How to Become a Book Designer in Twenty-One Simple* Steps
A Foolproof Guide
Step One
Have your mother buy you Cover by Peter Mendelsund from Literati bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Realize that book cover design is a job, even though you’re already in your second year of a graphic design degree and have been a reader since childhood. Read the book voraciously.
Step Two
Get a page designer job at your university newspaper. Learn InDesign better than 95% of your peers (but still kind of suck at it).
Step Three
Design a copy of Fahrenheit 451 for one of your classes. Typeset it in 8 point Baskerville so that your future self needs to use a magnifying glass in order to read the typos you left in the book. Say “I like small type” and shrug.
Step Four
Earn your graphic design degree. Land a job designing a newspaper in West Michigan for $14 something an hour. Live in a shoddy, upstairs Grand Rapids apartment and turn your bedroom into an office and the living room into your bedroom. Never use the office. Drink too much.
Step Five
Move to Ann Arbor with no job prospects to live with your partner, rent-free on University of Michigan’s campus. Get a part-time job as a library page. Quit that job three months later to help take care of your sick sister.
Step Six
Go to a Susan Orlean author talk at the library. Pick up a flyer for the library’s in-house publishing imprint. Shoot off a quick email from your seat enquiring about freelance opportunities and receive a “thanks, we’re good” email.
Step Seven
Wait a few months, get an “actually we need some help!” email. Design your first freelance book.
Step Eight
Notice that the library is hiring a part-time graphic designer. Apply. Get passed over.
Step Nine
Get another, remote, newspaper design job in the evenings for about six months to help pay for your forthcoming wedding. Receive a call saying the library job is yours if you want it. Do both for a few months. Design a few more titles for the library.
Step Ten
Post some self-initiated book cover design projects on Instagram. Start a DM conversation with a real book designer, and get asked to help out his fledgling studio.
Step Eleven
Design, through nerves, frustration, and bad choices, your first university press book cover. Repeat.
Step Twelve
Troll Indeed and LinkedIn for book design gigs. Notice a posting for a freelance designer at a hybrid publisher. Google “hybrid publisher.” Apply. Somehow get it.
Step Thirteen
Design lots of book covers for people with enough money to thrust their questionable ideas upon the world in published book form. Hate yourself a little bit but cash the checks anyways. Get better through repetition. Get better through repetition. Design a few more subcontracted university press books along the way.
Step Fourteen
Get burnt out. Take a break from freelancing when you have a kid. Go back to it because you could use the money.
Step Fifteen
Take another break the following year after your mom is diagnosed with breast cancer. Question if you really want to keep designing books about email marketing and covers that recreate what a tasteless author created in Canva.
Step Sixteen
Watch that hybrid publisher burn to the ground. Wonder what to do—they were your primary freelance client. Keep doing good work for the library, including a coffee table book that is the best thing you’ve ever done.
Step Seventeen
Decide you do want to keep doing freelance book design, but on your own terms. Rent studio space. Revamp your project management system and cold email every university and independent press you can find. Get some nibbles on your line.
Step Eighteen
Reinvigorated, do some of the best work of your career. Remember that you’re damn good at this when you actually care about the books you’re designing.
Step Nineteen
Start a book design newsletter. Realize that you have a lot to say and that people will, against all odds, respect what you have to say. Huh! Whaddayaknow.
Step Twenty
Get an email from your old book design pal and mentor who now works as an art director for the largest independent publisher in the country. Do two covers for said publisher. Somehow nail it?
Step Twenty-One
Look ahead to the opaque future with nerves and excitement. Tell the world, even with your doubts, that you’re a book designer.
*Did I say simple? Oops.
What do you think about Papyrus?
What I’m Reading (links)
In Defense of Papyrus: Avatar Uses the World’s Second-Most-Hated Font to Signal the Downfall of Civilization (Design for Hackers)
Cover story: how Good Anger found its front by
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What I’m Working On
Something about swastikas, book covers, and the limits of cleverness
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Thanks for reading!
Thanks for reading! By now you may have noticed that this is, in fact, not exactly a followable guide to becoming a book designer. I hope you enjoyed yourself even if you were bamboozled. I like taking these cliché “how to” titles and attempting to subvert them.
My path to becoming a book designer was a winding one and, as I decided it wouldn’t several years ago, doesn’t involve living in New York City. While this isn’t exactly a guide, I hope that if you do want to design books, this inspires you to do so on your own terms. You’ll need some skill, and quite a bit of luck, but it is certainly possible. I’m a testament to that.
If you find this newsletter valuable, let me know by buying me a coffee or a becoming a paid subscriber. Paid subscribers gain access to How to Design a Book Cover, my bi-weekly bonus series that breaks down my process from sketch to final cover. You can read the first post in that series for free here:
I loved hearing about your journey! Your sense of humor seems to have helped you a lot through it all, i'm glad you're sharing it with us now :))
Also, i love papyrus!! It was the most popular font when i was designing "home pages" in Photofiltre for a horse game in 2015-ish. I made so much (fake) money from it, it even bought me a hundred unicorns (the pretty ones too!).
Now you can't shit on papyrus anymore without shitting on middle-grade girls, and we can't have that, can we? 😁
This is great! I think a lot of us have these fits and starts stories behind our “careers”.