How I design Valley Press books

A complete, non-technical overview of the process – inside and out

I had a message earlier this week from a blog subscriber. Having read through the existing posts in the “How to be a small press publisher” series, they very politely asked when the next one would be along – or indeed if I was still committed to completing it at all.

Their email made me exclaim out loud: “Oh my lord …. the series!!” I’d almost forgotten about it, having got carried away with competitions, interviews, diary-style posts, and anything else that sprang to mind. (I have a great new competition lined up, by the way – but will save that for next week.) I hope some of those intervening articles have been useful for any publishers reading, even in a roundabout way; but following this reminder, I have resumed my efforts to create “the ultimate, definitive guide” to the noble pursuit of producing and selling books.

The subscriber who wrote in is a small press publisher themselves, who went into the industry as a confident, experienced editor and long-time professional in publicity and marketing. That is the absolute dream ticket, if you ask me – but they have found themselves struggling with costs in other areas, with huge bills springing out from behind every corner. As visitors to our website will know, freelance publishing services are not cheap, so anything a publisher can’t do themselves poses a serious threat to their profit margins.

With the problem thus diagnosed, “Doctor Publishing” (as I might start calling myself) has prescribed the post below – which is a little hard to succinctly explain. It’s a guide to what I think about at each stage of the book design process; how I approach each step, without getting into technical discussion of particular software. My hope is that, having absorbed the below, determined readers can refer to the documentation of whatever program they are using and figure out how to achieve these same ends – rather than waiting for me to write up practical demonstrations, like my first cover design post, for software you may not even have.

Before I get going: if anyone else is reading this with specific publishing issues, please don’t suffer in silence. Send me your questions and, if remotely possible, I will answer them in a future post – maybe even in a free one, if the information required isn’t too in-depth. Today’s effort isn’t a freebie, alas, so I will see all of you paid subscribers after the jump.