If you’re flush, you could hire the designer to give you style sheets — a design for the interior — using the typesetting software of your choice. Learn a system like InDesign and then do that interior typesetting on your own.

A more low-end, but probably perfectly acceptable, substitute would be to typeset the interior with Microsoft Word. Just remember to use a contrasting typeface, sans serif, for the title of each poem, and then a compatible, readable font, with serifs, for the body of the book.

Since we’re talking poetry, we’re not talking footnotes or tables, right?

Don’t let yourself be stopped by high fees for typesetting, but do be sure to find a good professional. If you email me, I’ll give you the name of the designer for my last three covers.

Or, if it is acceptable, I’ll mention her here: Melanie Matheson from http://www.rollingrhino.com. No financial interest here. I just adore her work, enjoy working with her, too.

Wait, poets get paid?

I think we are generally out of the realm of financial logic when we are discussing the economics of publishing poetry.

But you point out the basic dilemma of independent publishing.

Phrased another way, are we sure it’s rational to pay the designer 10 times what we’re paying the poet?

Note that I’ve zero issue with those numbers as such—if the book sales can support it, fantastic. But the hypothetical example is one in which it is virtually impossible to do so.

You should certainly come down to Buenos Aires someday. It’s a great city with a dynamic literary culture.

Designer A mostly works with university presses. Designer B tends to work with commercial trade publishers. Designers C and D do a lot of work with museums and other art book publishers.

BTW, I have translated Cortazar and some other Argentine writers, but I have never been to Buenos Aires. I would love to visit some time.

My assumption is that designer A probably works more with self-publishers and small presses and the others with larger, commercial publishers. (Also, from these rates it’s clear why there is a problem in university publishing).

For internationally-based designers like us, it poses a dilemma as whether to increase pricing to the evident expectations of commercial publishers (as reflected by designers B, C, D) or to retain a pricing structure reflective of local costs though none of our customers are local.

I’ve noticed in Web design that fees are mostly consistent for quality designers regardless of location. Perhaps that will be true for book designers also as book design expands into the global market. Or, the global market simply drive down the cost of book design.