Book Design Resources
Here are some resources for self publishers and those looking to improve their book design. I’ll update this as I learn about new resources and remember to do so. This is not comprehensive, but it’s pretty damn thorough.
If you find this useful, consider buying me a coffee.
On this page you’ll find:
Some Newsletters I’ve Written
Some Books About Book Design and Typography
Some Book Design Tools
Software, Images, Fonts
Some Places to Hire a Book Designer
Some More Places to Read About Book Design
Some Social Media Accounts to Follow
Some Newsletters I’ve Written
What’s a resource page without a little self promotion? Here are a few helpful newsletter posts I wrote (and recorded).
How to Collaborate With a Book Designer (Self Pub 101 by )
Some Books About Book Design and Typography
These are (mostly) bookshop.org affiliate links. Purchasing a book via these hyperlinks helps support the newsletter. Thanks!
Book Design & Layout
The Design of Books: An Explainer for Authors, Editors, Agents, and Other Curious Readers by Debbie Berne
Book Design Made Simple by Fiona Raven and Glenna Collett
InDesign to Kindle by James Gifford
Layout Essentials Revised and Updated: 100 Design Principles for Using Grids by Beth Tondreau
Making and Breaking the Grid by Timothy Samara
Book Covers
The Clothing of Books by Jhumpa Lahiri
Cover by Peter Mendselsund
The Look of the Book: Jackets, Covers, and Art at the Edges of Literature by David J. Alworth and Peter Mendelsund
Chip Kidd: Book One by Chip Kidd
Chip Kidd: Book Two by Chip Kidd
Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover edited by Paul Buckley
Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design edited by John Bertram and Yuri Leving
Don’t Sleep: The Urgent Messages of Oliver Munday by Oliver Munday
Typography
Butterick’s Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick (free and online!)
Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton
Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks by Keith Houston
The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
Some Book Design Tools
*I have never used this tool but still think it’s worth recommending.
Typesetting and Layout Software
Cover Design and Illustration
Gimp (free, open source)*
Images
Generally speaking, professional book covers use purchased, or licensed, images. That being said, there are plenty of places to find and use high quality, free and public domain images.
Here’s a huge list that’ll keep you busy for a while.
Shutterstock (paid)
iStock (paid)
Alamy (paid)
Getty Images (paid)
Figurestock (paid)
Vault Editions (paid)
Adobe Stock (paid + free)
Rawpixel (paid + free + public domain)
Unsplash (free)
Pexels (free)
Pixabay (free)
Gratisography (free)
Stocksnap (free)
FreeImages (free)
Morguefile (free)
Jay Mantri (free)
PicJumbo (free)
FoodiesFeed (free)
StockVault (free)
UnDraw (free + open source)
OpenPeeps (free)
Library of Congress (public domain)
The MET Open Access (public domain)
Smithsonian Open Access (public domain)
Public Domain Image Archive (public domain)
New York Public Library Digital Collections (public domain)2
Biodiversity Heritage Library Flickr (public domain)
Europeana (public domain)
The British Library Flickr (public domain)
Creative Commons Search Portal (public domain)
Artvee (public domain)
New Old Stock (public domain)
Fortepan (public domain, with credit)
Fortepan US (public domain, with credit)
Fonts
The statement above, about images, applies to fonts too. You’ll notice dafont.com is not on this list. That is intentional.
When it comes to fonts, you usually find two kinds of sites: ones from type foundries, or font designers, and marketplaces that host, curate, and sell fonts from several designers. This list is a mix of both, there will be some overlap, and there are hundreds, if not thousands, more places to find fonts on the internet.
Please, please remember there is a difference between personal and commercial font licenses. Here is a good overview if you want to learn more about font licensing.
MyFonts (paid)
Adobe Fonts (licenses included with Adobe Creative Cloud Subscription)
Vocal Type (paid)
Hoefler & Co. (paid)
Heritage Type Co. (paid)
Emigre Fonts (paid)
Paratype (paid)
Dynamo (paid, value-based pricing)
Bureau Brut (paid)
Creative Market (paid)
Envato Elements (paid)
I Love Typography (paid + free)
Atipo Foundry (paid + free)
Brandon Nickerson Studio (paid + free)
Fontspring (paid + free)
YouWorkForThem (paid + free)
Lost Type Co Op. (paid)
Google Fonts (free + open source)
The League of Moveable Type (free + open source)
Use & Modify (free + open source)
Velvetyne (free + open source)
Open Foundry (free + open source)
Some Places to Hire a Book Designer
I Need A Book Cover
I Need A Book Cover is the brainchild of book designer Zoe Norvell.
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.
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, 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. 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.
Some More Places to Read About Book Design
Spine Magazine
Oh, I love Spine.
Spine was founded in 2014 by Emma J. Hardy, and covers creative and production aspects of the book publishing industry with a primary focus on the author's process and book cover design. It was developed further by Eric C. Wilder, from 2015 to early 2020. Today it is published by Vyki Hendy. Its mission is to offer creator insight, long-form stories, product information, and community content for an audience that is highly enthusiastic about books.
Spine publishes Q&As with designers about specific covers, articles on trends like minimalism and maximalism, university press round-ups, and more. They used to publish a podcast that I believe is now dormant but it is well worth digging into its archives.
The Casual Optimist
The Casual Optimist is a blog about books, book design, book culture and publishing. It is a terrific resource for looking at gorgeous contemporary book covers with monthly and annual notable book cover roundups.
Book Design Made Simple
OK, let’s get nitty gritty. Book Design Made Simple is a great place to learn about how to design your own book from cover to cover. In addition to being a blog, it is also a book. I think the cover work here is a little wanting, but I learned SO MUCH about typesetting and InDesign and book layout from this book and website.
The Book Designer
The Book Designer is a blog that was started by the late Joel Friedlander and is now owned by selfpublishing.com. It was and continues to be a solid resource for self-publishing authors to learn more about book design.
I Need A Book Cover
I Need A Book Cover, first and foremost, is a place to find book cover designers. But the site, run by Zoe Norvell, also has a great blog updated every month or so with topics like “Should You Consider a Book Cover Redesign?” and Book Covers Using Crumpled Paper and “10 questions” for several cover designers.
Print Magazine
Print Magazine is the name in graphic design publications.
It’s buried in the navigation menu, but Print has a Book Covers tag. It’s where I first saw Catherine Weiss’s cover for Big Money Porno Mommy (I did my own Q&A with them, check it out!). There are roundups, deep dives, interviews, and lots of other good stuff to read.
Some Social Media Accounts to Follow
There are a quarter bajillion book designers to follow on Instagram, but here are some accounts that are good for learning and curating several designers.
Blk + Brwn Book Designers, Inc
Exclusively photos of black and brown people.
Be sure to check the box marked “search only the public domain” near the search bar.