BTS of our Book Cover Design for 'How to Build a World Class Substack'
An interview with Russell Nohelty
“What matters is sending the right signals to the right reader that they should buy this book.”
I asked Russell to share a peek behind the curtain at our process for coming up with the book cover for How to Build a World Class Substack.
At the time of writing and making decisions on the book I was in a space flooded with complexity in my personal life.
In these times you have two choices; wait and watch chunks of time disappear or trust the whisper of your gut. I chose the latter. I trust myself and I trust Russell - that was the next right thing in our journey to getting this book out “on time”. This interview is full of truth bombs and I’m hear for it. Anything that supports YOU to get closer to understanding a world class process which I believe Russell applies to everything her makes in service.
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Hi Russell! Welcome to !
Can you tell us more about your artistic and creative process with book cover design?
I am not an artist, but I do like to think I've developed a good eye for design in 20 years working as a photographer, website designer, publisher, comic creator, and author. I've created my own covers before, but never for a non-fiction book.
Earlier this year I logged onto Canva to find some design ideas for a new book and was able to create a very nice cover pretty easily for an upcoming book. This is how it turned out.
I think it looks really nice, so I thought I could do something similar for our Substack book, too. I don’t think I could have done this even a year ago, but since I had been using these systems so long, and the design I wanted was simple enough, I thought I could make a go of it.
And how did it work as a co-authored book design?
I believe we were starting to talk about working together, but I really wanted to slam home a yes from Claire, and I thought I could do it if she saw a cover she loved. Here’s a tip for partnerships…the more you can get the other person to see the final vision, the more excited they will be to make it happen.
The biggest part of good partnerships is about making sure you’re both on the same journey, and are excited to remain on it through to the end.
The cover wasn’t perfect from the start, though. Before we discuss that, a relevant digression.
I had a very strong design aesthetic for a book I’m releasing next year called How to Thrive as a Writer in a Capitalist Dystopia, which I had also designed in Canva that heavily influenced my original design for this book.
So, this is the cover for that book, coming January 2025.
And here is the initial design I sent Claire.
You can see the influence, right? I still like this design a lot, but Claire had a visceral negative reaction to it. This is what she said.
My readers and clients have a lot of questions about creativity. I talk about sustainability in going paid a lot too. I've been paid for 2 years on one of my publications (Creatively Conscious) and it builds super slow - 1-2 new subs per month but that's great for me...it fits with my life and my career ambitions.
From this I realized that this was too much business and not enough the “joyful growth” that Claire talks about all the time. She also referenced Beth Kempton’s Kokoro cover later in the conversation, which is the total opposite of this more in your face cover.
This isn’t the first time I’ve run up against this working with a partner. Monica and I have very different aesthetics, too. I’m more Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and she is more Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic.
Frankly, I prefer to work with partners who have very different styles and talk to a complementary but largely different audience than me. Most people think the best partnerships are with people who are very similar to them, but that usually doesn’t bring them new readers. Often, you don’t expand your brand at all doing it that way, and since you both have a very similar audience, you’re even making the same money since they would likely have already bought your stuff either way.
Until you have a name, it’s a good idea to partner with people in your same niche who have the audience you want, but after you build a name for yourself I find that by trying to find somebody that is disimilar (similar, but different) to your work makes partnerships much more durable, interesting and lucrative for both of you.
Back to the drawing board then… ?
When I do a book myself, like How to Thrive as a Writer in a Capitalist Dystopia. I can more embrace my own aesthetic. Since a big part of this book was about exciting both of our audience, I went back to the drawing board.
This was the final design.
Claire loved this one! I was actually surprised that we only had to do two treatments. I thought we would be at it for days. In fact, I went back to our initial conversation to pull other designs I thought we did, but didn’t find any.
Tell us about design and not tearing your hair out in the process…I feel like it’s a craft that often leaves me flummoxed…
You can see the influence of The Author Ecosystems cover in the final design of this book. It turns out that because there are usually so many words on the cover of a non-fiction book, there are a finite number of ways to make them look nice.
One of them is
title
image
subtitle.
Since I already knew it worked, I decided to stick with it. That first cover passed the Monica Leonelle (my business partner) smell test, and she has very exacting standards, so I figured it was a good model.
Once I find templates that work, I try to use them as often as possible. When you do that, though, you are also discarding all that development time and forcing yourself to build from scratch again. If you have a design that works, or a process that works, finding out how to use it repeatedly is going to help you do more with less.
For instance, I’m still using the same formatting process I’ve had since 2011 because I know it can get me where I want to go and people like it enough to keep buying my books.
Templates create leverage.
Leverage creates space.
Space creates peace.
Canva has a ton of templates to choose from if you want to try this yourself. https://www.canva.com/book-covers/templates. Once I knew the template worked, it was pretty easy to figure out the color scheme. I knew I wanted to use orange since that’s the main color in Substack’s brand.
That seemed like a no brainer. Coming from movies, I also knew that blue and orange are one of the main color palettes studios use to make their posters pop.
I’d love to know more on colours… I think it’s fascinating…
So, the blue/orange palette came pretty quickly. I could have used white or purple, but I didn’t think that would be as eye-catching on Amazon to make people stop their scroll to look at it.
There are several ways to find complementary colors depending on how many you’ll be using in your cover, but modelling what really success creatives already do is a good cheat code for most things.
Aside from that, the main colors I use on almost every design are white and black, depending on the contrast of the main color palette. We had an article on
a couple months ago about making your work accessible for disabled readers, and the writer provided this checker to make sure your contrast is high enough.Really using black or white test usually comes down to which has more contrast. Another cover tip is to choose exactly two fonts; one for the title and one for everything else, and they should also complement each other, too. No more, no less.
After that, I used the internal resources available on Canva to iterate on the image, and locked it in when I was happy. I often use DepositPhotos a lot to find my imagery for the book and chapter breaks. Whenever I see an AppSumo for an image pack I pick up a couple hundred new ones.
That’s where I got the chapter header image for this book.
Knowing ourselves and what WE want… how do we stay true to ourselves in the face of controversy/ misunderstanding?
We know not everyone likes the cover or agrees with the focus of the title but we are SUPER happy with it and here’s what had to say on it…
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Listen, you won’t get any argument from me that this is a very boring, middle-of-the-road, safe cover.
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It’s the kind of thing that is meant to offend nobody. I’ve spent a lot of my life making covers that alienate a lot of people, and right now, where I am, is that I want to make a cover for my non-fiction that’s not going to offend anyone.
I would rather make a less boring cover that takes chances. I don’t think this is the project to do that.
How to Thrive as a Writer in a Capitalist Dystopia, on the other hand, is a book I’m willing to take way more risks with because if you are gonna buy that book, you probably already have a specific point of view.
As opposed to this book, which should be able to be read by anyone who wants to succeed on Substack, and that is the backstory of why I made such banal, boring choices with this one, even using the orange color from Substack, which is such a very hack move, but also…it doesn’t offend anyone.
So there’s a design ‘style’ for different types of non fiction? Fascinating!
Yes, why did I choose this one?
Because it best exemplifies what sells on Amazon in the genre of business books. Is it as homey or as bespoke as I would like? No, it’s not. Would I prefer a less aggressive style? Yes, honestly, but what I want doesn’t matter.
What matters is sending the right signals to the right reader that they should buy this book.
I know it will possibly alienate some people who should read it, but for a book like this I just wanted to keep it as straight down the middle as possible.
The same thing with the title. My first book was originally called Sell Your Soul: How to Build Your Creative Career. It got a good chuckle from people, but it sold terribly until I changed it to How to Build Your Creative Career.
I like the first one 1,000x better, but nobody read it. So, what good did it do?
Not as much as it did when people actually read it and internalized the message. It’s a really hard still to learn, but it’s an essential one to learn as a publisher.
How to Build a World Class Substack is the title of my most popular post on the subject, so it’s been split tested against many other titles, and it was read by the most people. I don’t love that this is how the world works, but this is a very niche subject and it really needs not to alienate any of its potential audience. Maybe you hate me for those choices, but there was a lot of thought behind them.
We made a business book designed to help you create something sustainable that will grow. Claire has a very folksy, homey style, but this book is about how you can best utilize the platform to grow a business that works for you.
I designed it for the market that will most likely resonate with it, which are people on Substack that want to build a sustainable, thriving business. To do that, I comped a bunch of other business books in that genre and made something that fit with them. So, saying things like;
“It looks like all other business books”
like…good.
It should. That’s the goal.
People feel all sorts of ways about the title, especially about our use of the term “World Class” Here’s the thing about “world class” I use that intentionally in the title, because I think everyone is trying to build a world class publication.
Maybe you think “world class” means making the most money. I don’t, personally.
To me having a world class publication means having the ability to connect on the deepest level with the most readers who resonate deeply with your message in a way that compels them to fall in love with your work.
That is a world class skill. If you are striving for at least that, you then will resonate with our book.
Branding, audience growth, monetization, and all that other stuff revolves around becoming a world class writer, and a world class writer means developing the skill to find and connect with your ideal readers on the deepest level. If your ideal reader can come to your page, immediately know they are “home”, and have a visceral positive reaction to your work within seconds, then you have a world class publication. The rest of it is all semantics.
Leaning into being ‘for’ the mass market
I used to resist making my covers with mass market appeal, but after I realized that what I really wanted was the most people to read the book, I got over myself and started to design covers in a way that send the correct signal to the readers most likely to read and resonate with the book.
This is not a book of koans or soft reflections. It’s a book about how to build a business on Substack that works for you. Getting comfortable with that took literally years.
Can we all design our own covers?
So, would I recommend going it alone to design your cover? No.
Honestly, my way only works if you already know what you want and how to articulate it to the system. Because I knew the style, the design elements, the colors, and knew how they would combine, I could do it myself.
I have hired dozens of cover artists in my career and edited just so many project briefs that I knew how to make this work myself. I still prefer to work with a designer because they will have a design aesthetic I don’t, and since they work on this stuff all the time, they will be better at this than me.
I definitely recommend hiring a designer if you’re not practiced at design. I’ve now released over 50 titles, and written 10 non-fiction books, so I was very aware of what works in that genre. I’ve talked to Monica about it for hours and she knows 100x more about it than me. Plus, I’ve designed dozens of websites and even drawn a couple of comics myself, along with spending years as a photographer and director before I moved to LA.
Practise makes “perfect“ then?
Doing it alone isn’t how I would go about your first book, or even your 10th book.
I have spent 20 years developing my eye as a designer and editor. If you don’t have that, then go hire a professional.
You can use these templates for inspiration, but I would definitely hire somebody.
Besides, we only rise to the structures we have in place. If you don’t have designers you can call on, you will be the choke point in your own business. You want somebody you can call in a pinch to help you. Even knowing what colors clash and complement each other is something that takes a lot of time to learn.
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If you back How to Build a World Class Substack this week you get
’s book ‘How to get your Book Selling on Kickstarter’ and an accompanying crowd funding class thrown in. Here’s the link. Thanks to everyone who has made our first week a huge success and to those who challenged us and helped us to come up with more content to better explain what we’re doing here and why.Delighted to share the journey with you,
Sending Sparkles,
Claire and Russell
This is absolutely fascinating. I love how open you both are about the journey and how this collaboration has evolved for you.
This is fabulous Russell! And the point about partnerships is so good