Thinking About Design
I’ve spent the day watching and making notes on a “How to Design A Book” course. It’s pretty important, because I’m not an artistically gifted individual. In fact, I don’t really have a visual eye for design at all.
One thing that Gary Halbert suggests that absolutely nobody does (that I’ve seen) is to take the handwritten copy you do of famous ads and prepare it to be printed.
What that means in the modern day is that copywriters don’t design their pages – with the headlines and everything given loads of attention.
Well, at least I don’t.
The same thing is true of writing books. I’ve released e-books before, but now I’m looking to start offering print books. (In the near future – another one of those “Do tomorrow” scheduling things.)
The problem is that I realised that I’ve got no idea how to do that. With e-books, you just upload a document file and hope for the best – then you get it sent to your kindle and painstakingly go through every formatting crunch that the algorithm puts the books through.
With print, you need to actually design the thing. I haven’t done that before.
So I got a ten dollar course and I’ll Google the rest.
Back to my point though: A lot of copywriting is visual effect. Bold words and italicised words are something that seem to have made their way into my freelance work recently. I don’t even use headline text in these daily blog posts… but I know I should.
This article is coming from the distinctly not-an-expert place in my mind.
Here’s what I was going to do:
I was going to buy a bit of software for online copy. Thrive Content Builder. It looks pretty amazing, and I will get it in the future (and review it here.) I was going to pay someone on fiverr to do my book layouts for print.
The Better Way To Do It
The beauty of the Gary Halbert/Handwriting system is that it works not just with writing but with everything. When I do my handwriting and my copy, I’m going to plan out the designs according to a bookmarks folder of nice-looking copy online – a design swipe folder.
For books, I’m going through this course today (I’ll probably review that too,) and then go through all the books I like on my bookshelf in the niche I’m targeting and see what they all use.
The Reason
Some people would argue that this is all better off outsourced. After all, I make money from writing. I don’t make any from cover design or page layouts or whatever.
But as I found the first time I tried outsourcing, if you don’t know what you’re doing, then it’s an uphill struggle to get something that you’re happy with.
As for buying software – again, I don’t really know what “good design” is, so the best software is still only going to produce mediocre results until I know what I’m doing.
Closing Thoughts
Today’s Topic of the Day has been a bit of a non-starter really. I’m keeping the streak going though, and that’s basically a summary of my day.
Hopefully, I’ll learn some cool stuff and then I’ll be able to produce more useful content on this later.