Welcome to Episode 59 of Published. Today, I'll speak with Greenleaf’s Art Director, Neil Gonzalez, about book design elements and why a well-designed cover and interior are vital to your book’s success.

In this episode, we're discussing all things book design.

• The old saying goes “never judge a book by its cover,” but of course, we all know in the book industry that is exactly what happens. An eye-catching cover is key to attracting a reader and making sure your book is taken seriously. The cover design is the first impression a reader gets of your book so if your design is strong, a reader can assume your writing is also.
• You want your book cover to be congruent with your genre and showcase themes from within the book so that reader gets a taste of what's to come. There's nothing worse than a misleading book cover. You don't want your book to miss its target audience because it didn't look the part.
• In this episode we'll also be discussing the importance of your book’s interior design. This is one part of the design process that many authors overlook. The way your text is formatted on each page, where the number falls, how your chapter headings are designed, these are all seemingly small elements that can really elevate your books overall quality.
• In this episode, Neil gives us his insight into the book design process and how an author can make sure their book design attracts readers and makes a lasting impression. Let's get into the interview!

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1:55 – Neil, welcome to Published! It's great to have you. Why don't you start out by telling our listeners who haven't listened to all our prior episodes who you are and what you do at Greenleaf.

• I’m Neil Gonzalez and I'm the Art Director at Greenleaf Book Group. I've been with the company for 15 years next month. I've been the Art Director for about 7 years now.
• What I do is work with the team of designers—we have about four in-house designers—and we all work on the different book covers, book interiors, marketing materials, and pretty much create the look and feel of the book. Then, we prep the files and get them ready to send it the printer.
• We also work with editors closely to input any corrections to the actual text. So, while we are focused on the visual aspect, we do manipulate the words with the help of the editors because the editors don't have direct access to the InDesign files that we work in. Once the book is poured and laid out at that point, really the designer is the only one that can go in and change the text around. We work with the editors for that, and the project managers help us and guide through it. So, the designers, the project managers, and the editors all make up the production side of Greenleaf in which we create the physical book and eBook.

3:45 – You guys create all kinds of different books from various genres. Where do you find inspiration for all these projects that come across your desk?

• It's hard to do that because business books tend to be in the same vein, you know, they are different, but they have a certain look and feel, so how do you reinvent the wheel? That’s challenging. Whereas novels have their own unique story and a lot more to offer as far as visuals and inspiration.
• For the different types of books, we work on, we have a project launch meeting where the lead designer meets with the project manager and editor to officially launch it in production. And once I hear the title, I'll get a bright idea in my head, it'll come to me. If I just hear it, I'll have that idea, really it kind of hits me. Usually that first initial idea is the best one. It comes to me, and it's all attributed to the title itself.

• A lot of times there's keywords in the title that will trigger something in your mind. So, it's nice when titles do have visual words in them that a designer can pull from. That's helpful for us as opposed to something that’s so metaphorical that you don't know what to convey visually on the cover. That's really challenging.
• As far as doing more research, we have the manuscript available. The manuscript is still in progress of being worked on, but we have pretty much the whole manuscript. It might change a little bit for but for the most part we have it there, so we have the availability to read through it. We have the availability to talk to the author and the lead editor, so we have a lot of research available to us.

• Sometimes we can’t read the whole book. Like I mentioned, some business books tend to be more cut and dry so I find you can skim that, and you don't need to read every page. A lot of times those books tend to communicate what the book is about through the title or subtitle. The subtitle can be helpful as well. There are a lot of keywords within that.

• Then, doing image research. Once I get the gist of what the book is about, I'll do image research because a lot of the covers use images. So, I'll start looking up those keywords. Sometimes typing in the title in a search engine will come up with tons of different ideas. So, it's fun to kind of brainstorm. That’s something as a designer I learned going through design school, how to brainstorm and do research, doing word lists and drawing little thumbnails, kind of racking your brain, and that's actually a great way to come up with good ideas.

• All you have to do is think. A lot of times when we were working in the office I would have to drive home, and I live on the opposite side of town. I’d sit in traffic for 45 minutes to an hour and that was a great time to think of the project. If I had a book that I'm working on that week and I'm in the middle of brainstorming ideas, all I have to do is think. It's great. You don't necessarily need anything else to do that. You don't need a computer or pen and paper. That’s handy to have, but just thinking about it you can come up with some great ideas. Then I'll just remember those and write them down later. That's what's kind of fun about being a designer. When you're assigned a book, you’re kind of married to it for those two weeks. So, you live with it.
• As I go to bed, I'll think about it. You know, it’s something I think about constantly. Even when you're going to bed at night as you're falling asleep your brain is still working and I can pop in that book title and start thinking about it. A lot of times some good ideas come from that little twilight area right before you go to bed.
• In fact, I remember Paul McCartney from The Beatles said that's where he came up with the idea for the song Yesterday. He got that melody as he was about to fall asleep, and I find that's this magic little time where your brain does crazy things. I don't always rely on that time. I don't set my watch to do that, but it's happened before and it’s fun. That’s one of the many weird places you can pull inspiration from.

• But going back to image research, that's helpful because you will see a lot of obvious searches, like if you type in cat, a cat will come up, but as you dig further down, you'll see some weird ones that you might not have thought about, and it can trigger other ideas. It's neat to see what you can come up with from what’s already out there on the Internet.
• You'll always be surprised by some images or a combination of images, like, oh I never thought of that. Really, it's kind of cool to combine images or ideas because everyone can put an image of a cat on a cover if it's a book about cats but when I combine it with another thing that the book might be conveying, it sets it apart. Combining ideas, I find, is a good way to make the book unique.

• Inspiration is all around you. Just taking a little walk down the road, taking a break and walking down your street, even the colors of a tree that's changing color can inspire you as a new color palette you can incorporate. You might think that's pretty, so I'll take a picture of it and then keep that in my back pocket and look at it when the time is right. Like, oh, there's that beautiful tree, I’ll kind of incorporate those colors if it's appropriate to the subject matter.
• That's something that you don't always think about. Your radar has to be on at all times in a way because there's inspiration around you and if you're not looking for it or open to seeing it, then you're going to miss it. But it could be right in your face.

11:00 – Now, if you were able to boil it down into a few key points, what would you say are the important elements of a successful cover design?

• I always follow this rule: keep it simple, stupid. You don't want to overdo it. You can easily overdo it if you try to add everything on the cover. You have to boil it down to that essence of what the book is conveying. If you can find that one key idea and present it in an interesting visual manner, then that’s going to be more powerful than trying to cover everything that every chapter is trying to cover.
• A lot of authors like the clean and simple covers, as do I, because they're more powerful than a hodgepodge of everything. So really trying to find that one powerful idea and conveying that is going to be the better approach as to trying to cram everything on it. Sometimes when we're working with authors, we have to mention that to them. you can’t shoehorn everything on. Sure, there's 20 chapters and each chapter covers a different topic, but you don't want to do that.
• That's why it's great to have a strong title and a subtitle that can support that. Basically, trying to work in tangent with that title by the visual means. It goes beyond that you want to look professional and have great type and all that but it's really powerful if you can strip away the title and subtitle and see the visual aspect and get what the book is about without reading anything on the cover but just seeing it.
• That's a great way to go about designing a book, at least trying to cover every aspect and cover your bases. When we design, we come up with different varieties and approaches that we feel will work. There's never just 1 idea, there's always multiple ideas that can work. If you can provide 4 great options, that's the best-case scenario because then we feel all these options will work and it’s a preference at that point or what you feel will be the best fit for your book.

13:35 – We know that cover design, and all design I suppose, changes, evolves over time and there are trends that turn up in certain genres. How do you personally stay on top of those types of swings in trends?

• Yeah, it's good to stay on top of trends and like you said they're constantly changing. I find there's tons of websites and Twitter handles or accounts that you can find. So, on Twitter there's a lot of book related stuff, but there's a lot of bad design out there too you have to be careful of, and I don't want that to inspire me. Of course, art is subjective, but most people know if a book cover is well designed. You can easily see a bad cover and know it's bad compared to a great design cover.
• There's this one Twitter handle Spine Magazine (@spinemag) that I follow. I look at it every day to keep up with stuff on there and on top of trends. They will showcase books and new designs and then retweet other published articles that cover trends. So, that's good and that's interesting to look at. Then following other favorite studios, like Faceout Studio (@faceoutstudio) is one I really look up to they have some awesome stuff, so I check out their Twitter a lot.
• Whenever there's an awards list announced, some graphics or communication arts, it's cool to look at the winning covers and designs of that year and see why they picked that and what made it such an award-winning design.
• Then, it's fun to go to Barnes and Noble and browse. I feel like a kid in a candy store going and looking at all these books. It's overwhelming because there's so many good designs out there but it's cool to see what's current and being sold at stores right now.

• It's good to follow trends but it's also good to follow your own design instinct. Sometimes I like to go with what my heart is telling me to design and do my own research, like I mentioned earlier. A lot of times I can find great ideas and new styles and come up with something I didn't think I would have come up with that I think works really well.
• You don't want to always follow trends, but instead keep up with them. Of course, you have that ability to do that if you want, you can follow a trend, but I also like doing my own thing and hopefully starting my own trend.

16:18 – Are there any trends that you've noticed are starting to arise lately?

• Yeah, it's interesting that we have this modern technology with computers and fancy Photoshop stuff but a lot of books that I've seen winning awards are actually throwback designs going back to an almost vintage look. It's weird and it's neat because I love that old style and they did that without computers. It's almost like cut out flat shapes arranged and bold type. So, it's weird it's almost like going back to this Saul Bass type of design style. But it's funny how it's come back so much now that we see everything comes around again and it's trendy. What's old is new again it seems.
• Another trend is illustrated covers where they'll get an illustrator to draw or create a piece of art to use as the main visual.
• Then, there's this big trend I saw where it was these big, colorful, almost abstract pieces of art or collage type of images in the background and then the title and author name would be a big, bold san serif type of font. It was a beautiful type of design, but every book was doing that. It was overkill in my opinion. At that point you see so much of that style, and you probably would recognize it if I showed you an image of one. It was like they all started to look the same, at that point you're not going to stand out.
• You'll follow a trend but it's almost going to work against you. That’s the thing with trends, eventually they're going to get burned out and they're not going to be as cool anymore. Someone has to start the next trend, whatever that will be.

• I always compare it to the grunge era in music, the early 90s when Nirvana came out and they were the new thing. They busted out of the shell of the hair metal scene where everyone was doing the same thing. The younger kids wanted something new and then Nirvana came out. Then, every band after Nirvana was doing the exact same thing and the record labels were trying to hire anything that remotely resembled that type of thing. By 1994 and five and six, it was over saturated with the same stuff. I love that sound, but it was not cool anymore.
• It gets beaten to death and then it's like, okay this isn't cool anymore because everyone is doing it. Everyone wants to have that new underground thing before it gets popular, and I guess art is like that in general. You always want to be on top of the cool thing and not be that same old thing that everyone is doing. So, it's fun to keep up with it, but at the same time I like to do my own thing because you don't want to leave just a follower, but you want to try to be a trendsetter yourself.

19:15 – For sure. You mentioned standing out. We talk to our authors a lot about the line we have to walk between fitting in and being competitive within a genre yet standing out on the shelf, which is a tricky balance. So how do you approach that, in particular with making a book competitive within a genre which may have expectations around design?

• Yeah, that's something we do talk about, trying to fit in but stand out at the same time. I think for business books they tend to look like business books, you know. You don't want a business book that doesn't really look like one. Otherwise, it's not going to be taken seriously. You gotta do what you gotta do to be genre appropriate. You want it to look like business but at the same time you want to push boundaries. So, that's tricky. A lot of business books I find are more straightforward and to the point, but the thing is the readers are looking for that. They want to get to the point. I've learned that.

• There is the big trend of the Malcolm Gladwell style book design where it's very minimal—white background, very clean, and usually one small graphical element somewhere in the middle of the cover. That was huge. That actually came out when I first started working at Greenleaf and it's still popular to this day. It's just an approach but at the same time it doesn't stand out too much.

• Within each design there are different elements that can bring something new and different: the type of font we use, the image, there are other elements that play into the overall composition and how a book looks. So, you could use that templated design but depending on the type of font and colors you use you can make it stand out.
• Sometimes it's not easy to be as a straightforward with a design. Sometimes a title doesn't give you anything to go off and it's very cut and dry. At that point it's too late to change the title. So, sometimes the clean tight treatment can be very strong especially for business books. It's to the point.
• That's where the type-skill comes into play. That's one of the things where you can tell some books are self-published because of the type. It's so important and it's hard to do. Probably most people don't even think twice about the type and the font and spacing but it can be very, very powerful and nice if you use type in your design only.

• Also, within our Greenleaf imprint it's nice when we get to use printing technology for the books. We can used emboss where you lift the title like a piece of metal dice pressed into the paper on the cover and you can lift the title. You can use spot gloss if you have a matte cover, you can add that gloss to it which will play with the light at the right angle.
• Those little key things are something that can help make a book stand out compared to a book that might be a little less fancy. It gives it this perceived value that really makes it like, oh wow this book must be good because it has all these fancy bells and whistles. Although we don't always rely on that, it's a nice added enhancement we can do.
• I always believe that the foundation of the design needs to be strong. We don't have to rely on those bells and whistles but when you have a great foundation of a design, adding those will put it over the top. Then if you see it in a bookstore, it'll look a little more professional and be a little more eye catching. That's something nice that we can do from a printing standpoint.
• Sometimes when we're not able to do that, having that strong foundational design is strong enough. That's why I think it's good to have these designers working for us so we can always fall back on a strong design without relying on the other stuff.

23:25 – When we think of book design, I think we naturally think of the book cover, I certainly did when I came into publishing. Over time you understand and appreciate the importance of a strong interior design. Can you speak to that for authors who maybe aren't thinking along those lines? Why is the interior so important and what are some of the ways that you integrate an overall design feel so that it continues from whatever you're establishing in that cover?

• When you talk about book design everyone thinks of the cover, but they don't really think of the interior as much. It's really weird, it's like it's not given its due but it's almost as important as the cover. Sure, everyone judges the book by its cover and rightly so, but the interior can work in tangent with the cover.
• A lot of times we bring in elements from the cover to make it a cohesive design, so the fonts, if there is any imagery or a theme that the book is presenting, the title of it or its subtitle. We’ll bring that in somehow and use it as an icon or something if it's necessary. We don't always do that but there's different types of approaches for the interior design.
• Some books, like business books, we want to be a little more engaging visually in the interior so we can use little icons to convey certain sections of the books. A lot of business books have different sections and then end of chapter tip sections, or a chapter rundown and we can use elements to visually make that section stand apart from other ones so they're easy to go to. So, if it was a shaded box with a little icon next to the header, you could flip through and easily visually see and read that if you wanted to jump to a section. It's easier as a visual guide.

• That isn't completely necessary for novels where it’s straight text. In that case, the font and spacing you're choosing is super important because you want it to be readable and enjoyable to be read. You could have a beautiful cover and then some horrible typesetting inside and it's going to bring down the whole book because no one's going to want to read it and it's going to be hard to get what the book is trying to convey.
• It's kind of pointless if you have a great cover and great words in the interior or a story or a manuscript that isn't being conveyed appropriately through the actual type. That goes for the letting which, and it’s more technical stuff, is how spaced out the lines of text are. You don’t want it to be too much, but you don't want it to be too tight either. There's a lot of smaller, intricate little things that most people don't know about but it's important for how it goes into the text and the design of the interior.
• You can't really do that yourself. Everyone thinks they’re a little bit of a designer. For the cover it makes a little more sense because everyone sees the covers, and everyone has read a book and it's that first impression type of thing. But on that more technical side it's much harder to create a nice, readable interior, especially if you don't know what you're doing yet. Definitely leave it to a professional.

27:15 – What are the typical mistakes that you see? Quite often authors are working in a vacuum without the help of a professional designer. So, what are the typical mistakes you see for both covers and interiors?

• Yeah, and continuing on the interior that's something I see a lot with books that have been submitted to us that are already designed. You can immediately see a big difference and how they're not going to work. Basically, they don't look professional as far as the interior.
• The fonts are very important. If you have a lot of text, you're going to want to use a serif font. The serif fonts are the ones that are more traditional, classic looking letters and fonts with little swashes on the tails. Those actually serve a purpose to help guide the eye from letter to letter, and word to word. As opposed to a more modern san serif font that doesn’t have those little swashes, it's not going to be as enjoyable to read. Sure, you can read it just fine but if you're going to read a lot of text it's much easier and better to use a certain type of font—the serif fonts. Sometimes we do smaller sections in san serif, that's not to say they can't work together, but that's a big thing I've seen.

• There's hyphenation, and this is getting into more technical aspects, but most books are justified where the right side is a hard line, all the words are backed up to this line and that makes it easier to read from line to line. Once you do that then you have to have your hyphenation settings correct. You don't want words breaking so weird that you can't read it, or you don't want to not use hyphenations at all.
• I've seen that a lot of people are like, I don't like hyphenations, I don't want my words to be broken and split up onto 2 lines. But when you take that hyphenation off it creates huge spaces and gaps between words, which are called rivers, and that looks horrible and doesn't work at all. That's a big tale tell sign of a self-published self-designed interior.

• Then as far as covers, the type, like I was talking about earlier, I can't stress enough how important that is. People think, oh you just put your little type tool in there and type the title and that's it, but really there's so much more. There's the kerning between letters which is moving the actual letter itself within the word, there's the type of font you use—is it going to be appropriate for the book? If you have a modern sci-fi book, you don't want an old school looking type of type that's not going to match. So that's important.
• The image itself, you can have a beautiful picture of a tree and then you can just ruin it with horrible type. That's really easy to do and I've seen it done a lot, so really using the right type and image, and using them together, that's the hard part. To create one cohesive unit, that's really the tricky part of design.
• I've seen a lot of people slap a stock photo on and then type their text, and think, sure that looks like a book, but it doesn't look like a good one. It's not going to look like a professional or interesting book that people are going to want to read so it's not as easy as you may think it is to design a book cover or interior.

31:15 – Well, you've given us tons of great advice today. Any parting words of wisdom or additional advice for our listeners?

• I would say if you're going to look into designing a book or something, don't do it yourself. You can't just take a crash course and do it yourself. It's best to leave it to the professionals.
• If you're going to find a designer, find one that has book experience and then trust them. All designers will usually have a website and examples of their work so it's great if you can see that they've done book design in the past and that that design is up to your standards and looks professional. Then at that point if you think that's a good candidate, reach out to that designer, talk about pricing, and go from there.
• Once that gets started and they start to design your book, give them trust. Don't try to micromanage every little thing. Sure, you can have some suggestions and changes but let the professional do the work. That's why you hire them in the first place.
• I've seen that so many times when we've worked with illustrators. You can get an author, or someone overly involved and it'll kind of water down the overall design if you get too much feedback or if you try to please everybody. You can't please everybody. You have to stick to what your vision is and then let the illustrator or designer see that through.
• I found sometimes if you send covers to an author or someone, sometimes they'll send it to all their friends and family, and everyone will chime in with some type of feedback. You're not going to please everyone and everyone's going to be a critic. Everyone is going to have something they think should be changed and you can't please them all.
• If you try to address every instance, you’re going to water the cover down and it's going to be so boring and overly safe that it's actually going to work against you. It's better to have a nice, professional looking book that the designer is in charge of and not really do a lot of compromising.

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ABOUT NEIL

As the leader of Greenleaf’s design team, Neil ensures that every author’s project we touch meets the highest quality standards. Since he joined the company in 2007, he has personally designed over one hundred titles, including two Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestsellers. He’s proud to help promote our authors’ work and ideas—especially when a new book arrives from the printer. Neil holds a BA in communication design from Texas State University and an associate’s degree in visual communication design from Austin Community College.