Ep. 216: Self-Publishing Like a Pro: Michele DeFilippo’s Guide to Indie Success

Have you ever wanted to write a book but got totally lost in the complexities of trying to do it through traditional publishing channels? What if you could bring your manuscript to life, maintain full creative control, and keep more of the profits by self-publishing? 

In this episode, I sit down with Michele DeFilippo, a publishing expert with over 50 years of experience, who shares her journey from traditional publishing to helping self-published authors create high-quality books that stand shoulder to shoulder with bestsellers. As Michele says, “Real self-publishing means you are in charge, you control your book, and you should get all the revenue.” If you’re ready to take control of your publishing journey, this episode is a must-listen!

We Also Talked About:

• The major disruptions in the publishing industry and how Michele pivoted her business
• The biggest mistakes self-published authors make and how to avoid them
• The difference between self-publishing and working with a “publishing service”
• How to ensure your book looks as professional as traditionally published bestsellers
• The step-by-step process of getting a book from manuscript to finished product
• The importance of book cover design and why it’s more than just aesthetics
• Why Amazon’s print-on-demand model has changed the game for indie authors
• The truth about book marketing and what authors need to know

Want regular access to tips, techniques, and advice from experts about growing your business? Sign up here.

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Trudy Rankin is the host of the Online Business Launchpad Podcast, Director of West Island Digital and the founder of the Online Business Lift-Off program.

Affiliate Disclaimer: If you click on links on this page and then make a purchase, I may earn a commission (at no extra cost to you).  I am a proud affiliate of these resources because I use them in my own life and business.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Michele DeFilippo’s website: 1106design.com
• Free resource: Publish Like the Pros (available on her website) or go to https://1106design.substack.com/

TRANSCRIPT

Episode 216: Self-Publishing Like a Pro: Michele DeFilippo’s Guide to Indie Success

Trudy Rankin: [00:00:00] So, you want to write a book, but with the slim odds of getting picked up by a traditional publisher, is self publishing a better way to go than that traditional publishing route? What if you could publish a book, keep control over every detail, and actually earn more profit from each copy sold? Today I’m talking with Michelle DiFilippo, a publishing expert with over 50 years of experience who’s seen it all, from traditional publishing to the disruptive rise of Amazon’s print on demand model, all of it.

In today’s episode, Michelle shares how she pivoted her business after technology transformed the industry, and explains her process for helping authors bring their manuscripts to life. You’ll hear about what it takes to create a professional book that can stand alongside bestsellers and learn the mistakes to avoid if you want your self published book to make an impact.

Now, Michelle’s journey from typesetting to full service publishing management means she knows [00:01:00] exactly what it takes to produce a high quality book. She’s here to help aspiring authors navigate the complex landscape of self publishing and avoid common pitfalls. Microsoft Mechanics www. microsoft. com 

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast.

I’m Trudy Rankin and I bring you stories, tips and advice from online entrepreneurs who have overcome problems and challenges to get to success because if they’ve done it, so can you. My mission is simple. I want to help you solve the challenges you face as an online business owner so that you can have more time and money for yourself and your family and more choices in how you live your life.  

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad podcast. I’m your host, Trudy Rankin. And today I have got Michelle DeFilippo with me. And Michelle is someone who helps people publish their own book. Now, I know that for people [00:02:00] listening, you’re going to be interested in what she has to say, because I suspect That there is a book inside just about everyone that they would love to help get out.

But if you look at the traditional publishing process, your chances of getting a traditional book publisher to publish your book is like almost as good as winning Lotto is here in Australia. So without further ado, I just want to say welcome to the podcast, Michelle, and thank you so much for being here.

Michele Defilippo: Thank you so much for having me, Trudy. 

Trudy Rankin: So let’s go ahead and start like we used to do for my podcast guests. I’d love to know a little bit more about you, who you are, what’s your backstory, and how did you get to the place where you’re where you are today in terms of helping people. 

Michele Defilippo: I’ve been in publishing in one form or another for more than 52 years now.

So it’s quite a long story. I don’t know how much time you have, you want to spend on it. I started at Crown Publishers in New York City, where I grew up in 1972. [00:03:00] And Then about a few years after that, my husband and I got the bright idea to move to Phoenix, Arizona. And we were young and stupid, and we made the assumption that we could find jobs very easily in Phoenix, like we could always could in New York, but that didn’t turn out to be the case.

So after a number of years of working for minimum wage, I opened up my own typesetting business in 1980. And we worked for publishers and magazines and corporations doing annual reports and even everyday stuff like car ads and brochures, things like that. And that went on until 1993 when technology disrupted everything.

Steve Jobs invented the Macintosh and that put every typesetting business in the world out of business within a few years. So I had to go back to square one and figure out, okay, what do I do next? So I freelanced for a number of years. And then right around 2001, I started [00:04:00] 1106 Design because that’s about the time Amazon came on the scene and made it possible for anyone who wanted to publish a book without working with a publisher. And that was right up my alley. I knew how to do that. So I thought okay let’s see where this goes. And so ever since 2001, I’ve been the owner of 1106 Design, helping authors.  

Trudy Rankin: That’s really interesting because here in Australia, I think we would call a typesetting business.

We would call it a printing business where basically people take, but now you take your files to them and get them to turn it into really lovely stuff. So this, it’s interesting to me. So I’m going to, I’m going to follow up with a question that’s slightly different to probably where we thought we were going to go with this.

But I’m curious because I think it’s pertinent, particularly to people who are finding their work, whether it’s a job or whether they’re freelancers, disrupted by technology yet once again. And I’m talking about AI and how AI has come in [00:05:00] and, the way people are using it is starting to seriously impact on a lot of writers, a lot of editors, a lot of people who would normally be able to quickly and easily pick up work, even quite skilled people.

And I’m finding, and that’s what I’m hearing in the industry, that it’s becoming harder and harder to do. Can you just speak just a little bit more about how you went about dealing with that disruption. You said you put your types, all the typesetting businesses out of business over a period of years.

Talk to us a little bit more about the process and the thought process that you went through to actually deal with that disruption. 

Michele Defilippo: I was very slow to recognize what was happening. That was the biggest problem because I would follow up with some customers that I hadn’t heard from in a while and they would say, oh, I bought a Macintosh.

So we won’t be needing your services anymore. But a big part of me didn’t want to believe that that was what was going to happen to everyone. And part of it was that the early [00:06:00] Macintosh computers did not produce what we would have thought of at the time as good, beautiful, crafted typesetting.

So to me, it seemed like this is just a toy. This is just a fad. It’s going to go away. And then over a number of years, I realized that it wasn’t going to go away. And I ultimately wound up taking apart a 35,000 dollar typesetting machine and throwing it in a dumpster. So it’s even hard to imagine the pricing back then, right?

Imagine paying 32,000 dollars even today for your desktop computer. It’s unthinkable. And that was in 1980 dollars. Yeah, ouch is right. We used to pay 125 for a single font, 

Trudy Rankin: And so much has changed since then. So you say it took you a while to recognize the writing on the wall.

And once you did recognize it, how did you move forward into finding a new way of basically running a [00:07:00] business or finding a business? 

Michele Defilippo: At first it was a step backwards. I closed the typesetting business and then went back to what I knew, which was freelance graphic design.

And I did that for a while. And I just stumbled on a brochure in the library for the Arizona Book Publishing Association. And I went to a couple of meetings and I learned then that we had something called Amazon all of a sudden. So there’s bookends there, right? Because. the new technology of which Amazon was a part actually put me into my new business, even though Steve Jobs Macintosh technology put me out of business a number of years before.

So it was interesting in that regard. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s really interesting because you got, there’s quite a a road, quite a journey to get to that place. So once you found out that there was a new this is a great way of doing things. Just talk to us a little bit about the process that you use to help people, cause it would be different, a little bit different now, [00:08:00] maybe than what it was when you first started your business.

But what’s your process that you use now to help people who have that book inside them, they would really like to get it out and, but they want it to look good. People want to be proud of whatever it is they produce. So just talk to us a little bit about that.

Michele Defilippo: Sure, when self publishing first started and I was going to those Arizona Book Publishing Association meetings, everyone understood that the author was going to be the publisher, right?

It was expected that the author would do what traditional publishers did. They would hire experts to produce a quality book, and the benefit of them making that investment would be that when a book was sold, they would keep all of the revenue from book sales, instead of sharing some of that revenue with a publisher.

That was the pitch, if you will, for self publishing. In the last 20 years, things have gotten much more complicated, and now we have Companies that call themselves publishers, [00:09:00] but they charge the author to produce the book, and they also take revenue out of their pocket on the back end when a book sells.

And that’s not advantageous at all to the author. Today an author can find any model they want but I would hope that they will remember that real self publishing means you are in charge, and you control your book, and you should get all the revenue. in return for an investment.

Trudy Rankin: I find that interesting because, and also it’s a really powerful argument for actually self publishing.

Assuming that you can find somebody who can help you produce a quality book. But I’m just thinking my brain’s ticking away cause, cause this is a space that I’ve got some interest in. And, cause if you look at the publication of it, Yes, you get to keep all of the revenue, but when it comes to the distribution of it, you’re paying someone, somehow, to distribute it [00:10:00] in, and I’m thinking in the back of my mind, I’m thinking Amazon.

How do people get your book? Physically get it in their hands. So can you talk just a little bit about the, the world of actually getting books into people’s hands? 

Michele Defilippo: Sure, at the beginning of self publishing, before Amazon existed, you would have to print 5, 000 or so books in order to get a good unit price, and then you would have to hopefully sell every book that you printed.

Now we have the wonderful thing called print on demand, so that a book is not printed until it’s sold, so there’s no out of pocket expense for the author in terms of inventory. You, There are two expenses that you can’t avoid. One is the retail discount. Amazon, people don’t know it generally, but Amazon takes 40 percent of the cover price.

That’s how they stay in business. Nothing wrong with that. They’re providing a service. They’re putting your book in front of millions of people, right? And then you have to pay for the [00:11:00] print on demand printing. And then the net revenue comes to you, the author. But with these intermediate publishing companies, I mentioned, they charge you to produce the book and they take an additional fee out of your pocket when that book is sold.

In addition to the retail discount, in addition to the printing costs, they take two, three, five dollars for themselves and pay the authors very little. 

Trudy Rankin: So basically it’s almost more I’m just thinking out loud and trying to find a, like something to compare it to. It’s saying to somebody you’re going to partner with me and I have to pay you up front for the help that you’re going to give me. And I’m going to give you a cut of out of every book I sell. So that’s that’s a, an interesting model. Can you compare how you do that to, to what we just talked about?

Michele Defilippo: Sure, we provide we’re basically publishing project managers. So we provide a vetted team, reliable services and handholding throughout the whole process to get your book ready [00:12:00] for distribution. Then we upload it into your print on demand accounts so that You get the sales reports, you get the deposits to your bank account, and there’s nobody else taking any portion of that revenue.

We don’t take a penny of your revenue from sales. We do charge for services, we have to, right? But we’re not, we’re not taking additional money out of your pocket every time you sell a book. If you think about it say for instance, you owned a restaurant, right? You go to the grocery, you go to the grocery store, you buy the food, you fix a plate food for the customer.

You don’t pay the grocery store again every time you. serve a plate of food, right? You pay the grocery store once. That’s what we do. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense. And for anybody who’s listening and you’re thinking about doing a book, having that kind of a model and knowing that you’re going to be getting all of the revenue into the future, you have to weigh that up about how much you want to, what you’re paying for right now for the services.

And, project management is something that’s near and dear to my heart because I have a phase in my life where I [00:13:00] was a project manager and I’m still a certified project manager and I know that it’s a, that it is a a skill that you need if you want to do things lovely and smoothly and have an efficient operation.

So just out of curiosity, so I’m going to come back to what I think that the listener would be interested in. And, cause I’ve got a few questions for you about the business side, which we, if we have time, we’ll come back to, but for people who are listening and who are interested in potentially creating their own book, what would they need to have already in place before they came to you for help? 

Michele Defilippo: Okay, our services would start typically when you have a manuscript that’s completed to the best of your ability. It doesn’t have to be perfect because then we would pick up with editing and so forth and polish it up for you.

But let’s say you should be finished writing before you come to us.

Trudy Rankin: So would you have had, so if, let’s just say it was me, would I have [00:14:00] needed to have had somebody already come in and edit my manuscript? 

Michele Defilippo: No we do offer the editing services. We start with an editorial evaluation to figure out what, which level of editing it may need.

Sometimes it’s a higher level. what we would call substantive editing, where things need to be rearranged and structured in a better way than you’ve, you may have been able to do. And there’s no shame in that, by the way, we can’t be experts at everything. That’s what editors do. Some more, most often, it’s copy editing, just a cleanup of, punctuation and grammar and redundancies that you may have missed and mistakes that you may have missed because you wrote the manuscript in.

in various sessions and not all in one day. We once had a situation where a fictional character was killed off in an early chapter and came back to life toward the end of the book. That was probably the funniest mistake we ever found. But it makes the point that you do need a fresh pair of eyes on it when you finish.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, absolutely. [00:15:00] Absolutely. It’s so easy to miss things. Even if you’ve looked at it three times, you still pick up something after you published it. That’s annoying. So somebody can just bring you the best, a manuscript that’s to the best of their ability and then talk us through the process.

What happens after that? 

Michele Defilippo: Like I said, we’ll start with the editorial evaluation and the copy editing. We will show the author every edit that the author, that the editor suggests. So there’s no worry. Sometimes authors worry that an editor is going to change their voice or change their words, and that’s very stressful for them.

We don’t change a thing without your permission. We’ll send you a document filled with the Track changes and you can accept or reject each one of those changes. The final decisions are up to you, but, of course, we hope you take the editor’s advice for the most part but it’s always up to you.

So there will be no surprises there. While the editing is going on, we’ll typically design the cover, work back and forth with you with that. And then once the editing is complete, we’ll move on to interior design and interior [00:16:00] typesetting, which is an old fashioned word now hard for me to believe, but now people call it formatting but actual book typesetting is very involved in much more detail than formatting.

So we do that. And then we’ll proofread the pages that have been made to make sure that nothing has slipped through everybody’s eyes before that. And we always find things, even no matter how many times the author has read the book and how many times the editor went through it, there’s always things that don’t make an appearance until the book is properly typeset.

It’s remarkable. So then there’s usually a few rounds of revisions, and then we get to the point where we upload the files to your print on demand accounts, and then we start the e book after all changes have been made to the print book. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s really interesting because I did a little tiny experiment a while ago because I looked for something and couldn’t find it on Amazon. And I wanted a little they call them low content. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. Low content journal. I wanted one that I could [00:17:00] both write and sketch in and laid out in a specific way.

I couldn’t find one. And so for those of you listening who have never tried to set up an Amazon self-publishing account or the Kindle Direct Publishing type of an account. It is an interesting process. So if somebody who can help you with that, basically getting all of that stuff set up and the book loaded in and everything filled out and so that it can go live, trust me.

It is an interesting process. So it can be really useful to have somebody to help you with that. I’d like to, and then of course so quick question. So once it’s up and loaded, is that the end of it for you? Or do you help people with the marketing side? 

Michele Defilippo: I introduce people to marketers that I trust because that’s really not where my area of expertise is and different books require different kinds of marketing strategies.

So I hand that off to people who know that. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah. It’s quite a, it’s quite a thing. And that’s another thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that you can write all the books you like, but if people [00:18:00] don’t know that they exist, nobody’s going to be buying them. So being able to be put in touch with people who can help with the marketing is really useful.

Cause it is an art unto itself. 

Michele Defilippo: People, a lot of people don’t realize, I’ve had this conversation with people, they think I’ll just put my book up on Amazon, and that’s the end of it. And I remind them that no, Amazon isn’t going to do a thing to drive people to your book, not unless you buy Amazon ads.

And so it’s your job as the publisher to get people to know about your book. And that’s why it’s important to do it well. Also because when people go find your book on Amazon after you tell them about it, Amazon’s going to put up the bestsellers next to your book. So your book has to look as good as those bestsellers.

Otherwise it will come off as being self published and risky and maybe not a good idea to that purchaser. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So there’s a whole process there that you, you have in place when you’re launching your book. And that’s a, that is another whole nother conversation.

[00:19:00] Yeah I just quickly mention I know somebody who’s put together a tool that helps with creating Amazon ads. Helping to automate that process of creating Amazon ads, because that’s, once again, marketing it’s a whole art unto itself and you need all the help you can get when you’re self publishing.

So I’d like to come back to the business side of things a little bit, because I always find it interesting talking to people about how they run their business. Now you have a team that helps out with the creation of the books and things like that. Do you have employees?

Do you use contractors? Do you use freelancers? How do you run that particular side of your business? 

Michele Defilippo: I use contractors and the reason for that is I have four, three, four, five editors, designers, proofreaders, and so forth. And I, by having so many contractors, I can always have someone start pretty much is the minute the project arrives.

I couldn’t do that with [00:20:00] employees because, nobody would want to wait six weeks until the editor got done with their last book. You just can’t manage it any other way. So you could think of us as an ad agency where we have the team in place and we, and then we just help the author manage all of the steps and and answer all the questions.

We’ll typically answer 300 messages in the course of finishing a job. So the project management side is a big part of it. 

Trudy Rankin: And do you have people who are specifically designated to be the project manager? Is it, like an account manager or project manager where they’re responsible for making sure that particular book goes through all the steps, even though somebody else is doing the work?

Michele Defilippo: Yeah, I have two project managers actually, and then we use the collaboration, online collaboration system to keep track of all the tasks and all the due dates and so forth. 

Trudy Rankin: So just out of sheer curiosity, what system do you use? Nifty. Nifty. Okay. I haven’t heard of that one. I’ll have to look it up and see it.

Michele Defilippo: We used to use Wrike and then before that we used Basecamp and [00:21:00] every time I see a better idea, I move over. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, cause project management, it’s really helpful to have a good tool that can help with that. And there’s so many out there. So I’m just going to ask a curiosity based question here.

How do you decide? that a tool, a project management tool is better than the one you’ve already got. 

Michele Defilippo: Usually it’ll come down to how much they’re charging for guests, right? Because our issue is, authors take a, it takes a long time to do a book. So an author may be with us from four months to a year.

So unfortunately we left Wrike because they decided they wanted to charge 9 dollars per month per guest. And I couldn’t afford that because I’ve got 70 or 80 people at any given time in the system. So that just couldn’t be, I couldn’t consider that. So Nifty was, relatively new and for the moment they’re not charging for guests.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a problem, isn’t it? Just watched the technology and you [00:22:00] tend to go from a, come on for free, Let’s do all these things and then they start to add functionality and they’ve gotta run a business as well. And so pretty soon you’re paying for services that used to be free and it, then it becomes a little bit problematic.

So in terms of the I’ll call it the pipeline, typically, how long does it take from the time that somebody says, Hey, I’ve got a manuscript for you. Love to have you help me till their files are loaded up and it’s live on Amazon. Typically, how long? 

Michele Defilippo: We’ve done over the course of doing 4, 000 books now.

It’s typically four months, but it can be shorter if the book is shorter, if there’s a deadline that has to be met, we can, of course, expedite it. But four months, it can be six months. It really depends on how quickly the author responds when we send them something to approve and how many changes they make.

So if I have to say anything over and over again, it’s please make sure your book is written before you start [00:23:00] production. 

Trudy Rankin: And that’s a really good point. And so if somebody is working with you with their, getting their book produced. How much time would they typically need to allocate over that four month period to making sure that they are responding to you on a timely basis?

Michele Defilippo: I guess the first step was when they reviewed the edited manuscript, right? That, and that might take some hours for them to go through everything that the editor. found. So that might require the big, probably the biggest chunk of time. They would review cover designs and that probably doesn’t take too much time out of their day to decide whether they like something or don’t and what they want instead.

The next stage would be, Interior design, again, that’s not too much of a time commitment because they could just look at the samples we send and decide which one they want best and how they want to change it. Then reviewing the typeset proof of the whole [00:24:00] book would probably take some time because I recommend at that point, we’re sending the typeset pages to our proofreader and to the author at the same time.

So I do ask the author to. read every word, jot down any changes they see that need to be made, and then when we send them the proofreader’s version, then they can compare the two and see if the proofreader found some things that they didn’t, or vice versa and merge those changes into one document for us to make the corrections.

So that, that’s a time chunk there. 

Trudy Rankin: And it would also be a little tedious, wouldn’t it, I’m thinking out loud here. So you’d want to make sure as an author that you set aside enough time to actually do that and reward yourself when you’re done, because that would be hard. 

Michele Defilippo: No kidding. 

And try to actually focus and be quiet and think.

That’s the most important thing. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, no distractions. I want to ask a couple of questions because, I hadn’t really [00:25:00] thought about it too much. And I don’t know whether other people have really thought about it too much either who might be listening. Can you just talk just a little bit more about the interior design parts and what is that actually?

And what are we looking at there? 

Michele Defilippo: Sure. This was the way I was trained, right? The book pages have to be designed by somebody before they’re, before the actual quote unquote formatting or typesetting is done. And that involves just. Just trying to match the voice of the book and the intent of the book.

A cookbook is designed different than a history book or a memoir or a novel, but each of the. You want to bring some personality into the interior design. At least that’s the way we approach it. So you want to pick the right fonts. You want to come up with alternative ways to do something.

You want to maybe the chapter openers have an image of some sort. If there’s tables and charts involved, you want to make sure that they all look the same and they’re not just a [00:26:00] hodgepodge of things. webbed from the internet somewhere. So there’s a lot that goes into the interior design.

And then when we get to types, when a design is improved, approved, and we get to typesetting the pages, then that’s where true typesetting comes into the mix. And that’s where a typesetter will, will meticulously space every line, every word, every paragraph, and obey about two dozen rules that, that, make a book look like a book and not like a Word file.

And there’s a lot to that because the language doesn’t always cooperate to the book page design rules that we have to adhere to. So that’s a task. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Okay. So that’s actually making a lot more clear to me. So it’s really about making the whole inside of the book, every page inside the book look visually appealing and also make it, I assume that it makes it easier to read if it’s I can just imagine if everything was higgledy piggledy, like in a Word document or something, it would make it really hard to [00:27:00] read.

Michele Defilippo: The reading comprehension is the reason for meticulous typesetting because my new spacing variations like tight and loose lines or paragraphs that end in half a word or a line of type. At the end of the paragraph at the top of a page that all slows the reader down and impedes their comprehension.

So we attend to all of those things. So that doesn’t happen. One of the rules is an example is we don’t hyphenate a word on the last line of a right hand page. because the reader would have to hold that thought in their mind as they turn the page to get to the back end of that word. And that’s a distraction.

So we try to avoid that. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s really interesting. So I, okay, curiosity question again. So do you do a lot of that yourself or do you have people who help you with that in terms of I’m just thinking about the type of person who would enjoy that sort of work?

What kind of background would they [00:28:00] have? 

Michele Defilippo: They have to be trained in typesetting, of course, and It’s weird because I love typesetting. I know how to do it. And it’s, it, some people would consider it unbearably tedious. Once you get in the flow, it becomes like a Zen experience and it can be actually quite pleasant to do, depends on the person.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, fair enough. So I’m curious if somebody was going, Oh, that sounds like an interesting kind of type of job to have doing, you call it typesetting, whatever you want to call it, formatting the book so that it, it’s easily readable. What kind of experience do they have to have? 

Michele Defilippo: Mostly it’s on the job training.

Trudy Rankin: Okay. 

Michele Defilippo: Because you have to learn the standards wherever you’re working. I suppose you could, you should take a course maybe in Adobe InDesign but even that, just knowing the software isn’t enough. You have to know what to do with the software and why you’re doing the things you’re doing. We’ll get some, we’ll get some InDesign files in here that are just dreadful.

And [00:29:00] the person who built the file didn’t know what they were doing. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. So I’m just curious because I know people. Oftentimes we’ll listen to the podcast who are still, either they’re still career hunting or they’re they’re looking for something new or different to get into.

And that is a skill set that I hadn’t even thought about or considered. Yeah, 

Michele Defilippo: I can say there’s an awful lot of work out there because something like 2 million books were independently published in 2022, I think it was, so somebody’s got to do them. 

Trudy Rankin: Oh yeah, for sure. So if somebody was thinking, Oh, I’d really like to learn how to do that.

Is there a place they can go? You say it’s on the job experience. So is there a name for this type of role or? 

Michele Defilippo: You would call it A type setter. 

Trudy Rankin: A type setter, 

Michele Defilippo: yeah. 

Trudy Rankin: Interesting. 

Michele Defilippo: Or a book, Desi, maybe a little bit broader than that. A book designer, if you wanna be the person that decides what the pages are gonna look like first before you type set them.

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Okay. That’s interesting. 

Michele Defilippo: [00:30:00] That can be one job where it can be two levels where the designer just comes up with it with the ideas and then a typesetter executes it for 400 pages or so. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah. Yeah. Making sure it’s laid out and looking really good. I want to touch again on one other thing before we start to wrap up.

And this is something that I think more people are probably aware of because people are looking at book covers all the time. If you’re an author and you’re you’ve written all of these words and you’ve put them together, sometimes, People are also good at design and book design as well, cover design, but I would suspect, is it, would it be true to say that lots of people aren’t that great at book design?

Or cover design? How do you go about that? 

Michele Defilippo: Cover design is much more difficult than it looks. I’ll put it that way because typography has to be great. The images have to be great. The composition has to be great. It has to look like [00:31:00] a a traditionally published book. And that’s a lot harder to pull off than you would think, right?

To get all those elements right and together. So I always recommend hiring a designer who’s been trained and who has the experience to do that. Now, one trick you can use if you’re looking for a designer is to open up their portfolio in one window of your browser and open up the major publisher books in another window so you can immediately see what level that designer is working at, and whether or not the covers are as good as what you see the major publisher doing.

Trudy Rankin: So I’m going to ask a process question first. I’ve got another question. For a cover design, you said there’s iterations back and forth. You how does that work when you’re working with somebody? You’ve got somebody in your team creating book designs.

Is it totally up to the author who decides? to decide which one they’re going to go with? How does that whole process, the back and forth side of the process, go when [00:32:00] somebody’s getting a book cover design? 

Michele Defilippo: We start with research into what the cover should look like, if it’s going to fit in with the best sellers that are similar, and so our first, we’ll do typically three concepts to start.

Three, and three very different concepts, not three covers that look the same except the background color is different or something tiny like that. We do three very different concepts and then from that the author can choose which direction they like best and then start iterating from there about what they might like to see.

And, What we do is we understand the author has a vision and may have some preferences, but we will push back a little if the author starts saying things that are going to unravel the design. We try to prevent that whenever we can. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, because you would have a pretty good sense now in terms of, the different designs that have been created over the years, which ones work really well and which ones don’t.

Michele Defilippo: Yeah, it doesn’t take much to unravel a design, for example, if you say I want my name bigger [00:33:00] or I want, the title to be in, in Lucida Sands or something like that, it may be your favorite font, but that’s not the right reason to use it on your book cover. 

Trudy Rankin: Yeah, which leads me to my last question. 

I love children’s picture books, right?

Trudy Rankin: And I love the way that the text intersects with the images because the two of those things together create a synergy that’s more than just those two things together. How do you do that with a book cover? 

Michele Defilippo: Same thing, right? And again, it starts with the research. A thriller looks different than a cookbook or a history book or a children’s book or a memoir.

And if you just do that research first, then you can pick appropriate fonts and appropriate images and color palettes, right? For example, spiritual books will often be designed with pastel colors, bright, And it tells the reader or the buyer, we have good news inside this book. You’re going to feel better when you read this book.[00:34:00] 

Whereas a thriller is just the opposite. Lots of red and black and shadows and big, bold, blocky type. And it tells you that I’m going to, I’m going to be clenching my fists as I read this book. So it’s all about making the cover match what’s inside the book. visually and everybody judges a book by its cover, whether we want to admit it or not.

The cover is what makes people stop and learn more. After that, the book may not be for them. We can’t control that, but our job is to make them stop. 

Trudy Rankin: That is really interesting. Very interesting. Michelle, thank you so much for being here on the podcast and answering all of my curiosity based questions.

If people were interested in finding out more about you or interested in getting your help, or maybe even just getting in touch, where would they go? 

Michele Defilippo: My website is 1106design. com. And if you go there, I will give you a copy of my little book called Publish Like the Pros, which will go [00:35:00] into some detail that we discussed here.

And you can download it for free in PDF format. And I do want to add that if you contact us, we’ll have a nice friendly telephone conversation with you. We do not engage in high pressure tactics. We’re not going to start sending you five emails a day and pound you into submission. That’s not the way we work.

It’s professional service, one pro to another and we believe in doing business that way. 

Trudy Rankin: That’s good to know. That’s good to know. And I will put, I’ll put those, the links into the show notes so that people can actually reach out to you if they would like to do that.

Michelle, thank you so much. It’s been fascinating. 

Michele Defilippo: Thank you, Trudy. This has been great.

Trudy Rankin: Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope Michelle’s stories about what’s involved in the journey from manuscript to a beautifully published book have inspired you to consider self publishing. I really loved hearing about her early days in publishing and how she had to adapt when technology threw the whole industry for a [00:36:00] loop, and that’s a subject that we could be talking about a lot more these days.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to subscribe and leave me a review. Your feedback helps me reach more people with stories and advice that can make a difference. So thank you for listening and I’ll catch you in the next episode.