Even though, to you, the concept of a book cover designer might sound like a one-off, it's not. It's a niche field, and there are people who have made lifelong careers only living and breathing book covers. So do you want to work with someone who's a generalist, a graphic designer, and they're going to do one book cover a year? Or do you want to work with someone who's literally working on one book cover a week? Yeah, because those people are out there. Welcome to the Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast. My name is Savannah Gilbo and I'm here to help you write a story that works. I want to prove to you that writing a novel doesn't have to be overwhelming. So each week, I'll bring you a brand new episode with simple, actionable and step-by-step strategies that you can implement in your writing right away. So, whether you're brand new to writing or more of a seasoned author looking to improve your craft, this podcast is for you. So pick up a pen and let's get started. In today's episode, I'm sharing a conversation I had with Zoe Norvell, the mastermind behind ineedabookcovercom and its sister site, ineedabookinteriorcom, and I'm so excited to have Zoe on the podcast today because she's been designing book covers professionally since 2011. And she's done everything from working in-house at Simon Schuster and Penguin Random House to freelancing full-time as a one-woman studio, designing book covers and interiors for clients of all sizes, from the big publishers to tiny poetry houses to self-publishing authors and everything in between. And now Zoe runs a website called ineedabookcovercom, which is an ever-growing gallery for cover inspiration, a searchable directory for the industry's top talent and a virtual jobs board that connects self-publishing authors with that talent. And I'm not joking when I say that her website answers every single question that a first-time author has about the cover design process. It's such an amazing resource for writers, and Zoe has just a wealth of knowledge about covers and interiors. So today Zoe's going to share with us things like the first steps to take when looking for a book cover designer, what to consider when searching for the right designer for you and your book, including why you shouldn't use sites like Fiverr to find your cover designer and she's even going to talk through an overview of the kind of rates you can expect to pay for a book cover and exactly what to say when you reach out to the cover designer of your dreams. This is such a jam-packed episode, full of Zoe's incredible experience and insights, and I know you're probably eager to get into it, so let's dive right into my conversation with Zoe Norvell. Hi, zoe, welcome to the Fiction Writing Made Easy podcast. Hello, thank you, I'm so excited to have you here. You have an awesome website called I Need a Book Cover. We're going to talk all about that and how to find a book cover designer, what to look for, how to approach a designer and things like that. But before we dig into the details, can you let people know who you are, what you do and things like that For sure? So I'm Zoe and I'm chatting with you from Washington DC right now.

I've been in the book publishing industry my entire professional career. I was a graphic design major from Pratt Institute and, immediately upon graduating, just threw myself into the Manhattan book publishing world and it's all I've ever known. It's what I live and breathe, and I'm a book cover designer day to day, week to week, and I also design book interiors. And I work with clients of all sizes big five publishers, medium sized commercial publishers, small presses scattered across the country and also the occasional self-publishing author. That's so fun. It's like surrounding yourself with books in every way possible, which I love. What made you start? I Need a Book Cover, dot com. This is how I will explain it.

If you're a very tidy person, have you ever gone to your friend's house and there's just like a sink full of dishes and you're like I can't help myself. I have to tidy up these dishes? Yeah, that's kind of that's definitely part of my personality. So if there is just a clear problem that needs to be solved that I am so well suited to solve it, I want to get that done. So for me. That's what this website was all about.

I've been in the industry now for 13 years, wow, and I was in-house for the first five, and I've been full-time freelance working with all different kinds of clients for the next eight. So over my career of 13 years, I just found myself answering the same questions over and over again, and, as someone who's so steeped in this very niche world, I had all of this information that I realized just wasn't in one cohesive place for people that needed these answers. It was all in each of our heads me and my fellow cover designers but it wasn't readily available on the internet, and so, just like the girl who just wants to clean up the dishes at her friend's house, I was like I just need to make this resource and put it out there, and what's been so cool and so fulfilling is how many different types of people it appeals to. It appeals to. It appeals to my fellow cover designers, it's been helping out art directors that are in-house at big publishers and, of course, it's super helpful to first-time authors. Yes, and so there's so many things I wanna say about this, but basically listeners will see.

If you go to I Need a Book Covercom, you can browse through any kind of book covers you want. So you can go to science fiction. I think you can break it down by, like adult versus, let's say, middle grade right, yeah, so middle grade, but young adult yeah, yeah, or young adult, perfect. So you can break it down by genre. You can break it down by age range and you can just look at what does romance look like versus science fiction, versus memoir, and it's so cool Like I love color and I love visuals, and so I go on there and I'm just like randomly kind of browse around while I'm like waiting for a file to download and I'm like look at all the beautiful covers. So it is a really cool site. We will link to that in the show notes and everything. But that is so cool. You kind of are speaking to my heart because I'm also the person that will go over and be like I can fix that. Do you want me to help you? I'm not your butt in, but I would like to help you. So very cool, but okay.

So if I'm an author who's never had to think about book covers before whether I'm working with a traditional publisher or I'm doing it on my own what is like my first step I need to take? I think the first step is something that I know you talk about a lot on your blog and in your podcast, which is the mindset. So approach working with a cover designer with a very strong professional mindset. If I would imagine that your listeners are the type of people who've spent hours on their manuscript they're listening to this podcast right now. Maybe they're working with you or a different book writing coach. That means that their mindset is that they want to approach this very professionally and they want to set themselves up for success.

So if that's your mindset going into this, do not skimp on the book cover design aspect. Take all of that strength and power to this aspect of the process, because not. Every person who sees your book is going to buy it or read it. Every person who sees your book is going to see your cover. Yeah, every person who sees your book is going to see your cover. Yeah, so don't spend hours and hundreds of dollars on every other aspect of this process and skimp on the book cover. Yeah, it's just as important. That's a really great point. Yeah, because I never thought about that way, that, yeah, literally everyone's going to see it. Everyone's going to start a conversation of do you want to pick it up and read more, or read the first page? And some people will, some people won't, right, but everybody will get that book cover, yeah.

So one of the things we talked about offline was I love how your site is curated. So you've curated titles and book covers for certain reasons, and you know we can go into that if you want to. Titles and book covers for certain reasons, and you know we can go into that if you want to. But something I see with authors all the time is they pull up Amazon and they say like sci-fi covers or fantasy covers, or how do I find a book cover designer or whatever, right? So using the Amazon approach is not one that any of us recommend. The Amazon algorithm when you're looking at one book and then they give you a recommended list, it is all about who's paying for that real estate and what publisher is trying to drive sales. It has nothing to do with the content. I mean, sure it's going to be a genre specific book, but it's not about your market and it's not about the look of the cover. It's all sales and algorithm based.

My best advice for anyone who's trying to find a cover designer and just trying to understand design trends and maybe come up with a cohesive look for their own cover is to go to a bookstore, because everything you're looking at there is going to be most likely it's going to be recent, right. You walk in and the first table you see is new, just released books. So that's going to tell you right there what is popular right now not 10 years ago, but right now. And the other thing that you can get from going to a bookstore and instead of relying on Pinterest or Amazon is that one of the things that's so unique about the field of book cover design is that traditionally, publishers credit anyone who's involved in the creation of the book cover Either. If it's a hardcover, it's on the back flap and if it's a paperback, it's on the back somewhere near the barcode. And this is just a traditional thing that publishers have been doing since I don't know the 50s or 60s, and it's carried on to today. So if you are in a bookstore and you see a bunch of designs that you like, you can flip it to the back and you know you have your phone with you. Just take a picture of that person's name and Google them later. But you can't get that when you're on Amazon, and you definitely can't get that on Pinterest either. Yeah, and the pool of options is just so huge. Like you said, you could be looking at a book on Amazon that you know could have been self-published and maybe it's doing nothing, maybe it's traditionally published and maybe it didn't really work that well, or maybe the cover specifically didn't resonate Right, like we don't know any of that. And yeah, there's something to say too about the reaction you have walking into a bookstore and looking at that table and what stands out to you as probably a reader of your own genre, you know. So totally agree that that's a worthwhile experience to do the other thing I see, so besides like going on Amazon or searching Pinterest or Google.

People will go to sites like Fiverr and they will hire somebody and sometimes it works out, but I'd say 90% of the time it doesn't. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, so I don't know. A lot of people know this. Maybe this is common knowledge, but Fiverr gets its name because when it first launched, like 10 years ago, their business model was that you could hire anyone for a gig for five bucks Wow, I didn't know that dollars. But yeah, that is 100% where it got its name. You could literally hire. You could hire someone to do, you know, anything like wash your car for five bucks. It wasn't specifically like a design service website. So just keep in mind that Fiverr is is an absolute budget marketplace. It's unfiltered, it's not curated. Anyone can sign up, and the same goes for 99designs. 99designs is a contest-based crowdsourcing model, so you, the client, you give your brief and post it online and then designers do work speculatively for free, and only the winner of that contest gets paid. So just ask yourself is anyone who's also working for Flatiron Books or FSG or Torcom? Are they going to waste their time on 99 designs? They're not, and there's probably instances where Fiverr or 99designs could work out.

I don't think it's with a book cover. I could see someone using it for like a logo or something Like, if you needed like a real quick press logo that's so different from a real in-depth book cover, right. Or like social media graphics for your launch or whatever that is like those sites are great for. But yeah, going back to your point, we don't want to skimp on the quality and we want you know it's the same thing with hiring editors or any other professional that you're going to work with on your book. You do get what you pay for, right? And you talk to sometimes about the difference between a general graphic designer and a book graphic designer, a book cover designer. So it's the same. I would assume it's the same thing there. Like you get the professionalism, the specific research, knowledge, expertise of that book cover designer versus someone who designs a bunch of different things. Is that right, right, right?

So even though to you, your listeners, a novice writer, the concept of a book cover designer might sound like a one-off, it's not. I am here to tell you again from the moment I left college, I have been a book cover designer. We are a small subsect of the greater graphic design world, but it's a niche field and there are people who have made lifelong careers only living and breathing book covers. So do you want to work with someone who's a generalist, a graphic designer, and they're going to do one book cover a year? Or do you want to work with someone who's literally working on one book cover a week? Yeah, because those people are out there. Yeah, they're out there and like they can be genre specific too. They might only do romance or only, do you know, young adult, whatever it is. So I think that's a great points to keep in mind.

We want quality, we want someone with that expertise, and then, once we know that, where do we go to find these people? Right? So again, I'm just going to harp on the bookstore technique. Yeah, which was great. Yeah, and I promise you, if you spend long enough in the bookstore looking for the design credit, you will start to see the same names over and over again. Yeah, so it really is true, if you spend long enough in the fantasy section, you might see certain names again and again, and that's how you know. Okay, these people are working at the top of their game. Yeah, and then, of course, I have to plug yes, come over to, I Need a Book Cover.

So you know, unlike 99designs or Fiverr, which are just the wild wild west out there, this is a curated site. We have a directory of 250 cover designers and they're all currently working either in-house or they're full-time freelance but regularly contributing designs to the top publishers in the industry. And this list of 250 names that's available on our directory tab. This list does not exist anywhere on the internet outside of ineedabookcovercom. And this goes back to the very first thing I told you about how.

I just knew that there was a gap out there on the internet. I knew there was a problem that needed solving, which was I could come up with a hundred really talented book cover designers right off the top of my head, but there was no one place that connected everyone. Right, because everyone has their own portfolio site site, but they're all just advertising their own services. And sure there's, you know everyone's working at different publishing houses, but even the publishers don't. They might list the editors working there, but they're not listing the cover designers. And I just found it wild that we're this disjointed but also interconnected ecosystem of designers that are all doing the same thing and yet, unless you're truly in the industry. There was just no directory of who all these people are.

Yeah, which, I mean, is hard when you're in the industry. Imagine being a first-time author. That is super challenging, right, so hard. Yeah, you're just going out into the Wild West, like you said, and hoping you find a good cover designer. Right, you have a job board. How does that work, okay? So, yeah, there's two ways to use the website to find someone. Number one is totally free and it's a bit more time consuming.

So you come to the site. You would follow the same steps that I described with the bookstore scenario. You come to the site, you look at a number of covers that appeal to you. Hopefully, you're being genre specific, as we've talked about. So, if you're looking at a fantasy book, you're looking at fancy covers and you figure out who designed those covers, because everyone's profile is tagged to each book. And then it's on you, the visitor, to go to each designer's separate portfolio site and contact them one-on-one, find their email or, you know, use their contact form. So in this option, we act as a matchmaker and we are helping you filter out all the noise of all the other things that Google is going to tell you when you go to Google and type in best book cover designers, we act as a curation system and we hand you all of these people on a platter, but ultimately it's on you to contact them, right? And so that part's free. Yeah, right, that's just coming to the website and using it as much as you want, and that part is totally. We charge $99. But everyone who has used the jobs board so far has had an amazing response and it's absolutely worth the price.

If you want to save some time looking for the cover designer, we walk you through a step-by-step process to ask you all of these questions that are pertinent to a cover designer and we put together all of your answers into an automatically generated creative brief, which every cover designer no matter if I'm working with a self-publisher or if I'm working with a big five publisher I need a creative brief. If you don't know how to make one that's what the jobs for is we make one for you through a series of questions, and this includes your creative vision, which is so important for the cover designer. So we know all the questions to ask and you fill this out and at the end you have a creative brief. You fill this out and at the end you have a creative brief, and then really, the service that you're paying for is that we blast out your creative brief to our exclusive list of 500 designers. This email goes out on Tuesdays. We have like an 85% open rate.

People are definitely like waiting for these emails and are responding to it, and so far, on average, our authors are getting between 20 and 40 project bids per brief. Wow, yeah. So instead of you know emailing 20 people and maybe getting ghosted a little bit along the way you are, you know Tuesday morning you'll wake up and your inbox will be flooded with people who have already looked at your brief, and so, if they're responding to the brief, you already know that they're available, they have time in their calendar, you already know that they were within your budget because that's going to be displayed, and you know that they're interested in your book because they've gleaned all of this from the brief. Yeah, that's amazing. And so for $99, that saves you time, mental energy, potentially wasted money if you're. You know having to go through all these different designers to find someone who works, because I've seen that happen, where a writer will work with one designer and they go through the whole process and then it's like you know, maybe it was a designer from Fiverr or whatever, and then they have to move on to somebody else because there was just this disconnect or the quality wasn't there, or whatever. So all of that saved for $99 is a pretty good deal, I think, yeah, yeah.

And the other thing is we connect you with the designer and then we step out of the way. You enjoy full autonomy working with the designer. I know, just anecdotally, a lot of the authors get on the phone with the designers. There's a connection made and we step out of the way. There's no more hidden fees. We've just provided you that connection. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're totally a matchmaker. That's what you said and I think that, yeah. So that's great. We already kind of talked about, like once, whether you're browsing your site I need a book cover dot com or you're going through this kind of matchmaking service.

What are some things that writers can look for in a book cover designer that they want to work with? Again and again, I'm going to say please be genre specific. So you know, don't fall in love with someone's cookbooks and then approach them about your fantasy book, right? I've been approached a few times for mysteries and they're just not my strong suit. But that's fine. I've, you know I've passed on those potential clients to mystery specific designers that I trust. But just really take a look at someone's portfolio and make sure that you're asking them. You know they might've designed an amazing like Sally Rooney cover, but if that hasn't, that's going to have a totally different look from your thriller, right? So you just have to be like, really genre specific and then pay attention to little things like whether or not someone used hand lettering in their portfolio. So if you know for sure that you want to see hand lettered typography in whatever capacity on your cover, make sure that you're reaching out to people that have examples of hand-lettered typography in their portfolio and make sure that that's a conversation you're having in the very beginning, because sometimes you might confuse what you think is a hand-lettered design. It might be a font, which would be great for you, because that means you can just go ahead and use that person, maybe use that font again. Or sometimes people hire hand-letterers so that would be an added cost. So that's just something to keep in mind.

And also, if you really want an illustration forward cover, not everyone considers themselves to be an illustrator. I certainly do not. I am a graphic designer first and foremost. I do some hand lettering. I don't do illustration. So anything that's illustrated or painted in my portfolio, that all came from stock websites. But there are other designers out there who are illustrators, slash book cover designers, you know I'm thinking of Michaela Alcano. She's in the UK. She's done a ton of fully illustrated fantasy covers. Jim Tierney just did the rebrand for the is it House of Glass? Castle the Glass, the? Sarah J Maas oh, is it Throne of Glass? Yeah, throne of Glass, yeah. So Jim Tierney just did the complete rebrand for all of those. They're beautiful. Vianne Nguyen she is an illustrator and a designer. So, yeah, just make sure, if you want an illustrated cover, that you're reaching out to someone who does illustrations. If you reach out to someone like me who relies on the stock imagery, you could still get a super bespoke cover.

But it's this. There might be limitations to the number of tweaks I can make to something because I'm not creating it myself. Yeah, and it could just cause frustration or, you know, problems with communication down the road. I've seen that happen to where you know, and I have kind of a weird background. I used to work in the surf industry with clothing designers. So some of the writers I work with they're like I don't know how to talk to my designer and I'm like tell me what you were trying to say and let me help you, like switch it into design language. But if you're saying something where, like for you, you don't illustrate, so even if you're trying to communicate something and you know, I've just seen it cause that frustration that makes the process not fun. And it should be fun, it should be a partnership, you know, and things like that. So all great points.

And then talk to me a little bit about rates and budgets. Yeah, it's something that's not. It would be great if there was just a like cut and dry menu that we could all refer to. Right, like I don't know what it's like in editing or book coaching. There's probably a range, right, but there is certainly a range with cover design. And even I myself, I accept a wide range because I offer a lower rate to small poetry presses, you know, in smaller cities across the country. I offer them a lower rate because I like working with them and I like doing poetry books. I'm going to accept a much higher rate from someone like Simon Schuster. So there is a range and the trick here is to try to find someone who mashes up with you. I have a few articles on the I Need a Book Cover website where I basically try to tell the readers what they're up against.

So if you fall in love with Riverhead designers work and you absolutely want to work with them you have to be competitive with what they're being offered. They're busy, right? They're at Riverhead. Maybe they're only accepting very few freelance projects on nights and weekends. There's a chance you could work with them, but you have to be willing to compete with the rates that they're getting from other big five publishers. So if you can play at that level, I have an article online where I explain.

Those big publishers are spending between two to three thousand dollars per cover design, and if it's a fully illustrated cover, it's more per cover design, and if it's a fully illustrated cover, it's more. It's way more than three. Yeah, because that takes time, takes, you know all of it takes experience and time, but illustrations are probably a lot more labor intensive, but so okay. So just to reiterate, because some people probably had a little bit of sticker shock at 2000 to 3000. You're saying those are for kind of bigger, big five people that work with big five publishers. Yes, so my point there is that let's say you wrote a business book and you absolutely want to work with the same guy that did a Michael Lewis book cover. Yeah, that is possible, the guy who does Michael Lewis's book covers that. He's on my site. But if you offer him, you know, half of just said about, sometimes you'll offer lower rates with exceptions.

Would you say that pricing is heavily based on experience or is it? You know? I'm sure it can be based on so many things actually, right, like, how many clients does this book cover designer want? Do they want a little bit? Do they want more? What kind of work are they doing? Is it really just kind of all over the place? It can be all over the place, it can be all over the place. It really can be like.

If so, I have a lot of all type covers in my personal portfolio and the typography can is all over the place, it's custom, it's super illustrated, it's hand done. I don't mean just like Helvetica covers the page, that, that it's a type forward book that I might budget charts one a bit higher for something like that, as opposed to someone who wrote a memoir and they know that they absolutely want to use a photo from their childhood of them with their mom and my job is to make that childhood photo interesting, that's. You know, that's going to be a different fee than show me eight different super heavily involved typographical approaches. You know, and and I wish I could tell you more about the illustration side of things, but it's just my wheelhouse. I think it's great for people to hear just like what even goes into the thought process of you know, am I using a childhood photo? Am I creating something from scratch? Is it going to be illustrated? Is it heavy on type? Like what is it?

So it's all super interesting and you brought up, like, how many options you're going to see. That is definitely important. So, obviously, when I send round one, if a client has asked for six different options in round one and another client has only asked for three, I would bill a different amount. So, yeah, the number of options that you want to see in the first round, that's super important. That's going to determine the overall cover budget as well. Yeah, and that's great for authors to think about, especially if they're going through your job board and they're kind of, you know, having to answer these questions. It's good to think about it beforehand and be realistic about what you're expecting for what you're paying. But OK, so that's all really great about what you're expecting for what you're paying. But okay, so that's all really great. And then so say, we've found a few cover designers or we've gone through the job board or whatever. How do we approach somebody? How do we even ask or reach out to a cover designer? Great question.

For as long as I've been doing this, I've received excellent cover letters from potential clients that have led to really great collaborations, and I've also received not so great initial emails that I kind of pass off. So I have created a email template that I can share with your listeners and your readers, and for me, as someone on the receiving end of these emails, this is just the perfect form letter that I would want to receive. When I have a super busy day and I'm getting 100 emails in a day, this is how your initial email to a cover designer is going to stand out. So I'll just walk us through it real quick. So, first and foremost, I will write this email as if I'm pitching you, savannah. So hi, savannah, we all use my name. I mean, we all know when you receive a copy and paste email, right? So hello, sir or ma'am, yes, yes, yeah, so hi, savannah.

Next paragraph is the how. So I found your name while searching. I need a book cover. Your colleague, zoe Norvell, recommended me. I saw your name listed on Lit Hub's 2023 best covers list and your designs stuck out to me. Just something that lets me know how you found me. And you know, especially if I pass people on to other colleagues all the time. So if someone, if you name drop someone that referred you, that's definitely going to help stick out.

So now the what I have written a fiction nonfiction memoir book about. Be super brief here. Like super brief, you can add more at the end. So I've written a memoir about my life growing up in Egypt. I will be self-publishing and I'm looking for a cover designer at the moment. I hope you'll consider working with me.

New paragraph why I love your work, especially the cover. You did for mention a cover, because this really lets me know that you've done your homework, you've looked at my portfolio and you want to work with me specifically. Honestly, it's touching when I get that personal connection that someone really likes. Wow, you did the cover for my favorite memoir and I would be so honored to work with you. Like it really, really helps. So I love your work, especially the cover you did for Blank, because it's exactly what I'm looking for.

I'm hoping to achieve a colorful, all type design on my own cover, Something again that lets me know you're going to be able to speak my design language and you're really connecting your vision to my portfolio specifically. Yeah, and I'll pause you there because that might freak people out a little bit, because they're like, I don't know all the design lingo you could probably say something. Correct me if I'm wrong, zoe, but you could probably say something like I'm hoping for a bright, illustrated cover with personality, like you did for this book. Or I'm looking for something that features my heroine and hero in his hockey uniform, because it's a sports romance, like every book, so it doesn't have to be super techie. Yeah, and also, please don't say things like an attention grabbing. I mean, everyone wants an attention grabbing, so do the designers right, right, right, right. I mean that's attention grabbing. Yeah, and plus. That's really subjective. What's attention grabbing? Yeah, and plus that's really subjective.

What's attention grabbing to me is probably different from what's attention grabbing to you. Yeah, it does. It's not specific enough. It's true, it's just such a bottom of the barrel, like descriptor, you know. Yeah, and then I also, I love this one line.

So, after you say what you're trying to achieve with your design, I would always add I would also be open to your own interpretation based on my manuscript. So, yeah, like you already said, it's a collaboration, but this sentence shows that you trust my expertise, you're open to my own input, which is more fun for me as a designer. This lets me know that you're choosing me because you like my style and you'd be totally open to me suggesting other things for you rather than just me responding to exactly what you're telling me to do. This just makes lets me know that this could be a really fun collaboration Right, and keyword collaboration right, because the other option of you just being told what to do is not that. It's just you getting the job done and that's not fun. If you have to choose between two projects, you're going to pick the one that feels more fun and more like a collaboration.

Yeah, next sentence. Please include this in every email. My cover design budget is blank, you're going to ask we're going to get to this no matter what. So just say it in the first email. If your budget is high enough, that's going to make this email, this, the thought of working together, a lot more appealing. And if it's too low for me, that's going to let me know sooner rather than later, so I don't waste either our time. And again, this is. This is just another really handy thing for me to have, just in case I want to point you elsewhere, which brings me to the last sentence in this email.

I call this plan B. This is how I would close. If you're available and interested, please let me know. If you're not available, could you suggest another designer that I might reach out to Tap into our knowledge? I always send people around. If I don't think I'm the right fit for them, I'm the right fit for them. And again, when you've given me your budget, one sentence before that's gonna let me know who I'm going to suggest. If it's super high, I'm gonna suggest the World is my Oyster, I'll suggest anybody. But if it's a bit lower, I will suggest names of designers who are junior designers in house somewhere, whose you know their nights and weekends are a bit more open. Maybe they you know their nights and weekends are a bit more open. Maybe they're still working on their freelance career. That's the kind of thing that we know because we are in the industry, but other people would have no way of knowing that Right? So that's why having the budget is handy. And then plan B could you suggest another designer I might reach out to? And then, to close, more information about my book is below Hope to hear from you. Thanks.

You give your name and then, at the bottom, after your email signature, that's where you can add a really long email, a book summary, about your book. To put that too far up will just cloud my vision and I lose all of the key points that you're trying to get across. So I always just put that closer to the bottom. I would say, yeah, that is an excellent email and we're going to link to the template so you listeners can get your hands on that, and I so appreciate you putting that together for us.

Zoe, two questions on that. So if I'm a writer because this is a question I've been asked and I'm like I don't know the right answer If I'm a writer and I'm writing something like this letter that you've suggested, or this email, and I say my budget is around $800, but I also don't know if that's appropriate or if. But I'm also flexible. Can you write something like that or is that a red flag? No, I would write that.

The important thing is to just be honest from the very beginning. You know, like talking about money is tough. You don't know what the budget is. You don't want to be like, you don't want to offend someone by saying something so low Not that I've ever been offended by these things, because it really is such a dance yeah. And if you say my budget is 800, I'm not sure if you work in that range, but I really like your work Let me know. I might respond and say well, my minimum is a thousand Savannah, if you can meet me there, that would be great. A thousand Savannah, if you can meet me there, that would be great. And for a thousand dollars I will offer you three unique designs per round, but I would prefer to charge, you know, 1500. And for that I would give you five options for around and we can kind of yeah, that's good to know, Cause it's not.

I have a feeling you know there's people out there that are going to Google and they're going to get 10 million responses of what should a book cover cost? And you know a lot of it is. Be realistic with your budget, do the research I think that's great and then also be open to have the conversation, because I think, like you're saying, things can be a lot more flexible or, you know, it doesn't have to be as hard as maybe we think it does. And then the second thing I want to say about that awesome email is that it reminds me of when people pitch my podcast and I there's like an easy pile, a yes, an easy yes pile and an easy no pile. And when people are writing to you about your book covers, this email template is basically making it either an easy yes or an easy. I know what to do next with this email. So it's not like you said, it's not clouding your vision, it's not becoming a chore, it's just like oh, you don't really meet my budget. I know exactly where to send you. So I love that. It's just like so crystal clear, makes it so easy, and we all love frameworks, I think. So make sure to get everybody that template and put the link in the show notes.

But this has been super informative. I feel like I could ask you 45 more questions. I could go on and on. Yeah, well, we'll have to have you back another day to maybe go more in depth. And, like you said, on ineedabookcovercom, there are a lot of articles that it's basically like a peek into your brain. So I recommend people go check those out. But any like last parting words of wisdom or advice for people who are nervous or apprehensive about working with a cover designer I guess you know there's just so many aspects to this.

And again about, like the sticker shock with with the pricing, you know everything I'm saying here is my experience and this is the. The website is my way of saying. If you have your heart set on a certain level of design, it is attainable, even if you're self publishing. But it's you know it's just going to cost a certain amount and there's a certain way that you communicate, like you know. You and I haven't even talked about like premades. There's all these websites out there that offer premades. I can't speak to those because that's so, not so goes against everything that me and my colleagues do. Yeah, but yeah, there's premades out there that cost $200.

And if you find a premade that you love, great, who am I to say that that's not a good plan for your book? But you know, last parting words is just that there's trend setters in every industry and then there's trend followers and the people on my website, my esteemed colleagues. You know, those are the trend setters. They're the ones creating new looks for certain genres, certain genres. They're setting the bar pretty high and it's kind of like that Meryl Streep moment in the Devil Wears Prada where she says that this color blue trickled down. The same thing, something that was maybe super popular in the business book world 10 years ago maybe has at this point trickled down to Canva or Fiverr. But if you really want a design forward book and you want to work with a trendsetter, it's possible, it's totally possible.

And a trendsetter that has the knowledge, the experience, the connections, it's so much more than just producing a cover. Is what I'm taking from this Because, like you said, I can go to Canva and make a book cover. Right. It's not going to be the best book cover, I'll tell you that. So you're paying for more than just a product of a cover. You're paying for everything that goes into it Experience, time, connections, trend, research. I mean, that's a thing so right, right, yeah, so cool.

I love that and I highly encourage everybody even if you're like I'm not at the space where I need a book cover go look at the website anyway, because it's really fun. It's fun to browse around and even just click through like, how does sci-fi look different than romance? And you know there's a color tab. So you want to look at all red color covers, all blue covers. Yeah, there's a tab for everything, which is really fun because an author I work with just popped in my head and I know her favorite color is yellow and I could. I could hear her right now going oh, I'm going to go to all the yellow covers, yeah, so that's really fun. But thank you so much, zoe, for hanging out with me today and hopefully we will have you back another day to nerd out about book covers Other than ineedabookcovercom.

Where can people find you around the internet? I only have one work Instagram. It's my name's at Zoe Norvell. I have a personal website. I have a personal website that's zoenorvellcom. And then, like I did mention, besides book cover design, I also design book interiors, and you can learn about my book interior services at ineedabookinteriorcom. I love it. I love those links. Those are pretty cool. I need a book cover and I need a book interior.

Okay, we will link to all that in the show notes and thank you so much for being here. Thank you, savannah. So that's it for today's episode. As always, thank you so much for tuning in and for showing your support. If you want to check out any of the links I mentioned in this episode, you can find them in the show notes listed in the description of each episode, inside your podcast player or at savannahgilbocom forward slash podcast. If you're an Apple user, I'd really appreciate it if you took a few seconds to leave a rating and a review. Your ratings and reviews tell Apple that this is a podcast that's worth listening to and, in turn, your reviews will help this podcast get in front of more fiction writers just like you. And while you're there, go ahead and hit that follow button, because there's going to be another brand new episode next week, full of actionable tips, tools and strategies to help you become a better writer. So I'll see you next week and until then, happy writing.