Hello My Name Is

New Name, New Direction

I spent almost 20 years building up my reputation as a book designer under the name April Martinez. In June of this year, I got married and changed my last name.

New Name: McMillan

This is the perfect opportunity for me to start anew in the book design world — new last name, blank reputation, fresh start, new direction. Back in March, I wrote that I was no longer open to new clients. Today, I’m announcing that I’m open to new clients again, with a caveat.

I do still have my full-time day job, which means the book design work is still a side hustle, but my married status now means that my income now helps to support two adults, two kids, and two pets, instead of just me. Full-time job, full household. So, while it would be nice to have the extra income, I still need to make sure the book design work is kept to the weekends. That means I’m now open to only a very specific two types of clients.

New Direction: Open to Special Clients

Those clients (hopefully with long lead times and short emails) are:

  1. Publishers.
  2. Well established self-publishing authors with a steadily growing backlist of five or more books.

The reason behind this is pretty simple. Because my time is limited, I can’t spend a lot of it explaining the process to new or inexperienced authors, answering the inevitable questions about expectations, specifications, industry standards and conventions, and the like, or I’ll simply never get around to doing the actual work.

Authors who just finished writing their first book can be fun to work with — the excitement and the feeling of novelty is catching, and I have enjoyed freely sharing my knowledge with those eager to learn. In fact, I am happy to explain how things work to people new to the industry, just not in one-on-one emails and not as a vendor to a client.

That said, part of my new name, new direction goals involve using my blog and my social media to educate new authors and new cover artists. So, if you are a publisher or well established author, April McMillan awaits your business, and if you are new to publishing entirely, stay tuned as I build a reputation for my new name by telling you all that I learned when I was April Martinez.