Step 4 – Cover Design

The cover of a book is always very important because it will be the deciding factor whether a reader will pick it up to investigate it further, or not.

The graphic artists at Groep 7 use Photoshop or CorelDraw and have the knowledge to design your dream cover! The cost for design is normally between R600 and R900 depending on the information supplied by the author and time spent. Therefore, it may be necessary to obtain copyrighted photos or graphic stock where the artist has given us the consent to purchase and use these (R250).

Authors are more than welcome to design their own book cover and forward it to us in print quality PDF (portable document format), without incurring costs for the cover design.

Please ensure that you have copyright on all photos, clipart etc.

The following can be used as layout guidelines when designing your own cover:

• The front, spine and back are designed as a single document.
• The layout size for an A5 book is double A5 (thus A4 landscape) plus spine, plus 3 mm ‘bleed’. (E.g. an A5 book with 100 pages, has a spine of 6 mm, and the document will therefore be 216 mm x 309 mm).
• The layout size for an A4 book is double A4 (thus A3 landscape) plus spine, plus 3 mm ‘bleed’. (E.g. an A4 book with 200 pages, has a spine of 12 mm, and the document will therefore be 303 mm x 438 mm).
• An important guideline to ensure it is visually pleasing, is to place all text and photos 15–20 mm from all edges.
• Please design in CMYK, short for “Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key Black”.
• After binding, the book is trimmed 3 mm on 3 sides.