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Your Book is Unique

Each book differs in character, length, complexity and format. To determine the price for designing your book, we take into consideration all of these factors and tailor a price quote to fit your book project.

Typical questions to determine a quote for your book include:

Type and complexity of your book. For example, is this a novel with no images other than a cover? A book with extensive headings, subheadings and footnotes? A book with images and captions? A book with carefully placed text, like a children's book, a "how-to" book or a cookbook?
Word count. Along with the size and typographic format of your book, a word count helps us determine the approximate page length of your book. We utilize formulas for determining the page count, but it's not an exact science because variations in layout, chapter breaks and non-text inclusions can make for slightly fuzzy math. This is one of the main reasons we prefer to determine the cost of whole project, rather than go by a strict per-page charge. In our experience, we've found that everyone is happier with a set price so that we don't worry about a shifting price as variables come up and we can focus on simply making your book great.
Cover and interior. Will we be designing your cover, interior pages, or both? Will you be providing the images for the cover? Or will we be searching for them at stock image agencies or creating them from scratch? Generally we like to design both the cover and interior of your book so that they compliment each other in an overall pleasing way. But we're open to just designing one or the other.
Images. Will you provide them? How many will be included? Will they require captions? Do we need to prepare the images you provide for publication? For example: you may need your images converted from color to black-and-white, or/and from a web-friendly jpg format to a print-ready tif format. Will the images need to be repaired (dust and scratches removed)? We can also color correct your images to maximize their reproduction fidelity. Scanning your original hard-copy images is also available.
Format. Will your book be produced for print, ebook readers, tablets, or all three?
Production management. Are we coordinating production and delivering the files to your printer? Generally, the price of delivering your files to your choice of printers is included in the overall package price. But if you would like assistance in locating a printer by submitting for printing bids and/or have special needs we add a fee for the extra time involved.
Marketing materials: We can design and provide you with print ready files for your marketing campaign. For example: Bookmarks, post cards and press kits.

A Firm Quote

Once a quote is made we stick with it unless changes are requested from you. We don't charge for minor corrections and changes (within reason). In the book production process, as a manuscript morphs into a book format, errors often become more apparent. We'll gladly make corrections, because it's always part of the process. But if extensive (more than one hour per 100 pages of text) corrections and changes are requested, then an hourly charge ($60 per hour) are added onto the total bill.

Your quote will include the following price breakdown:

Design phase: This is our basic cost of the initial design phase, when we work with you to create an overall book style.
Page count: Our page rates are based on the complexity of your book's interior pages and its total approximate page count.
Cover design: Based on the complexity of your cover and acquiring or creating the image elements for its design.
Production management: If applicable, we can manage the production of your book through to its delivery to the printer or ebook distributor, or you can handle it yourself. In either case, we are available to advise you.
Marketing materials

Pricing Guide

Here's a general outline of how we formulate our quotes. Please keep in mind that this is an approximation. But, you can use these rough quotes to calculate the cost of your book design.

Cover: Depending on the artwork and time involved, the price of designing a cover can range from $400-$1600. Factors include whether you provide the artwork that will be incorporated into the design, or if we are to find or create the artwork (sometimes it's a combination of all three).

Initial interior design phase: The initial design process. We'll generate multipule layouts and tailored to your book's concept and marketing, with lots of opportunity for feedback from you. Depending on the complexity of the book the initial-design fee is $600-$900.

Per-page layout: Below is a list of our general price guidelines for the actual layout of your book's interior. This is in addition to the above design fee:

Simple text. Example: Novel. $4 per page.
Text plus multilevel headings. Example: Non-fiction. $5 per page.
Text, multilevel headings, extensive footnotes. Example: Historical. $5.50 per page.
Text, images with captions and/or extensive backmatter (example: with multilevel index) and end notes. Example: Textbook. $6-$9 per page.
Text, images, captions and varied layout. Example: Cookbook, How-To book. $7-$12 per page.

Please contact us with details about your book, and we'll provide your custom book-design quote.