Book Design Templates

Book Design Templates sells pre-made, professionally designed book interior templates that authors drop their own manuscript into — the cheapest path to a polished, industry-standard layout without buying dedicated formatting software or hiring a designer. Founded by the late Joel Friedlander (author of the long-running TheBookDesigner.com blog) and run through his Marin Bookworks studio with designer Tracy Atkins, each template is built by an award-winning book designer and organized by genre.

Unlike a formatting app such as Vellum or Atticus, this is a downloadable file, not a program. You buy a design, open it in a word processor or layout app you already own, and replace the placeholder text with your book.

What You Get#

• One design, four file formats: every purchase includes the same template as editable Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, Affinity Publisher, and Adobe InDesign files — use whichever app you have
• Genre-matched designs: dozens of templates across fiction, literary fiction, sci-fi/fantasy, thriller, nonfiction, memoir, children's/YA, poetry, cookbooks, and photography books
• Complete interiors: pre-built front matter, chapter openers, running heads, page numbers, section breaks, and styled body text — not just margins
• KDP & IngramSpark ready: designed to meet Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, Lulu, and other print-on-demand interior specs

Pricing#

| Product | Price | |---|---| | Individual genre template | From $49.99 | | Author toolkits (Amazon Success, Book Planner) | $49.99 each | | Author Success Bundle | $299 (list $399.99) |

One-time purchase — no subscription. Custom cover-design services are sold separately and are not part of the template price.

Best For#

• Authors comfortable editing in Word, Pages, Affinity, or InDesign who want a designer-quality interior on a template budget
• Nonfiction, memoir, cookbook, and children's authors whose layouts fall outside what reflowable formatters handle well

Limitations#

• Not software — there is no writing, live preview, or one-click export engine; you format inside your own app and export the PDF/EPUB yourself
• Requires some layout comfort — swapping text into a Word or InDesign template is more hands-on than a guided formatter
• Per-title cost adds up for authors publishing many books, where a one-time formatter (Atticus, Vellum) can be cheaper across a backlist

Alternatives#

• DIY Book Formats (free / freemium) — Derek Murphy's free Word and InDesign templates for authors who want to try the template approach at no cost
• Vellum / Atticus — dedicated one-time-purchase formatting apps if you'd rather automate styling than edit a template
• Adobe InDesign / Affinity Publisher — full page-layout software if you want to design an interior from scratch rather than start from a template