Book design is so much more than an eye-catching front cover. Design also encompasses the page-by-page aesthetic and flow of the interior layout. In essence, it’s the both first thing you see and the entire experience of reading.

If your goal is to publish a great book, hiring a professional designer can be the difference between your book being picked up and purchased or languishing on the shelf. But how much should book cover and interior design cost?

The short answer is “it depends.”

Before you spend hundreds (or even thousands), we break down the most important factors that will make a book designer’s prices fluctuate for cover design and the interior layout of your manuscript.

Finally, to assist you in finding and hiring a professional who will be able to take your work from good to great, we surveyed the industry for average costs.

Four factors affecting book cover design costs

The cover is your book’s first impression on potential readers. A cover that appears cheap or unprofessional can work against you. Conversely, a well-designed book cover can pull the attention of readers away from other books, entice them to buy, and even influence how much they enjoy the book.

When discussing your cover with a designer, here are the four factors to be aware of that can cause costs to fluctuate:

• STYLE
  The style of your cover, and its resulting complexity, will affect the time spent on the design and therefore the cost. If a designer has the simpler task of working their magic with stock images, that’ll be a quicker job than creating a unique illustration, which can also have its own degrees of complexity.

• ITERATIONS & OPTIONS
  Translating your vision onto paper is challenging enough, but to communicate it to someone else is even more difficult. As a result, you may need to make adjustments to better suit your needs with additional revision rounds. The service will certainly include some revisions, but as they increase in number and complexity, so too can the price of the finished product.
  Perhaps you don’t have a clear design in mind to represent your book. In that case, you may wish to see multiple unique cover options, each with a different conceptualization, before getting into numerous revision rounds to perfect one particular design. Just know that requesting completely unique designs (or “mock-ups”) creates more work for the designer, which in turn can mean a higher cost.

• FORMAT
  A printed hardcover and softcover book will always require a more extensive cover design than the eBook version. Why? The print version needs design for the front cover, back cover, and the spine. This increases costs relative to the eBook, which has no need for the latter two elements.

• DESIGNER’S EXPERIENCE
  Last but not least: you can expect that experienced designers with years in the industry and a wide range of skills will often charge more. You’re not only paying for their artistic excellence but the knowledge needed to create an effective cover that sells your book. A beautiful cover is nice, but one optimized for the marketplace is the key to a book’s success.

Four factors affecting interior layout costs 

Graphic designer Joe Sparano says, “Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.” A book’s interior layout is a classic example: what may seem like simple words on a page are in fact a delicate balance of font choice, line length, margin, spacing, trim size, and more. Behind it all is the hand of a professional designer.

A book’s interior layout is an under-appreciated art, best executed when it recedes into the background so that the reader is able to read without glaring distractions. It may not be the most noticeable or exciting part of the book, but there’s much at stake. The text design is the book itself; it holds the book’s meaning. And if the text is poorly designed it will be difficult to read and therefore difficult to enjoy.

With so much hanging in the balance, it pays to hire a professional who speaks the language of interior layout design. To help you become more fluent, here are the top four factors influencing a book’s interior design:

• COMPLEXITY
  If your manuscript incorporates illustrations or other graphics, the project will undoubtedly be more complex, laborious, and costly. The interior design of an all-text novel will cost less than that of a project with more complex visual requirements—an art book or a cookbook, for example.

• MANUSCRIPT LENGTH
  In addition to the layout complexity of your book, the word count of your manuscript will also influence the time it takes to format. While some designers will charge on a per hour basis, in many cases you’ll find an established minimum price for a particular manuscript length, and additional fees when expanding beyond it.

• FORMAT
  The work of formatting a print book and an eBook is different, so they require differing approaches to the same text. Print books have a rigid layout of which the designer has precise control, while eBooks have a more simple, fluid layout that will adapt to a wide variety of electronic reading devices.

• DESIGNER’S EXPERIENCE
  A more experienced designer will once again result in a greater fee proportionate with their ability. You pay for their experiential knowledge in having worked on many books, but also their ability to cut through all the noise and can clearly communicate with you to produce exactly what it is you want. Much time and money can be spent in miscommunication.

Average design costs in the publishing industry

Now you know the factors influencing book cover and interior design. But when it comes down to dollars and cents, how much can you expect to spend?

We used a 60,000 word manuscript (the average word count of a FriesenPress-published book) as the basis for our study. The following figures are industry averages for the cost of cover and interior book design:

Bear in mind that (given all the factors explored in this article) each book is its own unique project and each author possesses their own unique set of needs. However, this aggregate number gives you a solid understanding of what designers charge (and what influences their rates) before you dive into the market. There are plenty of graphic designers that can produce good work, but the experience and track record of a specialized book designer is where you’re going to find the greatest success. 

At FriesenPress, you're not just getting a one-of-a-kind book cover and dynamic interior layout, but an attractive marketing tool and an interior with smooth readability that guides readers through your book. Our design team is composed of experienced professionals with a wide variety of skills, styles, and specialities to help all types of authors create the best possible book.