Brand design, cover art, interior illustrations, typesetting, eBook production, publishing assistance and author services that give your hard-earned book the credibility it deserves.
The job of a cover is to catch the reader's eye, grab their attention in a crowded marketplace, and communicate the key message (and genre) at a glance. It should quickly convey what it is, and who it's for.
We work with you to refine your title, subtitle, copy and overall marketing proposition so everything pulls together as one clear, coherent conceptual package. This work makes marketing easier (and cheaper).
An impactful cover is punchy: it conveys a core idea or argument quickly, with confidence, and pulls readers towards the blurb. We've helped hundreds of authors make and launch marketable books.
We don't just design books—we brand them.
We specialise in brand design and bright, bold, loud, eye-catching, attention-grabbing covers, that jump off the page and stand out, whether on a bookstore shelf or as a one-inch thumbnail.
We're authors, so we know the marketing challenges writers face first-hand. When it comes to packaging our manuscripts into a product, we struggle to see it as a stranger might. When it comes to promoting a book, we've spent so much time zoomed in on the micro-level of writing and editing, it's hard to be objective about the brand it wears on the shelf; to zoom out to the position of a busy reader browsing Amazon who knows nothing about the book at all.
How do we grab their attention and tell them WHAT IT IS, so they understand instantly—with only a handful of words and a thumbnail to do it?
You’ve given your manuscript the time, energy, and care it deserves, now let us design it. We'll strengthen the concept and deliver the core message with a bold design, so your book speaks loudly and clearly to the readers you want to reach. This is why we chose the name BOLDER. We add emphasis; guide focus; strengthen and highlight what matters most.
We lead you through the process, share our experiences along the way, explain our decision process and reason our way forwards together, so you can stand behind your book with confidence. Not all authors love marketing, but thankfully the effort is made easier (and less icky) if the book itself is made marketable. If it looks good, feels right, makes sense—the brand helps do a lot of the work for you. We help onboard indie writers to understand their books as a publisher would, to think like authors, and to market their books like professionals.
We can help with typesetting, eBook production, and basically anything else you might need.
At the end, you get a marketable book. But, more than that, you get a message.
Bold, loud, bright colours catch the eye, grab attention and stand out as thumbnails (especially against the all-white backdrops of online marketplaces like Amazon), so your book gets noticed.
Thumbnails are small: the title, concept and artwork must remain legible and "getable" at the size buyers first encounter it. A cover has one job: to intrigue readers enough to entice a click. A little cleverness helps.
We've learned that each element added reduces the importance of the others, while every element taken away raises the visibility and importance of what’s left. At BOLDER, we emphasise more with less.
Paul Hawkins is a 100k+ bestselling British humourist, author-illustrator and general self-publishing geek from (almost) London, England. He handles art direction, design, branding, concepting and copy at BOLDER.
Linn Alice Hart is an illustrator and designer from Hamburg, Germany, with a background in film, editing and translation. She handles cover art & illustration, typesetting & eBook production, and client onboarding at BOLDER.
Hi, we’re Paul Hawkins and Linn Alice Hart, a Berlin-based husband and wife creative team, with a background in visual arts and publishing. As well as writing, illustrating, designing, typesetting and marketing our own books, we help other authors do the same at BOLDER.
We learned what we know by doing it ourselves, apprenticing ourselves on our own books, as authors and illustrators. Together, we've had 12+ books (five co-authored together) published with traditional publishers like Goldman (Penguin Random House), Ullstein (Hachette group), C. H. Beck, Langenscheidt, PONS, Donkey, and W. F. Howes (#1 in audiobooks), and are catching up with self-published titles. We know traditional publishing and the self-publishing process inside-out. In particular, we know first-hand the challenges authors face at every stage of releasing a book, especially when it comes to design, branding and online marketing.
Check out our bestseller The Bloody British on Amazon to see how we learned to pull everything together; the title, subtitle, cover, blurb copy and Amazon A+ content all working together as an inseparable conceptual package. That's what we'd love to do for you.
We live in Berlin (and we're often in London.)
We design impactful books, inside and out, from first concepts to final copies. We learned everything by doing it first ourselves. Find out why this makes us different.
Book design, from bold covers to characterful illustration, the typesetting of print interiors to eBook production. Visit our Showcase to see our work.
We offer book development, design and author services—from refining titles to getting final copies out there. See what authors have to say about us.
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