Failure and Success

by Chris McAlpin

Genre

Wealth management, Retirement planning

What Was Done

Cover Design
Interior Design
ePub Production
Proofreading
Three rounds of copyediting

What They Wanted

When I took on this project, I hadn't done a lot of financial-related books. Let alone a book that's supposed to represent a company. So the question became: how do I visually convey that this is a book about finances that a company would be proud enough to display in their office?

On the left side of the cover is a blue ripped and crumpled paper with the title Failure & Success in large letters near the center of the blue paper. Below that is the subtitle in smaller letters: The Story of Money. Toward the bottom of the blue paper is the author name: Chris McAlpin. On the right side is a glimpse of a close-up of Benjamin Franklin's face from a $100 bill. The blue paper looks like it's on top of the money.

See Project Live

The Project

My client reached out to me to tell me that one of his clients that he was coaching was interested in writing a book. Since me and the client had worked on his own book before and we had already established a relationship, he was quite confident I could help his client.

A lot of copyediting had to go into this project. I wasn’t well-versed with the financial world (I’m still not well-versed in it), so the copyediting was slow because there were a lot of terms I needed to look up to get a better understanding going into the book. As a blind read, I could, at least, give an opinion about what I had learned from just reading the book as is. So that was helpful for them.

One of my favorite aspects of this project is the cover. I think out of all the covers I’ve done for other authors this one is the one I might be most proud of. I was really intentional with not creating a cover that had vector art. I saw that there were a lot of covers that did have vector art on them, but they felt like those really cheap, short Kindle reads. If you looked at more bestselling books from world-renown financial gurus, they had an absolutely different look and feel. And because Chris wanted to use this book to help promote his company, I really wanted to tie in elements of his company’s logo.

His company colors are shades of blue. The branding felt really simple but gave off an authoritative-feel. So I wanted to try to capture that without feeling staunchy like the bankers in Mary Poppins.

Out of the three mockups I provided, they really loved this one. Adjustments and tweaks were made until all parties were happy with the final outcome. I think the cover feels a bit timeless and stands out in the crowd of financial books. Not only that, but it looks great in an office.

With the interior, I wanted to keep that same look and feel going. So I borrowed some of that ripped paper look for the part opening pages. You can see the same font that’s used on the ampersand on the cover as the dropcap for the opening chapter title pages. Everything was kept intentionally as clean and neat as possible.