Before "indie publishing" had a design industry around it, best-selling young-adult author Anne Eliot was proving the model. Her books needed covers and interiors that could stand shelf-to-shelf with the big houses' output on Amazon's most competitive pages. The engagement covered the full run: cover design art-directed with the author, InDesign interiors built for both print and Kindle, audiobook cover adaptations, and design support as the titles were translated into more than eight languages.
Genre book design is typography under commercial pressure: a YA cover has about a thumbnail's worth of attention to communicate tone, age band, and heat level, and the interior has to disappear for a reader who will finish the book in one sitting. This work was judged nightly, in sales numbers, by teenagers.
