Tom Christensen did an informal survey of four book designers to find out how much they’d charge for a hypothetical job.

I was trying to determine a reasonable price for a 320-page hardcover collected poems, interior and cover/jacket design. . . .

According to the 2001 edition of the Graphic Artists Guild handbook of Pricing and Ethics, for an average poetry book a designer might charge $7,500 to $15,000 to design and set the interior plus $1000–$2000 for the jacket. That gives a total range of $8500–17,000. Those figures are seven years old, but several people say the prices in this publication skew high.

Yes, in my experience, they do.

The results? Each different, like a snowflake: $3,100, $8,000, $8,800, and $12,800. See Tom’s post for each designer’s breakdown of charges: rightreading: Book design fees.

Photo: price list by Nick Sherman; some rights reserved.

At the beginning of this week, I spent part of my lunch hour at the cafeteria (aka Whole Foods) casually consulting with a friend of a friend who’s checking the page proofs for her first book. It’s an anthology of articles about filmmaking, and it’s being brought forth by a reputable publisher of scholarly and professional books. Unfortunately for the author, her publisher is determined to produce the book as cheaply as possible: completely generic and poorly thought-out design, executed by apparently quite error-prone compositors in Hong Kong. She loathes the display type, she doubts the wisdom of the layout, she’s unhappy with the cover, . . . and her publisher has been fighting her at every step, since the moment the contract was signed. All in all, she’s not having a very warm and fuzzy experience as a first-time author.

And I’m torn, because she’s right—the interior design is hideous, and a lot of the layout choices just don’t make sense. For instance, perhaps half of the articles are interviews, and they’ve been indented on both sides, for their entire length. This wastes so much space that the body type in the book as a whole has had to be squeezed down quite small in order to make castoff. The design of the epigraphs and head notes is also ill-considered, and the front matter and display type throughout are extremely homely: too many fonts, too many styles, and utterly random indents throughout.

These are problems that a competent book designer/compositor, such as, oh, me or the designer friend through whom I know this person, could fix in one to two hours. I am dead certain that I could make the whole thing look much more inviting and coherent, while sticking to the desired page count, in less time than it will take the distraught author to mark up every single chapter title to be even small caps instead of caps + hideous fake small caps, as my friend and I cautiously recommended.

At the same time, however, looking wincingly at her stack of proofs, covered with Post-Its and liberally scrawled with deletions and additions, wordy corrections using nonstandard proofreading symbols, and requests for global layout changes, I deeply pity and sympathize with her editor and production crew. Read the rest of this entry »

Somewhere once, I want to say it was in a Ruth Birmingham mystery, a former colleague found a passage about the different rates the private investigator would charge. This passage was read aloud to me, and I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to remember things I hear rather than read on paper; but in my probably flawed memory there were three tiers of fees: the B, or basic, rate; a lower rate for nice people or those especially in need, which may have been C for crazy (which doesn’t quite make sense—part of why I don’t trust this paraphrase); and the A, or Asshole, rate. The latter is the only part I’m sure of, because to this very day, that friend and I joke about charging certain clients “the A rate.”

In practice, of course, neither of us does this. (In my case, this is mostly because I tend to work for friends, who say to me, “This is all the money we have/are allowed to pay. Is that enough?” And it’s often not, but they’re my friends, so I do it anyway.) But some people do, and more power to them. Do you?

Via Tiny Gigantic, who propose a more mature and sensible way of coming up with fees.

Photo: Best rices in town by juicyrai / al; some rights reserved. See also: Prices by vasta.

I was going to delete this spam comment (which I’ve received twice now) without remark—

Author: Francisco Quia-ot
E-mail: francisco@datastyling.com
URL: http://www.datastyling.com

Comment:

SUBJECT:
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MESSAGE:
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—but then I thought, Wait, maybe this company actually exists.
Read the rest of this entry »