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Amanda Weiss

@avweiss

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NJ > MI > CT > Nashville, TN
Freelance book designer
www.amandaweiss.org
Posts on @that.covers.it 🚫 AI or NFT

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As we begin 2026, I wanted to ask my design community if they're available/taking on book cover or book interior projects! 🙏 I often get projects that I can't take on due to my schedule (or just not being the right fit!) and would love to refresh my list of designers I can recommend this year. Even better if you wanna mentions things you are specifically skilled in and things you want to avoid or don't do (for ex. I won't recommend designing and typesetting a non-fiction interior if you prefer cover designs or do mainly illustration-based stuff).

Thanks all! I hope this can also be a list for others to discover and hire other people too... You never know until you ask! 😊 Comment below and if you can, share with a friend. by @avweiss

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9 months ago

Posting this because it's been brought to my attention the auto reply message I set up 4 weeks ago may not have been going even though it says it is? 🥴 I love technology. Apologies if anyone did not get it and wondered why there was radio silence or no reply. Do let me know if you got it! Happy new year everyone! by @avweiss

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9 months ago

🚨Cover reveal alert!🚨“Spawning Season: An Experiment in Queer Parenthood” by Joseph Osmundson is coming from Bloomsbury Publishing (@bloomsburybooksus) on May 26th, 2026. Read more about the memoir, and how the cover, designed by Amanda Weiss, came to be on our website. by @avweiss

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10 months ago

Stumbled across some older work I forgot to share, a subject just as timely today as it was in 2022 (if not more).
A couple killed covers, with the final at the end
Yale University Press
AD: Dustin Kilgore

Book synopsis:
"Online privacy is under constant attack by social media and big data technologies. But we cannot rely on individual actions to remedy this—it is a matter of social justice. Alice E. Marwick offers a new way of understanding how privacy is jeopardized, particularly for marginalized and disadvantaged communities—including immigrants, the poor, people of color, LGBTQ+ populations, and victims of online harassment.

Marwick shows that few resources or regulations for preventing personal information from spreading on the internet. Through a new theory of “networked privacy,” she reveals how current legal and technological frameworks are woefully inadequate in addressing issues of privacy—often by design. Drawing from interviews and focus groups encompassing a diverse group of Americans, Marwick shows that even heavy social media users care deeply about privacy and engage in extensive “privacy work” to protect it. But people are up against the violation machine of the modern internet. Safeguarding privacy must happen at the collective level." by @avweiss

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a year ago

New work for @natlanticbooks, coming out June 2025 🧡
AD: Jasmine Hromjak by @avweiss

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a year ago

Some killed cover designs from February for Unshrunk, a memoir by Laura Delano, published with Viking/PRH. Thank you to AD Jason Ramirez for the opportunity! 🙏

An incredibly absorbing manuscript, this title hit closer to home. Anyone, especially female and femme-presenting individuals, can understand the difficulty of being seen and heard fully as an individuals in the doctor’s office, especially when it comes to mental health, medication combos and side effects, doctor/patient expectations and trust, and the long-term journey of how these medications effect our day-to-day lives. The book asks many questions: what happens when being on psychiatric medication is the only thing you’ve ever known? And what does it look like to be (or not be) defined solely by the language of a diagnostic manual of mental disorders? As someone who has been on an SSRI for over a decade and is in a much better place because of it, this was still a very important read. The author currently works through her org to help individuals and families seeking support during the withdrawal journey and life outside of psychiatric drugs. A very multi-layered experience, I highly recommend this book.

Design: For this project, I wanted to use an abundance of natural imagery to help represent this overwhelming joy or happiness coming forth from the confines of a set psychiatric diagnosis or clinical term. The natural world was also very important to the author in this memoir. We also explored photos and paintings of the New England coast, where the author grew up, as well as the ocean, since it was another important environment and grounding prescence for the author during her journey.

*Disclaimer: In our current climate, I know the wrong people will latch on to this book, often without even reading it, to proclaim all medications are evil, people are sick, push anti-vax BS, or a bizarre multi-step holistic treatment you can purchase to cure all your problems, and I want to say a big fuck you to those people. :) Delano exlusively states she is not "anti psychiatry" or anti-medication. To everyone else, please take the time to read the whole book and make your own judgments. Thanks! by @avweiss

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2 years ago

Cover design for Being (Sick) Enough by Jessica Graham, out next month with @natlanticbooks.

Part of the synopsis:
In an unapologetic look at living well with trauma and chronic illness, writer and meditation teacher Jessica Graham offers smart, funny, raw, and mindful insights on untangling—and embracing—the messy realities of being a human alive on this planet today.

Graham gives us permission to accept care—and accept that it’s okay to want care. They weave together personal stories and practical wisdom, offering their take on managing symptoms, getting creative, setting boundaries, and healing from ableist tropes like “you don’t look sick” and “we’re all a little ADHD.”

Graham also shares vulnerable personal history: The adverse childhood experiences that wired their body and brain. The workaholism and addictions that kept their pain lying just below the surface. How illness and trauma intersect to obscure the knowledge that we’re each enough, wholly as we are.

Design background:
Rarely do I get an opportunity to work with titles that feature parenthesis, so I was looking forward to the chance of incorporating that into the cover design. Because of the parenthesis, an idea was suggested that we could feature other bracketed words on the cover to reflect the multitude of the author’s lived experiences. We wanted a cover that was bold and attention-grabbing in the genre and thought type-only was the best strategy. While we also explored typefaces for this concept, we ended up gravitating towards the handwritten version, which was a pleasant surprise. We chose a magenta and orange color palette that was almost vibrating, but not completely unreadable or off-putting to those who may be sensitive to neon color combinations. by @avweiss

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2 years ago

Excited to share the cover design for The Dad Rock That Made Me a Woman by Niko Stratis for @utexaspress coming May 2025. It features the typeface Asoma, created by James Plattner (@james.plattner).

I was completely absorbed by this MS. I love memoirs and personal essays, I love music, and I especially love talking about lyrics. I really had to pace myself so I could take the time to properly sit with each song during each chapter, and it was incredibly rewarding. Now I have even more songs that make my heart do funny, weird things when I hear them, and I’m grateful. Can't wait to see this shared with the world.

Huge thank you to AD Derek George (@plexoboy) for giving me the opportunity to work on this. 🙏

Some design background: we knew we wanted a type-forward cover (there was no need to get in the way of a fantastic title). Earlier on in the process we attempted to incorporate some secondary graphic element to hint at the place/the content (the Yukon landscape, cassette tapes) but it just wasn’t landing as successfully as we wanted. I was hoping to treat the title in a way that gave a subtle nod to the “dad rock” genre we assume we know the look of, while conveying that the Dad Rock discussed in the book defies a specific time period and gender altogether. So I was looking for a typeface that was attractive, had a vague sense of the 70s/80s, and still felt modern if treated with the right colors. I tried various designs with Premier Shaded, Ronda, Kabel, Avant Garde, and even Lazybones, but none were as strong as Asoma. ❤️🧡💛💚 by @avweiss

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2 years ago

I realized I’m behind on sharing some work from this past year 😵‍💫 Here’s two unused cover designs for a killed project with PRH/Image. Big thanks to AD Jessie Bright (@jessiesayward) for giving me a chance to work on it 🙏 by @avweiss

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2 years ago

Off to the printers for @yalebooks!

Type is a mix of scanned Dover/Rob Roy Kelly wood type and fonts from @federalforagecaps/The New Blazing Star Press. Also, @truegrittexturesupply (you'll have to pry their bitmap texture files from my cold dead hands 😌). by @avweiss

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2 years ago

New cover for @yalebooks, coming spring 2025. Thanks to AD Dustin Kilgore and the team, including author @jane.draycott, for being so open to such a unique engraving! 🗡 I had a lot of fun.

I finally got an opportunity to use Forevs by @ohnotypeco ✨️ Not pictured are the one million beautiful alternate glyphs. Check them out.

Swipe: I also attempted some calligraphy, but naturally after 2 hours, didn't end up using any of it 😂 Rustica is hard, and a bit too hand-made for what I wanted, so it lives here now. by @avweiss

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2 years ago

Final cover design and unused comps for @natlanticbooks, coming February 2025. A beautiful text I felt very fortunate to work on. Thank you AD Jasmine Hromjak!

From the synopsis: “Proud Flesh is a gripping memoir…that reckons with the questions: ‘What happens when survivors become mothers?’ and ‘What if we give half the attention to understanding our pleasure as we have to our pain?’”

For further background, “proud flesh” is the medical term for the tissue that grows over an injury, preventing it from fully healing. In this case, it is also used as a metaphor for over-healing and proliferation.

I first explored this visual pretty literally, using clumps of short brush lines moving around and throughout the type, but it ended up coming off more fur-like than I wanted. Fortunately this led me to explore a meatier, flower-like shape with “petals”, which looked vaguely like overlapping skin, and the lines radiating from the center gave it some much-needed movement. The graphic ended up conveying the multiple concepts I was looking for: a point of trauma, a birth, and a sense of pleasure.

(Also yes, I did show non-orange directions, they just aren't included here 😉🧡) by @avweiss

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2 years ago