We provide a comprehensive list of pre-press services, including book design, cover design, illustration and indexing. You can request a quotation by filling out this form.

Book design
Richard Hendel points out that although books are ubiquitous, few readers are aware of the "invisible" craft of book design. The craft differs from that pursued by other designers in that the challenge is not to create something different or pretty or clever, but to discover how best to serve the author's words (On Book Design Yale University Press, 1998).
This involves a wide range of decisions including selection of a book's size and shape, choice of typeface for text and display, arrangement of type on the page, and determination of typographic details for all parts of the book within manufacturing and budget limitations.

Cover design
Professional book cover design gives a title a significant advantage because readers, retailers and reviewers give each book only a few moments of consideration before they make a choice. In a study by Albert Greco, published in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing in 2001, he lists book cover art as the third most important reason for planned book purchases after the reputation of the author and the book's category. Cover art was rated more influential by book buyers than price, reviews, recommendations, advertisements or endorsements.

Illustration
Scholarly or technical books require illustrations that focus on expressing rather than impressing; their aim is to improve understanding rather than call attention to themselves. We use several different artists who work in a variety of media and styles so that we can always achieve a comfortable fit between text and illustration.

Indexing
Every serious book of nonfiction should have an index if it is to achieve its maximum usefulness.
-Chicago Manual of Style(1993)
An index is a key to locating information contained in a book. Ideally, it will provide references to the location of important information, and deliberately exclude references to irrelevant information. This distinction is important and gets to the core of the indexer's responsibility. Readers look for important and helpful information when they search for the terms or ideas in an index. Few things are more aggravating than to be sent on a wild goose chase through a book looking for a nonexistent reference. To look in the index and be confronted with a reference that leads to a useless passing mention is an annoyance and will quickly lead to the user abandoning the book for another, should it happen with any frequency.
A.S. Byatt says that savvy readers often examine the index first, to understand the author's approach; if the reader is knowledgeable about the subject matter, the index will signify how much new or inventive research has gone into the book. The ideal index will even allow you to gauge the precise scope of the book.
Many people have the mistaken impression that a computer program can create an index. Automatic indexing software programs are simply not good enough to create an index for a book. Book indexing involves not only trivial alphabetization, which computers can do, but also deep understanding and organization of ideas and concepts, which computers cannot do at all.

If you need prepress services, please send us a request, or email questions to us at: