This content was created by Eric Siu. This content was uploaded by Eric Siu. This is a YouTube video titled "How to Design a Book the Right Way" (uploaded Feb 23, 2021). The excerpt is a single-speaker presentation in English where the presenter (the book's author/host) walks through design decisions for their book "Leveling Up": cover art choices (color, typography, character placement), choosing a gender-neutral guide illustration, working with designers found on Dribbble and with the publisher Page Two, adding gamification elements and badges inside the book, iterative design and costs, and advice to have a clear vision while deferring to experts. The speaker closes with a call-to-action to visit levelingup.com and watch the next video.
Chapters
All right, so today we're going to talk about how to design a book the right way. Okay, so I got my book over here, Leveling Up, if you can see it, if you're watching. But this actually took a lot of work over here. So the book, look, the COVID is orange. We have this character over here, and there's a little guide over here. Okay, by the way, the way we first did the book, the COVID it— the COVID didn't look good, right? What we decided to do is we wanted to make the text a lot bigger. This leveling, we decided to push it to the edge. And then I had a lot of different variations. Could this be like, you know, instead of this box over here, how to master Game of Life, maybe it's like this, right? Or maybe it was up here and we moved the character down here. So there's a lot that goes into it when you're working with your design team on the book. I would encourage you, what I would do is go look at your stack of books, or if you don't have a stack of books, go look at bestsellers out there and look at what sticks out to you. Because the reason we picked orange is because it comes at you, right? And there's also this leveling up, right? That, that is How to master the game of life. That's to me, it's a good headline. It's a good subheadline too. Okay. We also had a problem here too. So this designer over here, I went to Dribbble. That's D-R-I-B-B-L-E. And I searched for game, right? And I basically ended up finding this designer over here. And so what ends up happening, this is the kind of key takeaway over here is there's a lot of elements, even though I'm not a designer, I haven't, I have an idea of what I want, right? So you have to know what you want, 'cause otherwise if you don't Have a vision of what you want. Other people are going to design the vision for you. You don't want to outsource that vision, and so we knew that the COVID had to pop. We had so many different versions of the COVID There was a white one. There was like a red one. There was a blue one, right? There's a gold one. We ended up going with up with going with orange. This character over here, there's so many different colors. There's purple. There was red. I think we had white. We ended up going with purple. Okay, and we ended up going with gender neutral too because we didn't want leveling up to be about. you know, a male versus female thing, right? So you actually can't tell what gender this person is. But we didn't want to make this about this person over here because people might interpret this as me trying to be the hero. I'm not the hero of this book. So there's so many nuances in here. So that's why over here you can see, or we'll put it over here, over here, this guide, that's me actually. This guide over here is actually me, right? I don't need to be the hero. I just need to be the guide. I just need to be the person that's spreading my wisdom, right? And at the end of the day, when you're trying to sell a book, the person that's buying it should be the hero over here, right? So there's so many— like, first it was just this character. I was like, guys, there needs to be a guide, okay? They drew the guide out there. I didn't choose to decide how to design the guide, but they did it and they did it super well. And again, you can't tell. Some people might say it's a he, some people might say it's a she. Now, I think it's also really important to understand that what goes on inside of the book is super important too. So Page Two, which is my publisher, they did a phenomenal job here. So you can see the pull quotes that they did here. So you can see this. So create your own game of life, a game that you can play and win on your own terms, right? So there's little pull quotes that are out there. That's that's not it though. I mean, there's a lot. There's a lot of nuances, right? So you can see over here, we have little quests throughout the book too, and they made it fun. I didn't tell them how to design this. They made it fun. They understood what we're trying to go for. The final thing I'll show you around this is that this wasn't cheap to do, by the way. These badges that we have throughout the book, it's cost us a couple thousand dollars to do these badges over here. But I think it's really important for people to understand that throughout each chapter, they're leveling up, they're getting stronger and stronger. So obviously there's a vision that's tied to it, right? You think someone else is going to understand that, hey, I want to add gamification to the book, I want to add badges to the book, I I wanna add a guide to the front cover. If you outsource your vision, they're not gonna know. And plus they're not incentivized to know. You're gonna be the one that understands most, right? And here's another thing. I didn't even catch this myself. I didn't tell them to do this. They did this on their own. You know, taking the dust jacket away, this is what it looks like. It looks amazing, right? Without the dust jacket. And so the key takeaway here is that design matters. You know, you want to work with someone that knows what they're doing when it comes to design, but you also have to pick who you want to work with. Because again, when it comes to this character over here, I found this character or the artist on Dribbble, and then she actually helped us with the logos as well, right? And sorry, the badges inside the book. And then page 2, they gave us so many variations, and the first couple were like, they were very underwhelming. But by iterating with them, we went through so many iterations here to get to this. And that's where we are. So that's how you have to design a book. You go find the artist, you decide, you know, you have a vision. Also decide when to step away when you're not the expert, right? You just want to give your feedback and say, hey, I'm not an expert. I constantly said that over and over. I'm not the expert here, guys, but here's what I think should happen. And they actually worked with me on it and they did really good. So super excited about it. By the way, let me know in the comments what you think if I'm missing anything around designing the perfect book. All right. All right. So don't forget to check out the next video over there. Okay. Over there. And before we go, open a new tab, levelingup.com to learn more about the book. We may or may not have other goodies tied to this book. All right. levelingup.com in a new tab. You can check out the next video first in a new tab, and we'll see you later.
