Covers
If you've trawled around the internet before arriving here, you'll already have seen one book-industry saying over and over again: yes, you do judge a book by its cover.
Try it out. Go into a bookstore and watch how people choose books. Being laid out on a big table is a big, big step forward, but the fact is that no-one's going to buy your book unless they pick it up first – they have to notice it. So the potential customer picks up the book, then what do they do? They turn straight to the back and read that little teaser bit of the story at the back, the Blurb. All this time the person is cradling your precious book in their hands, actually feeling what it's like. Only if they're still interested does the customer look inside the book, flicking through the pages to see if the look of the text, the writing style, and once again the look and feel of the paper appeals.
If you're lucky they then take it up to the Pay Desk. Result. By the way, there's a good chance it'll never be read but that's not your fault or your problem, they've paid their money. But an amazing number of people buy books – or are given them as presents – that they never get around to reading. I do it myself, I'm guilty. They end up a year or two later in the local charity shop. Don't get too bothered that your book appears there, by the way; it's free advertising and you never know, it might kick-start a new wave of new purchases.
Anyway, covers consist of a front, a back, and a spine. We publish in B-format paperback mode, which means that the front and the back are 198mm tall by 129mm wide, but the spine depends on the number of pages and the thickness of the paper used. Again, our preferred choice is bookwove 80gsm, which for some reason produces thicker and heavier than offset 80gsm. A nice woman at our printers tried to explain this to me but it was all too technical. (And yes, that "offset" really is the same stuff you put through your Xerox machine. Do you really want your book to feel like the latest office circular?) The cover itself should have a little bit of body, too – at least 300gsm weight. But watch out that different printers' paper weights seem to mean different things, so try before you buy. That's what a bound proof is for.
Spinewidth calculators are freely available on the internet. Here's ours on the right, with a little free advertising for our printers (click on the logo). So if you have a book that has a 20mm spine width, then your total area will be 129mm + 129mm + 20mm = 278mm x 198mm height. Finally, you'll notice that all printers ask for an allowance for 'bleed', usually around 3mm all the way around. That's a little extra wiggle-room to make sure that everything they cut is actually printed and not blank card.
For fiction, certainly, you want matt finish, which is slightly more expensive than gloss. Gloss is for cookery books and foreign language phrasebooks.
Try it out. Go into a bookstore and watch how people choose books. Being laid out on a big table is a big, big step forward, but the fact is that no-one's going to buy your book unless they pick it up first – they have to notice it. So the potential customer picks up the book, then what do they do? They turn straight to the back and read that little teaser bit of the story at the back, the Blurb. All this time the person is cradling your precious book in their hands, actually feeling what it's like. Only if they're still interested does the customer look inside the book, flicking through the pages to see if the look of the text, the writing style, and once again the look and feel of the paper appeals.
If you're lucky they then take it up to the Pay Desk. Result. By the way, there's a good chance it'll never be read but that's not your fault or your problem, they've paid their money. But an amazing number of people buy books – or are given them as presents – that they never get around to reading. I do it myself, I'm guilty. They end up a year or two later in the local charity shop. Don't get too bothered that your book appears there, by the way; it's free advertising and you never know, it might kick-start a new wave of new purchases.
Anyway, covers consist of a front, a back, and a spine. We publish in B-format paperback mode, which means that the front and the back are 198mm tall by 129mm wide, but the spine depends on the number of pages and the thickness of the paper used. Again, our preferred choice is bookwove 80gsm, which for some reason produces thicker and heavier than offset 80gsm. A nice woman at our printers tried to explain this to me but it was all too technical. (And yes, that "offset" really is the same stuff you put through your Xerox machine. Do you really want your book to feel like the latest office circular?) The cover itself should have a little bit of body, too – at least 300gsm weight. But watch out that different printers' paper weights seem to mean different things, so try before you buy. That's what a bound proof is for.
Spinewidth calculators are freely available on the internet. Here's ours on the right, with a little free advertising for our printers (click on the logo). So if you have a book that has a 20mm spine width, then your total area will be 129mm + 129mm + 20mm = 278mm x 198mm height. Finally, you'll notice that all printers ask for an allowance for 'bleed', usually around 3mm all the way around. That's a little extra wiggle-room to make sure that everything they cut is actually printed and not blank card.
For fiction, certainly, you want matt finish, which is slightly more expensive than gloss. Gloss is for cookery books and foreign language phrasebooks.
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We can do covers, but it's not yet our speciality, and we suggest you shop around a little for someone to do your cover. As publishers we're looking for a little flexibility, so we prefer the file to be returned in the following formats: Press-standard jpeg, and we use Adobe InDesign. We'd prefer that all covers be submitted in those formats, too, so that we can make any last-minute adjustments ourselves without having to go back to the cover designer. It probably means that most designers are using Adobe Photoshop, too.
Here's an InDesign template which you're free to download. It's backwards-compatible with InDesign CS4. |
| cbppbktemplate.idml |
Finally, if you're a cover designer and are looking for a specification for Comely Bank Publishing books, then here are our principal requirements – please provide us with:
- a full all-round cover, as a press-quality pdf. The cover should follow the house style faithfully, and either include either the correct barcode or else a white space for us to insert our own barcode
- a front cover version only in high quality, medium quality and low quality jpg versions
- a completely-editable high quality file in Adobe InDesign. It's important that we can adjust the dimensions of each element, including the front cover title, front cover author's name, spine writing components, barcode, price, blurb and any other panels which appear. The basic rule is, anything you can edit, we need to be able edit as well. If you're new to covers, that's because very slight alterations during the production process can have great knock-on effects for the covers.
- We expect all measurements to be accurate to 0.1mm.
- We can supply cover designers with a logo jpeg on demand, and although most designers seem to operate with Adoce InDesign CS4, although we use CS6 which allows us to open your files. However please state what version of InDesign you are using so that we can send you back a file you can open yourself.
- A letter or email to say that the author has the right to use and copy your cover.
