Where to Find a Book Designer
Four Websites to Help Your Publishing Journey + an October Notebook
So, you’ve written a book. You’re going to need a book cover.
If your book is going to be traditionally published, your publisher will coordinate the design of its jacket. If you’re lucky, you’ll have a little bit of say in this process. You may or may not be happy. It may or may not matter.
If you have opted to self-publish your book, it is your job to find and hire the appropriate talent to design your cover.1 “Not all designers can design books,” says art director Rachael Brandenburg. “Just like not all book designers can design a logo. Book designers will develop creative concepts and curate type treatments that capture the right tone and key themes of what the book is about and who it’s for.”
If you want to make it so that people like me cannot tell your book was self-published, you’re going to need to hire a professional.
The good news is that you are currently reading words written by a professional book cover designer. Hi, hello, I’m Nathaniel. Hire me here. The better news is that you’re not stuck with me. There are some magical places on the internet where you can hire any number of book designers infinitely more talented than me. Today I’m going to share a few with you.
I Need A Book Cover
I Need A Book Cover is the brainchild of book designer Zoe Norvell.2
From the INABC site:
My name is Zoe and this site is my love letter to striking book covers and to my colleagues who create them. I spent years dreaming about some version of this project before I finally brought it to life.
In the past, if I turned down a project, clients would often follow up with, “Who would you recommend instead? Where should I look to find a designer?” And although I could instantly think of 30 names to recommend, this list did not exist outside of my head. This scenario happened enough times that I decided the internet was missing one, central directory featuring my colleagues and heroes. I wanted a curated list of industry pros that I would feel confident sharing again and again. The talented names listed here are the ones who regularly knock my socks off.
If you visit this website often and want to show your support, you can buy me a latte. Cheers!
The covers on this website are some of the best of the best. He might be busy, but if you wanted to, you could use INABC to hire John Gall, the current creative director of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.3
You can search the site for a specific book or designer, but there are also several filters to help you dial in the look you want for your book. Additionally, there is a convenient jobs board where writers and publishers can create briefs that designers may then bid on.
Need some guidance? Norvell created this video to help you out. Want tips about self-publishing your book? There’s a blog. Need a book interior, too? There’s a companion website called I Need A Book Interior where you can hire Zoe herself to design your book for fair and transparent prices.
Blk + Brwn Book Designers
Is who designs your book as important to you as their design talent? Maybe you’d like your designer to better connect with the characters in your book. Publishing is very white, and publishers will often release books with covers relying upon visual stereotypes.
Blk + Brwn Book Designers is “an emerging organization formed to diversify the publishing industry by educating Black and Brown creators on book design roles through community gatherings + programs.” Founded by designer Dominique Jones, BNB Book Designers is primarily a resource hub for fellow BIPOC designers, but on the site there is both a freelance directory and a blog where authors can read mini interviews with the designers featured on the site.
The site also has a job board where you can post a freelance job that will be hosted on the site. Though like INABC, the site itself does not provide the services and encourages you to reach out to individual designers directly.
The Indie Pages
I actually didn’t know about this site until I saw it linked on Blk and Brwn Book Designers. Created in partnership with BNB, The Indie Pages is a resource for emerging BIPOC indie authors to publish on their own.
From the site:
We are a group of BIPOC in-house and independent freelancers within the publishing industry, who’re ready to help writers make informed decisions about publishing their books.
The Indie Pages has a terrific pro-con breakdown of traditional publishing vs. self-publishing and an overview of the book production process. There is a very healthy Resources page and, of course, a freelancer directory. And as an added bonus, there is a Finding Talent page in which you may find links to additional resources to find BIPOC creatives outside of the publishing industry as well as links to find BIPOC editors, agents, copy editors, proofreaders, and publicists. It’s a resource-rich treasure trove.
Reedsy
Reedsy is a publishing marketplace site where an author may find not only a book cover designer but an editor, publicist, ghostwriter, marketer, interior designer, or web designer.
From the About page:
Crafting beautiful books is at the heart of everything that Reedsy does. We're changing the way books are published by giving authors and publishers access to talented professionals, powerful tools, and free educational content. Reedsy was founded in the summer of 2014 by Emmanuel Nataf, Ricardo Fayet, Vincent Durand and Matt Cobb. Since then, we've proudly built a community of over 1 million authors and 3,700 freelance professionals — helping them bring more than 15,000 books to market each year.
The site shares some DNA with popular freelancer websites like Upwork or Fiverr, but it is focused solely on publishing jobs and has higher standards. I don’t know what the process looks like behind the scenes, but I know there is an application process in which freelancers can be and are rejected,4 so there is some professional criteria in place.
Reedsy is a useful tool and a site, like the others listed, where you can hire some of the best talent in the game. Do you like
’s newsletter Meanwhile? Of course you do, it’s terrific. You can hire him on Reedsy. Scrolling through the marketplace, you can browse designers and then request a quote/offer from them and provide a brief. The designer will then send you their rate and the scope that rate covers.
However, where Reedsy differs is that the company heavily moderates the collaborative experience. Whereas INABC, BNB, and Indie Pages sends you to designers directly, Reedsy requires you to hire and communicate with your freelancer through their site and their messaging tools. This has pros and cons. On one hand, you are better protected as an author. Should there be a dispute between you and your freelancer, there is a mediator that can step in and help protect your funds. On the other, especially from the freelancer perspective, it can feel a bit draconian. Reedsy charges a 20% commission (10% from both sides) in addition to Stripe’s payment processing fees.5 To protect that fee, the platform requires you to communicate and upload files only via their tools. If you even type an email address into your message, or send a non-approved url, you risk losing your account:
Never pay for services contracted through Reedsy outside our website. If a service provider encourages you to take payments or communications off-site, that violates our terms. You will not be covered by our Protection Policy, you will be liable to pay the Introduction Fee, and you will likely have your account closed.
This might be fine. It’s probably fine. I don’t think it’s bad, it just makes me raise a cynical eyebrow. I have completed successful projects with Reedsy, so take my cynicism with a grain of salt—but sometimes I think all this hullabaloo about “protection” is just a company trying to protect it’s bottom line as a middleman. Do with that what you will!
In addition to its marketplace platform, Reedsy has an extremely robust blog that may help you even if you don’t contract with a freelancer via their platform. They also have email courses you can enroll in, and lots of free webinars, so it’s definitely worth exploring.
If you use one of these platforms to hire a book designer, I’d love to see the final product.
October Notebook
If you found this valuable and would like to support my work, now is a great time to buy me a coffee. I’m gonna need it. 👶🏻😴
It’s been a hell of a month already, y’all. We welcomed our daughter Naomi into the world on September 28 at 11:11 p.m. She decided she needed about five extra days in the hospital and a little bit of extra oxygen, but everybody is now happy, healthy, and HOME.
What I’m Reading
In the hospital I continued my read through of James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series. In book five I stumbled upon this delightful coincidence of names:
Book mail: I got the copy of Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design, an exploration of how designers approach Lolita’s book cover. This is, as they say, my shit. Yes, I’m going to write about it!
I started watching Twin Peaks for the first time. It’s goofy and wonkier than I expected—but so far I love it.
“Publishing is A Fake Industry” by
Books on the Bed episode 5 from
featuring Glenis Redmond, author of The Song of Everything and other books.
What I’m Working On
My biggest book jacket to date. My cover for The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide was recently approved and posted online. It’ll be out in 2025 from W. W. Norton’s Liveright imprint. This is a major milestone in my book design career!
Last week: I wrote about my “day job” at the Ann Arbor District Library and how it has “ruined me.”
Coming up: LOTS of good stuff. Here’s a sneak peak:
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!
Until next time,
—Nathaniel
Colophon
A Book Designer’s Notebook is a newsletter about books, design, and creative practice from the desk of Nathaniel Roy.
It uses the typefaces Merriweather, Futura, and whatever fonts Substack has chosen. Merriweather is a Google font designed to be a text face that is pleasant to read on screens. Futura is geometric sans-serif designed by Paul Renner in 1927. It is on the moon.
Nathaniel Roy is a book designer, collage maker, photo taker, self publisher, and a few other things in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
You can see his work and hire him here.
More Like This
Or, if you are so inclined, you can do it yourself.
I featured one of Norvell’s covers in my newsletter called Cover Your Book With Beautiful Garbage.
He was also in the newsletter I featured Norvell in. Showing my hand here a bit!
I know this because I am on Reedsy and have heard from other publishing freelancers that they have been rejected.
If you earn revenue from Substack, you’re familiar with this particular pain point.
I’m glad your baby was able to come home and everyone is healthy. Best wishes on the coming time together.
Great list of resources!