If you don’t have all of the information, or don’t want to include it all, that’s fine just use these guidelines as a checklist so that you don’t miss something you would have wanted to include. The following guidelines are designed to help you compile the information for your CD liner notes.
We have put together a list of guidelines to help you find your way through this critical aspect of your professional CD publishing project without missing anything, small or large, and then to sift it down to what matters most. It might sound unlikely, but these kinds of omissions and errors happen all the time. You don’t want to be hitting yourself in the head later, when the CD is all produced and a friend quietly points out to you that you forgot to include the title track in the song list. What information do you need for your liner notes? What goes on the front cover? What about the back cover? How many pages should the booklet be? While all of these items are a matter of choice, and extremely flexible, it helps to have a way to organize your thoughts. And speaking of budget, if you have enough money to hire a professional writer (a very good idea if you want your CD to look professional), even the writer will be expecting you to provide him with the content to write up! Hey! Who is gonna take on the job of figuring out what goes into the booklet?īut where to begin? That’s what this article is about. Your graphic artist will want to focus on making the content you give to her fit into the space you want it to take, making the booklet aesthetically pleasing to look at, sending your visual-musical-entertainment message to your prospective buyers, and keeping all that within budget.
Production houses are wonderful for telling your graphic artist how to lay out your booklet in one of their formats, but they are not the people to bug for info on what kind of content and how much should go into the booklet itself. Just the same, you want it to look good, and to present you as the professional that you are. If you are a musician or band manager and you have succeeded in outlining a recording project that you hope will result in your own self-published CD, you have already got a lot of major challenges both behind you and ahead of you, and you may not want to spend hours fretting over what to put into your CD booklet.