Designing Your Book

I remember setting out to publish my first book of poetry and asking for a quote at this design studio that I loved. When the quote came back and equalled like three payslips (which I would have gladly paid if I didn’t have to, you know, pay rent, groceries, feed my dog and pay for the clothes on my body) I was taken aback for a minute. I studied photography at art school and was neck deep in student loans, so I thought, why not look into this Canva thing someone mentioned. I knew about images, just sucked at shooting them, I knew about what designs I liked, just wasn’t able to create them myself, so Canva turned out to be a life saver.

So what is Canva exactly? According to Wikipedia “Canva is a simplified graphic-design tool website, founded in 2012. It uses a drag-and-drop format and provides access to photographs, vector images, graphics, and fonts. It is used by non-designers as well as professionals. The tools can be used for both web and print media design and graphics.” You can create book covers, press kits, business cards, social media posts, story designs, anything you need to kickstart your poetry ventures really. It’s easy to use. The only thing we weren’t able to find on Canva is a design template for the inside of a poetry book yet. So we are here to provide our format for you. It’s free to use, it’s simple and you can adapt it any way you see fit.

If you don’t mind spending a little money, you might also want to check out Creative Marketplace where designers offer their products for affordable prices. You will find book designs there as well. We will post about our favourites another time, when we aren’t about to shoot off to our day job. Keep your eye out on that one. In the meantime, here’s a link to Canva, the Creative Market and our Indesign poetry template. Now get cracking and if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below.

Disclaimer: We don’t do affiliate link stuff, we just share the tools we use, so you can use them too.