How to Position Your Book So AI Search Finds You First- BM526

Do readers judge a book by its cover? Absolutely. And if your book looks self-published, readers notice before they read a single word.

This week on the podcast, book designer extraordinaire Victoria Wolf pulls back the curtain on what makes a book look polished, credible, and impossible to ignore.

With more than 30 years in the industry and 500+ books designed, Victoria shares the design choices that separate books people buy from books people scroll past.

We talk covers that instantly signal quality, interiors that keep readers engaged, and the subtle design mistakes that quietly kill credibility. You’ll also hear why many nonfiction authors sabotage their authority with amateur visuals without even realizing it.

If your book is supposed to open doors, your design can’t afford to whisper.

Key takeways from this week's episode;

•  Why interior design matters far more than most authors think 
•  The typography and layout choices that make books easier to read and harder to put down 
•  The real job of a book cover and why most self-published covers miss the mark 
•  When your author photo helps your brand and when it hurts it 
•  The tiny design tweaks that instantly make a book feel professionally published 
•  How strong design builds trust, authority, and sales before readers even open the book 

If you want your book to compete with traditionally published titles instead of looking like an afterthought, don’t miss this conversation. Tune in now!

Here's how to connect with Victoria:

Website:  Wolf Design and Marketing,

LinkedIn Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriawolf/
LinkedIn Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wolf-design-marketing
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfdesignandmarketing
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WolfsOnBooks

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Transcript

Susan Friedmann [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas and tips from the masters. Every week I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books. Today, my special guest is Victoria Woolf. Victoria is an award-winning book Designer with over 30 years of graphic design experience, specializing in book design. For the past decade, she's helped authors create books that look and feel traditionally published. Her approach combines strategic design with a deeply collaborative process. The result is a book that is visually compelling and positioned to stand out in a crowded marketplace. Through her company, Wolf Design and Marketing, she's helped bring more than 500 books to life.

Susan Friedmann [00:00:54]:
Well, Victoria, it's an absolute pleasure to welcome you to the show and thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor.

Victoria Wolf [00:01:02]:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited. I love talking books. This is gonna be fun.

Susan Friedmann [00:01:07]:
I love talking books as well. We're on the same page here. So you've worked with more than 500 books, which is absolutely incredible. But before we get into sort of the nitty gritty, I'm curious, when you look at a book, what do you notice first that most authors probably completely miss?

Victoria Wolf [00:01:30]:
I'm a type person. I think I'm probably drawn to typography more than the imagery. I can tell when something's off and it bothers me. I look at it and it's like, oh no, no, no. And then I can, you know, something that looks really amazing. I'm like, oh, wow, that looks good. I think type is sexy. I really am a type nerd.

Victoria Wolf [00:01:51]:
So that's what I see first.

Susan Friedmann [00:01:53]:
I love it that there are just so many different. In fact, it's overwhelming how many different fonts there are out there. Now I remember, I think when I first started there were about 200 and something. And now they've got to be 20,000 or something.

Victoria Wolf [00:02:08]:
No, no, there's more than that. There's.

Susan Friedmann [00:02:09]:
Oh, really?

Victoria Wolf [00:02:10]:
Oh, no. And when I first started in, 92, fonts were exceptionally expensive. I don't know how I got it. I still don't remember. I stumbled on the entire Adobe font collection I had. I was in possession of. I don't even know how I had it, but it was like gold. And nowadays professional fonts are not used as much.

Victoria Wolf [00:02:28]:
It's all the free fonts. There's a lot of type designers out there, quite a few free font websites, so you can get free fonts. I never use free fonts in my designs because they are not copyrightable, and they shouldn't be used. And they're told you not to use them only for personal use. But, yes, there's a ton of fonts that's very interesting.

Susan Friedmann [00:02:45]:
And I know that just, you know, a little squiggle could make a whole different font. It looks exactly the same as another one, but there's just one little curlicue or one little line that makes it different from another. So, yeah, it's gotta be overwhelming. And knowing what all the fonts are and which ones work well together, I think that's also an interesting thing.

Victoria Wolf [00:03:08]:
Yeah, it is, and it's fun. One of the things I'll walk authors through when I'm doing an interior, I usually pick a body font, and there's about seven to eight body fonts that I choose from because not every font is easy to read. And I'm all about legibility when it comes to the interior. And so I'll take the same paragraph, I'll stack them on top of each other, four or five different ones, and each one will be a different font. And there are many authors who cannot tell the difference between the fonts. And I'm like. I'm thinking to myself, and I know they don't. It's so obvious.

Victoria Wolf [00:03:37]:
Can you not see the serifs on this one are so much more exaggerated than the serifs on the other one? But it is very subtle, and I understand that. But when you see them on top of each other, it's really about how much space they take up. The same exact font with the same exact point size can take. One can be five lines, that paragraph one can be six, one can even be seven. It's very fascinating, but most people don't see those subtleties. But that's when you hire a professional like myself to do your book. That's our job. You shouldn't have to ask, well, what font is this and what point and why did you use this? And you shouldn't have to ask those questions.

Victoria Wolf [00:04:10]:
Your designers should already know those things.

Susan Friedmann [00:04:12]:
Why does interior design matter much more than really, authors realize, because they don't really think about it all that much. They put the words together, but then the real craft is what it looks like. So talk to us more about that interior design that, as I say, most authors don't even think about.

Victoria Wolf [00:04:34]:
No, it's kind of like a secondary thing. It's like, yeah, I need to get my book formatted. Maybe I'll get Atticus, or I'll find someone who did whatever. The other just Another online thing to use. And yes, if you're on a budget and you need to do that, that's the best way to go. The best, worst way to go, in my opinion. I think a lot of authors, they think this is just words. It's here's words on an eight and a half by 11, or here's words on a six by nine.

Victoria Wolf [00:04:56]:
It's just words that you read. But he never stopped to think if those words are easy to read. And that's just the first threshold you have to make it easy for readers to read. There's actually a in the brain, the way the brain reads a line of text. Depending on how wide the line is and how big the font is, the point size, it can make it very easy to read or very hard to read. If you have too many characters per line, your brain's like, I can't take it. I can't get to the end. If you have too many characters per line, it's like, this is just too hard to focus on.

Victoria Wolf [00:05:28]:
So there's this sweet spot of how many characters per line based on your width of your interior page that makes it for easy reading. So that's the first and foremost, very important thing. And then second to that is the look and feel. I'm real big about this. You want to pull the reader in and you want to keep them in that book. You want them to be comfortable, if that's your goal, and you want them to be grounded. And maybe you want them to be excited, maybe you want them to be hopeful. Whatever it is, the font choices that are used, the way the text is laid out all adds to that emotional experience that you get inside a book.

Victoria Wolf [00:06:02]:
And most authors don't think about it, but when you tell them that, they're like, oh, well, I really enjoyed reading Book X last week, but the book before that was. It was kind of hard to read, but I got through it. They don't understand why some things are hard to read, but I understand that and make sure that I do. Interiors. And then the other. There's one important thing. This is the thing. If I look at a book and I see this, I just want to scream at the top of my lungs.

Victoria Wolf [00:06:26]:
When you have a passage, a paragraph that has all this extra space in between the words, makes it extremely hard to read. That's a justification and hyphenation issue. And it takes precision to get that right. Many of the, like Atticus and Vellum, those programs, they don't handle that very well. I actually handle that manually for every single book, since it's so important. So I really love doing interiors, as you can tell.

Susan Friedmann [00:06:51]:
Yeah, we pressed a hot button there, which I really love.

Victoria Wolf [00:06:55]:
It's just hard to read otherwise, and it's not fun. I guess I'm the one woman campaign here to, you know, make interiors beautiful again, you know, whatever it is. But I'm all about that.

Susan Friedmann [00:07:06]:
Well, the reader experience is so important because you gave these great examples as I loved reading this book, it was easy. If I look at a book and as you say, the typeface is small, the font is small, it's all bunched together and it's just a whole blob on a page and there's very little white space. It's like, oh, I don't even want to look at it.

Victoria Wolf [00:07:30]:
Exactly. And depending on who your reader is, too. I mean, you can't accommodate for everybody. But someone like myself, who's very add ish, it's hard to begin with to keep our attention on a page. And then if you throw in all these factors that shouldn't be there that is causing you to look away because it's hard to read, then you've lost your reader again. You can't account for every reader type, but you can surely make the most readable interior and the best reader experience that you can create.

Susan Friedmann [00:07:57]:
Yes. Plenty of white space, a font that is a decent size.

Victoria Wolf [00:08:02]:
Yes. And hierarchy is huge. There is a natural hierarchy in books, and we're talking mostly nonfiction, so there's tons of hierarchy in nonfiction books, especially business books. So you've got chapter title, that's 1. Then you got a subhead, that's 2. Then you could have another subhead and another sub. You could have anywhere from one to four or five levels. And those have to be presented visually in a hierarchy that the reader understands.

Victoria Wolf [00:08:26]:
Oh, this is a subhead of this. And throughout the entire book, how you handle pull quotes and sidebars and stuff like that, those are all visual cues to the reader. It's like, oh, this is pulled out of the text. It must be important. This is off to the side. It must be important. But I could go back and read all the sidebars because it's off to the side, not in the middle of the narrative. There's a lot of heavy lifting that layout is doing in a book that most people don't realize.

Victoria Wolf [00:08:51]:
Which, again, it's okay. They don't realize as long as the person that's doing their interior understands all that things are all good.

Susan Friedmann [00:08:58]:
Yeah. And you want to, again, make it a fun and interesting experience, I think, you know, obviously there's the to look of a book. You know, any book you pick up, they all look the same. But then when they have the sidebars or when it's in a slightly different color, it's grayed out and you've got a case study or something that is off to the side. I've written a couple of Dummies books, and the way they lay out the books, the four Dummies series, with little icons that mean different things. And obviously they give you that at the beginning, but. But it makes it interesting and fun to read. And I think that adds to the experience if it's fun and interesting for the reader.

Victoria Wolf [00:09:43]:
Oh, definitely. And those Dummies books are designed for a reason. All the icons and everything is so that it makes it easily digestible. They're called Dummies books for a reason. They're supposed to be very basic and take you from basic to a good understanding by the time you're through the book. And typography and layout all add to that. If you did those books differently than they are, they won't be as easy to digest as they are. That's very, very important.

Victoria Wolf [00:10:06]:
And I like to put a lot of graphics, not a lot, but graphics in even my fiction interiors. I think that the days of just text are behind us. I think adding, you know, visual interest throughout the book is very important because we're all busy and we all have some level of focus issues. And so the more that you can make the interior interesting and change, it changes from page to page, not dramatically, but a little bit, the more the reader will stay interested and stay in the book.

Susan Friedmann [00:10:36]:
Yeah, and that's important too. I mean, as we know, people's interest level, you know, is very short these days. We've got to help make it easy for them. As they say, don't make this difficult, because if it is, then I'm not going to participate in the game.

Victoria Wolf [00:10:53]:
Exactly. The font size, that's probably the biggest concern I get. I work with authors of every age group, but a large percentage of them are older, middle age or older. And one of the big concerns of all them is the type size. You know, is it going to be legible? And again, I referenced earlier that there's a little formula, how many characters per line based on your line width. It works no matter what age you are. I mean, I guess as long as you have reading glasses of where I kind of am in life now, I haven't found a book I can't read yet. But there have been some books that were.

Victoria Wolf [00:11:25]:
The type was so small, I don't know what they were thinking, that even 25 year olds will have trouble reading it. You know, it's just, it's uncomfortable. I gotta really concentrate. And you don't want to do that when you're reading.

Susan Friedmann [00:11:37]:
Yeah, that's exhausting. Let's talk about covers for a moment because that's usually where authors focus first. But in your experience, what separates a good cover from one that really stands out?

Victoria Wolf [00:11:53]:
Well, a cover has one job and that's to get the potential reader to stop in their tracks, take a look and commit to another action. Like click the button, pick up the book, flip it over, read the back blurb, whatever it is, whatever the action is, to get them deeper into the book and to do that job. There's a lot of things a cover needs to accomplish, even though they only have one job. There's a lot of components to it, but first and foremost is being on genre. I see a lot of self published authors who are either attempting to do their own cover or they're highly art directing a designer that they hire and they are completely off mark when it comes to genre. Readers of certain genres expect certain things. It's kind of like, you know, to breathe because your body just does that. You know, what a, you know, a thriller cover looks like versus a memoir versus a business book.

Victoria Wolf [00:12:45]:
When you cross those lines, readers get confused and they just go away. They don't even try. And so that's the most important thing, secondly is conveying the emotional weight of the book or the emotional tone of the book. And this is a little bit more important in fiction than it is in nonfiction, but it's still a component in fiction, especially for memoirs. It's like, is it hopeful, is it dark? Is it, you know, you never want to have this, like, let's say you have this happy cover with a smiley face and all these beautiful colors. And then you get into the book and it's so dark. It's a journey you didn't expect. You're gonna be so let down as a reader.

Victoria Wolf [00:13:24]:
And I don't know how many people you're gonna tell about that this is not a good book because you felt like it got duped. And so that's really critical that your cover really is representational of what readers are gonna find in your book.

Susan Friedmann [00:13:37]:
Where does color play into this? I mean, I know that there are like in fashion, there are fashionable colors. Over the years I've Seen this, but talk to us a little bit more about that.

Victoria Wolf [00:13:50]:
Well, color for me, I don't use color in a very strict way. It's like, oh, this is a business book, we must use navy. Or this is a thriller, we must use red. It's whatever speaks to the story and speaks to the imagery on the COVID is the direction I go in. I know that there's a distinction, even though all the work that I do is designed to look like a traditionally done book. There is a difference between traditionally published books and self published books. You have a little bit more leeway and you can take more risk with traditionally published books because you have all that backing behind you and you have that publisher getting your book into all these bookstores no matter what. So the self published author has to be, I hate to say this, like a little safer, but self published author is unknown and has to prove themselves.

Victoria Wolf [00:14:36]:
And can we take risks? Yeah, I do some covers that take risks. There's nothing wrong with that. But when it comes to color, if you want to follow a trend, you're probably going to do that more if you're a traditionally published author than if you are a self published author. Because trends change a lot. And it costs money to change a cover, even though every three to five years you should change a cover. But not every author has those funds to do that.

Susan Friedmann [00:15:00]:
And you've also got to love your cover. I always say to my authors, make sure you are absolutely 110, 120% in love with that coverage. Because if you aren't, I know and I've seen it, you're going to be embarrassed by it and you're not going to sell it.

Victoria Wolf [00:15:16]:
Exactly. I tell authors that all the time. I never want an author to be at a book signing table and in the back of their mind going, oh my God, we should have went with the other cover, or God, I really hate that whatever on my cover because it gets in the way and it gets in the way of everything, marketing everything. And so you have to love the COVID But one of the things that I see a lot with self published authors, and this is difficult, it's a push and pull, is you have to love your cover, but you also have to understand that your cover needs to work for the reader. So there's a job a cover does. And sometimes the authors are so into their book and their story because of course they've been writing it for however many months and years they've been doing it and they don't look at, well, what does my Cover need to sell this book to get a reader interested. And sometimes covers are far too personal. They have a photo they want to use or an imagery they want to use that means so much to them, and I respect that.

Victoria Wolf [00:16:10]:
But it's not going to mean anything to the potential reader. It might by the time they're done reading it, but you've got to get that book in their hands first. That's a difficult dance sometimes.

Susan Friedmann [00:16:19]:
Yeah, no, I agree with that. And I often say to authors, test it with your target audience. Because they say to me, well, did you like it? What do you think about it?

Victoria Wolf [00:16:29]:
And.

Susan Friedmann [00:16:29]:
And I said, I'm not your audience. Take it to your audience, your target audience, and ask them what they think about it. Because that's going to help you much more than me saying, yes, I like it. No, I don't.

Victoria Wolf [00:16:42]:
Oh, yeah, exactly. It's not like, hey, let me see if my mom likes my cover. I mean, mom, yeah, we want mom's approval all the time. If mom's your target audience, then yeah, maybe that's good. But you're exactly right. The people that you ask for opinions on anything visual or anything written with your book should be your target audience. Because in fiction is such a good genre to use as an example, if you've got someone who reads thrillers and mysteries and you're asking them to judge on a romance cover or a sci fi cover, they're going to be like, oh, it looks pretty. They're going to give you some visual guidance, sort of.

Victoria Wolf [00:17:19]:
But what you're really asking is, does this work as a fill in the blank with your genre? Does this work as a fiction cover? Does this work as a thriller? Does this work as a business cover? Because that's the goal of the COVID And unless you read those genres, you're not gonna be able to help with that opinion or not.

Susan Friedmann [00:17:36]:
I'd love your opinion about using your own photo on the book cover. Cause I've got a lot of authors who want to have their picture on the COVID What's your take on that?

Victoria Wolf [00:17:47]:
I find that many authors, they don't want to do that. And I have actually suggested it to a few authors when I feel like it's proper to do and it's the right move. And they're like, oh, I get. They're usually hesitant. So it's great to hear. There are authors out there that are not hesitant. I always say that if you're somebody, people in your circle know, they know your face. Like, you've done a lot of Marketing, you have a huge network and you're writing a book that advances your authority in your industry, then by all means, put your picture on the COVID if that's going to sell more books.

Victoria Wolf [00:18:17]:
If that's not the case, then nobody knows who you are, then your picture on the COVID is going to mean nothing to anybody. Unless it's a really cool picture of you, I don't know, jumping off a mountain or, I don't know, snowboarding in deep snow. I can't think of any good examples, but it's got to be a really cool photo. But if you're a speaker and you have a large following, then I would say, yeah, use your picture. And it's got to be a good picture. And not to say that people don't look good. The composition of the picture has to work on a cover. And the expression is so important.

Victoria Wolf [00:18:48]:
If you're frowning in the least or you look a little uncomfortable, I mean, that's not gonna work either. So it's really a decision on the photo, how the photograph turns out too.

Susan Friedmann [00:18:57]:
And even if you have a small picture on the back in your bio, let's say for a soft cover book or even, you know, a hardcover book, where your picture is on the interior flap, that you want to be smiling because again, it's exuding warmth that you want your reader to feel about you. And obviously the contents of your book.

Victoria Wolf [00:19:19]:
Oh, yeah, definitely. And when it comes to those photos, I think if you're writing a book about authority, that's either you put your picture on the COVID or not you're gonna wanna put your picture on the back of the book. That's a question I get all the time, well, should I put my picture on there or just the. About the author on the inside? And I said, if your authority is your knowledge, your experience, your education, all that makes you the perfect and the right person to write this book, then that needs to go a little snippet of your bio and your picture on the back cover, because that's going to help sell the book. But if it doesn't, you know, and sometimes memoirs fall into this category, then, you know, just put the picture in about the other author on the inside. But for those who put the picture on the back of the book and on the inside, I will typically suggest a more professional, a warm, professional one for the back cover and then maybe a more casual one about the author on the inside side to show the other side of the author, maybe doing something fun like hiking or biking or something like that. Just to mix it up a bit,

Susan Friedmann [00:20:17]:
show that you're a real person.

Victoria Wolf [00:20:19]:
Yes, exactly.

Susan Friedmann [00:20:20]:
For people to know.

Victoria Wolf [00:20:21]:
People want. And I've had some authors, it's like, do I really need to put my picture about the author? I says it's not a requirement, but people want to, they want to connect with you and see your picture. And the only way they can even begin to connect with you is see your picture. So it's important we all do that. We always like, oh, who's this author? And we flip to the back of the book. Oh, that's what they look like. At least I do that. I've always done that.

Susan Friedmann [00:20:44]:
I do too. I want to know what the author looks like. If an author's already got a cover, what's one change or element that could take it from, let's say, an okay cover to an exceptional cover?

Victoria Wolf [00:20:58]:
I'm going to go back to typography and hierarchy, taking a good hard look at that typography and see if your hierarchy is in good order. And when I say hierarchy, basically you have title, subtitle, author name, and there is a hierarchy. Title is always bigger subtitle, smaller author. Depending on the author, it's somewhere in the middle. Sometimes it gets bigger depending on the author name too. If you have a big long name, it's usually smaller, but the title is the most important. And then the subtitle, if you have everything and even within a title, say you have a three word title and there's one word that's more important. Well, if you put all the words at the same size, it may work, it may not.

Victoria Wolf [00:21:37]:
But if you really want to drive a point home, then maybe within the title one of the words is bigger than the other two words. And so every title is different and every cover is different. So it just depends. But typography is usually the best place to start. And for me, typography, the title and everything is the star and then the graphics are the supporting characters. But they all work, they're all very, very important together. So I don't think you can ever. You can have one without the other, actually, because I've done quite a few more business books that don't have a lot of imagery and they are just really about the title and some interesting background.

Susan Friedmann [00:22:10]:
Well, it's a wonderful segue, Victoria, for you to tell our listeners how they can find out more about you, your services and that they can take advantage of your brilliance.

Victoria Wolf [00:22:21]:
Oh, well, thank you. You can find out more about me@wolffdesignandmarketing.com we also have a YouTube channel, WolfsonBooks. My husband and I work this business together. I do all the fun, pretty creative stuff and he does all the production stuff and he does a lot of the marketing, too. And that would be on YouTube. WolfsonBooks. Yeah, those are the best ways. And I'm on LinkedIn as well, so.

Victoria Wolf [00:22:44]:
Victoria Wolf.

Susan Friedmann [00:22:45]:
Excellent. And we'll put all those links in the show notes so that people can grab them and have a look. Excellent. And as you know, Victoria, we always have our guests. Leave our listeners with a golden nugget. What's yours?

Victoria Wolf [00:22:58]:
You really can judge a book by its cover, so do not skimp on your cover design.

Susan Friedmann [00:23:03]:
Oh, short, sweet, and to the point, without any shadow of a doubt. Yes, you don't judge a book by its cover, but yes, you do. So true. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. This was brilliant. I loved it. And listeners, if your book isn't selling the way you want it or expect it to, let's you and I jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales. Because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got the return you were hoping for.

Susan Friedmann [00:23:33]:
So go to bookmarketingbrainstorm.com to schedule your free call. And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparks some ideas you can use to sell more books. Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.

Here's how to connect with Victoria:

Website:  Wolf Design and Marketing,

LinkedIn Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriawolf/
LinkedIn Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wolf-design-marketing
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfdesignandmarketing
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@WolfsOnBooks