Zoe Norvell entered the publishing world in 2011 immediately upon graduating from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Her first job in the NYC publishing world was a position as a junior designer working in-house at Simon and Schuster for the Gallery/Atria imprints. In 2013 she moved over to Penguin Books (before it was PRH), employed as a designer for the Plume and Portfolio imprints. In 2015, she left Penguin and began freelancing full-time.
In 2018, Zoe traveled throughout Central and South America for four months straight while seamlessly working remotely the entire time. She chronicled these adventures in an article for Spine Magazine: “Designing Book Covers On The Go.” Other Spine Magazine features include the design process for Getting Off and The Redemption of Galen Pike.
Today, Zoe Norvell lives in her hometown of Washington, DC. In 2022, she launched the website I Need a Book Interior to advertise her interior services, answer frequently-asked questions about the book interior process, and to make things abundantly clear for her interior clients.
In 2023, she created this website, I Need a Book Cover. INABC was born from a strong desire to catalog and highlight the broad ecosystem of cover designers that Zoe felt existed interconnectedly yet also separately across Instagram and the internet. The goal of INABC is to highlight exceptional talent in the cover design world and to educate first-time authors about the cover design process. In late 2023, The Job’s Board was launched as a way for authors to instantly connect with 300 designers with a single click. On average, users of the jobs board receive between 24 and 40 bids from interested designers in response to their creative briefs, marking it a success.
You can listen to Zoe Norvell talk about her transition from in-house to freelance and the inception of INABC on the beloved podcast Cover Meeting, hosted and created by fellow designer, Steve Leard. More interviews, press clippings, and features can be found on her portfolio website listed below.