ended up being more of a manager and administrator than I ever imagined in graduate school. Most people never realize that every college and university is, in fact, a big business with huge budgets (even if they are non-profit). Heck, even most university libraries have budgets that are in the millions of dollars. But there are a lot of demands on that money and millions don’t go nearly as far as most people think. Staffing is usually the largest cost segment, but also every little expense matters: $1,000 here, $1,000 there soon adds up to a lot of money.

Anyway, head over to Mark’s blog for an interesting read from inside the publishing industry. If anyone knows any other blogs that talk about publishing from an inside perspective, please let me know.

Since we’re based in Buenos Aires, we obviously have no problem with outsourcing book cover design to offshore companies. But we’ve stumbled across this example of one of the worse book covers we’ve ever seen.

Sure, for $100 you’re not going to get much but this is ridiculous. Of course, such low quality is not just common with some offshore book designers. There are plenty of bad online portfolios of so-called book designers based in the U.S. and Canada. The focus of these firms seem to be self-publishers and the rates for a cover usually range from $100 - $500, though we have seen some bad designers charging as much as $1,000 for a cover. Now, at that price your really should get something good.

A book cover can be cheap but it doesn’t mean that it also has to be bad, bad, bad. For a low price, you’re not going to get great, great, great book covers but you might be able to get good, good, good book covers.

Once again Archivalia points us to an interesting site, this time on Scottish handwriting.

The site is focused on helping researchers read early-modern (1500 - 1750) Scottish handwritten documents. One of the serious limitations of utilizing historical documents is the legibility of that material. Hence, the aim of the Scottish handwriting site to help with that.

But, what does this have to do with book design? Well, as with any form of calligraphy, exposure to the stylistic lettering of 17th century Scottish handwriting can inspire a designer to try variations with typefaces for book covers and parts of the interior layout.

We remember being at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh where Ceci got quite excited about the traditional Scottish lettering that was used on some of the walls of the museum; we have photos around here somewhere. BTW, that’s a fantastic museum if you’re ever in Edinburgh.

The most unexpected advice

“Reading old documents is like playing golf.” Take the 1 hour basic tutorial in Scottish handwriting to learn why.

If you don’t have an hour, then at least take a look at the compendium of letter forms in Scottish documents.

By accident I came across this extraordinary Web site called Common Errors in English Usage that is handy for anyone wanting to check the correct use of a word or expression. But what I found just as interesting is that there is a book version of the site, too.