The Designer

The person who designs, or gives an artist the commission to design the front covers of books. Usually the author is consulted on this process, but it depends on the publishing house as to how much say the author will have in the final appearance of the book. A slightly new group in publishing houses these days is the web design team, more and more publishing houses now have a significant presence on the web. Depending on what 'web presence' the publisher decides to give the author, the web designer can often be an important person in the production of a book.

Rarely does the cover artist work within the publishing house. They're usually freelance. They are paid to produce cover art work for the book - these pieces might be oil paintings measuring 8 foot by 4, or computer generated pieces of art work. (If the art work is a 'real' piece of art work, the artist is usually happy to sell it to the author) how much say the author gets in this art work varies from publishing house to publishing house.