Professional book design at an off-the-shelf price

If, like most self-publishers, you are on a limited budget, off the shelf design may be just what you need.

You’d like your book to be professionally designed so that it doesn’t scream ‘self-published’, but you can’t really afford to pay for the services of a professional graphic designer. You could, of course, get a cheap job online. Some of these are quite good, many are awful … but in general you get what you pay for.

Good design and layout of a book is very time-consuming, and graphic designers have to eat too.

But what if you could share the costs with others—by using an ‘off-the-shelf’ design instead of one tailor-made just for your book. This does not mean that your book will look like everyone else’s, as you will be able to personalise your cover with your own photo or graphic.

What you’ll get is clean, elegant, simple book design with attention to all the fine typographic details that signal ‘professional’. All this for less than half the cost of a custom design, with no sacrifice in quality.

off the shelf provides a series of co-ordinating cover and text layout designs, arranged in 4 ‘families:

Basic, Classic, Heritage and Modern Script

Together, these give you 12 cover designs to choose from, with a co-ordinating text layout for each.

Cover designs range from $175 to $450 while design and layout of the inside pages starts at $450 for a basic layout of up to 256 pages (eg novel or prose-style non-fiction). Below are some samples, selected from each of the 4 families.

Sample from Basic templates

Sample from Classic templates

Sample from Heritage templates

Sample from Modern Script templates

Please note that author’s alterations are not included in the prices listed above, so customers are advised to have their manuscripts carefully edited and proofread before submitting their work for layout.

If you would like more details, please email me at

melisanda1 at me.com (please substitute @ for ‘at’ in the address)

(request the comprehensive PDF showing the choice of templates and packages available)