In my last post I talked about how I do my own cover design and formatting.

I’m one of those people who is super critical of my own work and I’m willing to work hard to acquire the skills I need in order to produce a finished product I’m happy with. And for the most part I prefer to do it myself because I know it will be done correctly. And if not I only have myself to blame.

Even if I plan to hire someone else to do a job I still think it’s important, as an author or business owner,  to have a good understanding of what goes into building a cover, designing an interior, designing a website, etc. It ensures you’re getting what you pay for, as well as keeps you from having unrealistic expectations.

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had a client come back to me after the job is finished and say, “I just need this one little change. It shouldn’t take but a few minutes.” That “little change” then ends up taking me four hours and costing them more money than they want to spend. Why? Because it might seem like a simple thing to them, but in reality it’s not.

A perfect example of this is InDesign. This is the program I use to design interior layouts for print books. This  program has a steep learning curve but I honestly believe it’s worth learning if you want to produce high quality print books. This is the same program traditional publishers use to layout their books. Unlike with Word or Pages or Google Docs or whatever writing program you use, when InDesign puts text into a document that text is linked. Every letter, every space, and every punctuation mark is like a single link in a chain. So if you decide you want to delete a paragraph it will effect everything after that point. For most pages it probably won’t matter much. But there are some where it will shift the text to the next page which could mean having to go through the entire document to make sure all the chapters are on the right facing page, reapplying  master pages so they are correct, and making sure you haven’t created any orphans or widows. (Orphans and Widows are where you have a few words either at the bottom of one page or the top of the other. This is something you generally try to avoid as it gives the finished product a messy, unprofessional look.) So by making that one “little change” I would have to more or less reformat everything after that point. This is why I stress to clients that it must be a fully edited manuscript and that there will be additional charges for changes after the layout is finished.

It’s those very types of things that make it important for authors to understand what it is they’re paying for. I’m a big advocate of taking control of your career. I hear so many authors who say, “I just want to write.” I understand that, believe me. I would love nothing more than to be able to  not have to worry about anything else but writing. I would love to just hand over my life and career to someone else to handle all of the business stuff. But I don’t honestly trust anyone to be as informed or to care as much about my career as I do. So while I hope to be able to get to a point someday where I can hire out certain things, I will never hand over control of my life or my career blindly to someone else. I’ve heard too many horror stories. Seen too many people lose everything because of that mentality. Yes, it’s easier to let someone else do those things you don’t want to do, but how do you know if they’re doing it right or with your best interest in mind?

Educate yourself. After all, knowledge is power, right?