Publishing Enhancements That Help Your Book Stand Out
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Small Details Can Make a Big Difference in the Way Readers Experience Your Book
Publishing a book is an accomplishment. Publishing a book that looks professional, connects with its intended audience, and is prepared to compete in the marketplace takes another level of attention.
That’s where publishing enhancements come in.
At Outskirts Press, you maintain control over your publishing experience. Depending on your book, your audience, and your goals, you can add professional services that strengthen everything from your title and manuscript to your cover, interior, library readiness, and even the way readers discover your other books.
You don’t need every enhancement. You need the right enhancements for your book.
Explore the options below to see which ones can help take your book to the next level.
Make a Stronger First Impression
Before readers experience your writing, they experience your book’s presentation. These enhancements can help your book capture attention and communicate professionalism from the very first glance.
Custom Cover Design
Your cover has one job before all others: make someone want to know more.
Readers make quick judgments based on a book’s cover, especially when browsing crowded online marketplaces where your book may appear alongside traditionally published titles.
A professionally designed custom cover gives you a design created specifically around your book, genre, audience, and vision. Custom typography, imagery, and overall design can help communicate what kind of reading experience is waiting inside while giving your book its own distinctive identity.
- Create a look specifically for your book
- Better communicate your genre, subject, and tone
- Present a professional image across print, eBook, audiobook, and marketing materials
- Help your book stand apart from competing titles
Book Title Optimization
The right title can help readers understand, and find, your book.
A title may have personal meaning to you, but it also serves an important marketing purpose. Readers encounter titles in search results, retailer listings, social media, advertisements, and recommendations.
Professional Book Title Optimization evaluates your proposed title and the subject of your book to identify opportunities for a stronger title or subtitle. You receive three professionally optimized title and subtitle suggestions while maintaining complete creative control over your final choice.
This can be particularly valuable for nonfiction books, where descriptive keywords and phrases can help communicate exactly what the book offers.
- Strengthen the clarity and appeal of your title
- Explore alternative title and subtitle combinations
- Incorporate relevant keywords and search phrases where appropriate
- Help potential readers quickly understand what your book is about
Cover Pitch Enhancement
Your cover gets their attention. Your words give them a reason to buy.
Once a potential reader becomes interested in your book, your synopsis and author biography have an important job to do. They need to communicate the value, story, or promise of your book quickly and persuasively.
Cover Pitch Enhancement professionally refines your existing synopsis and author biography for stronger clarity, impact, and marketing appeal while remaining aligned with your book, voice, genre, and audience.
- Make your synopsis more compelling and concise
- Strengthen the marketing message on your back cover
- Present your author biography more effectively
- Give interested readers another reason to choose your book
Create a Better Reading Experience
A professional book shouldn’t stop being impressive when the reader opens the cover. Interior design, imagery, and visual organization all contribute to how enjoyable and useful a book feels.
Enhanced & Custom Interior Design
Good formatting helps readers forget about formatting and focus on your words. Great design can do even more.
Different books have different interior needs. A novel, business book, cookbook, poetry collection, workbook, and memoir shouldn’t necessarily look the same.
Enhanced Interior Formatting provides a designer-created style system tailored to your genre, tone, and preferences, including elements such as typography, chapter styling, spacing, headers, and overall presentation.
For books requiring even greater creative control, Custom Book Layout & Design provides a more bespoke, page-by-page approach.
- Give your book a more distinctive visual identity
- Improve readability and organization
- Match the interior presentation to your subject or genre
- Create a more polished reader experience
- Accommodate books with more complex design requirements
Custom Illustrations
Sometimes your words deserve a visual partner.
Illustrations can bring characters, concepts, scenes, moods, and ideas to life in ways that text alone cannot.
They’re essential for many children’s books, but their value extends much further. Fiction can use illustrations to strengthen atmosphere or imagination. Poetry can pair imagery with mood. Nonfiction can use illustrations to explain concepts. Cookbooks, educational books, and other visually driven titles can use artwork to create a richer reading experience.
Outskirts Press offers numerous professional illustration styles in both full color and black and white.
- Bring characters and scenes to life
- Explain concepts visually
- Add personality and originality
- Create stronger visual storytelling
- Make your book more engaging and memorable
Interior Images & Visual Elements
A picture can clarify, demonstrate, inspire—or simply give the reader’s eye a place to rest.
Photographs, charts, graphs, tables, drawings, and other visual elements can make a significant difference in books where readers benefit from seeing as well as reading.
If you already have images you want included, Outskirts Press can professionally incorporate author-provided digital images and visual elements into your interior.
Don’t have your own images? Our Image Enriched Interior option gives you access to professionally licensed Getty Images photography and illustrations that can be selected to complement your content.
Stock imagery can be especially useful for cookbooks, instructional books, travel titles, fitness books, educational works, health books, hobby books, and other nonfiction.
- Break up lengthy sections of text
- Illustrate ideas and instructions
- Improve reader comprehension
- Add visual interest and perceived value
- Give your interior a more engaging, polished appearance
Strengthen the Content
Beautiful design matters, but the words themselves still have to deliver.
Professional Copyediting
Readers notice errors—even when authors don’t.
After spending months or years working on a manuscript, it becomes remarkably difficult to see every typo, inconsistency, awkward construction, or contextual error yourself.
Professional copyediting provides a fresh, trained set of eyes to help identify issues before they become part of your published book. You still maintain control over your manuscript and can review the editor’s recommendations.
- Catch errors that are easy for an author to overlook
- Improve consistency and readability
- Strengthen the professional presentation of your manuscript
- Protect the credibility of you and your book
- Publish with greater confidence
Professional Indexing
For many nonfiction books, the index is part of the product—not an afterthought.
Readers of reference, academic, business, historical, instructional, and other nonfiction books often return to a book looking for a specific person, concept, subject, or passage.
A useful index transforms your book from something readers simply read into something they can easily reference again and again.
Outskirts Press offers both Express Indexing and Premium Manual Indexing, allowing you to choose the level of professional support appropriate for your book.
- Help readers quickly locate important subjects
- Make information easier to revisit and cite
- Increase the usefulness of reference-oriented books
- Add the professional finishing touch readers expect from serious nonfiction
Expand Your Book's Reach & Usefulness
Some enhancements go beyond appearance and content to help prepare your book for libraries, connect readers with online resources, or support your growing catalog.
Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN)
Planning to pursue library readers? Make your book library-ready.
A Library of Congress Control Number helps libraries catalog books through established library systems. Many libraries prefer books with an LCCN when evaluating titles for their collections.
Because the LCCN must be obtained during the publishing process so it can appear in the book, this is an enhancement authors interested in library opportunities should consider before publication.
An LCCN does not guarantee library placement, but it can remove an important obstacle when libraries consider your book.
- Make it easier for libraries to catalog your book
- Increase your book’s library readiness
- Add another element of professional publishing credibility
- Support outreach to libraries and institutional audiences
QR Code
Turn a printed page into a direct connection with your reader.
Your book may be physical, but your relationship with readers doesn’t have to end on the page.
A custom QR code can give readers instant smartphone access to an online destination of your choice. Link readers to your Amazon page to leave a review, your author website, newsletter signup, digital press kit, book club materials, Outskirts Press bookstore page, or another relevant online resource.
- Make it easier for readers to take the next step
- Encourage reviews and continued engagement
- Connect your printed book with your online author platform
- Eliminate the need for readers to type lengthy web addresses
Back Page Promotion
Your newest reader may be your best prospect for your next book.
If you’ve already published other books with Outskirts Press, the back pages of your newest title offer valuable promotional space.
Back Page Promotion allows you to feature an earlier book inside your newest publication, including its cover, synopsis, retail information, and ordering details.
It reaches readers at exactly the right moment: after they have already invested their time in one of your books and may be wondering what else you have written.
- Introduce current readers to your previous books
- Encourage cross-sales across your catalog
- Make your other titles easier to discover
- Build awareness of your growing author brand
Which Publishing Enhancements Are Right for Your Book?
Not every book needs the same things.
A novel may benefit most from a custom cover, editing, and an enhanced interior. A nonfiction reference book may gain more from professional editing, indexing, images, and an LCCN. A children’s book may depend heavily on custom illustrations and visual design. An author publishing a second, third, or fourth title may want to use Back Page Promotion and QR codes to connect one book—and one group of readers—to the next.
That’s one of the advantages of self-publishing with Outskirts Press:
Your Book. Your Goals. Your Choices.
Choose the enhancements that make sense for your manuscript, your readers, your publishing goals, and your budget.
You’ve already done the hard work of writing your book. Now you can decide which professional finishing touches will help it make the impression you want it to make.
Ready to explore your options?
Speak with an Outskirts Press Publishing Consultant for help identifying the enhancements that make the most sense for your book.