Preparing for the design stage of your book 📙

I write to you from my other living room – The Dangerous Kitchen cafe, in downtown Tākaka.

How’s your memoir feeling today? Honestly, email me back with three words to describe how it’s feeling, I’d love to know!

I’m in the design stage of two books right now. This is where we take the text that people have spent months, often years, working on, and we lay it out to be printed into a book.

Some people do it the simple, low cost way. They write it, pop in a few photos here and there, and email to their local printer. They then usually print it as a booklet or as a bound document. And that’s good enough.

But others like to give a true blue, well designed book to their family and community. Maybe they’ll also gift a few copies to their local library and museum. That’s where we come in.

I have seven suggestions for you to prepare for the design stage

1. As you’re writing your story, you’ll have ideas about where you’d like to place photos, it’s good to note this in your doc, maybe in CAPITALS.
2. Keep an eye out for an image that would be good for your book cover.
3. How would you like to organise your images? You can clump them up, or place them individually throughout the story. I don’t see a huge price difference.
4. Are you going to organise your story into chapters? Sections? Be clear about that.
5. What colours do you love? The exact shades. It’s good to note that.
6. What fonts do you love? Note that too
7. Check out book covers around you. Which ones do you love? Take note of those too.

Preparing for the design stage now, is going to make things easier for you down the track.

But most importantly: Keep writing.

Charlotte x

And if you’d like help with this. Check out my online course Write Your Memoir, which takes you by the hand and leads you through the entire book writing process, including helping you prepare for the design stage. Also, we can write, edit and design your book for you.