Today’s post is by freelance book designer Andrea Reider.
Many independent authors design and format their own books to save money. Working with a professional book designer for your print book interior can cost between $2.00 and $3.50 per page, and there’s no guarantee that a book will sell enough copies to earn back that fee.
However, some authors may have good reason to hire a professional to work on their book interior. Even if you decide to design and format your own book, I hope to make you aware of important elements of book composition.
A professional designer can select the best fonts and graphic elements to showcase your work. Book designers often draw inspiration from the book cover design elements and fonts for the interior. Most professionally designed books use the cover design font treatments for the half title and title interior pages and often for titles and subheads. Designers typically use two main fonts for most books unless there is a reason to include other fonts. The main text is almost always set in a serif font. Times New Roman is a common default for word-processed files, but professional designers rarely use it for books. Some commonly used fonts are Garamond, Minion, Sabon, and Caslon, but there are many other fonts that work well for the main text. Designers may use a sans serif font for chapter titles and subheads.
Most designers will offer several different designs as a starting point with various fonts and design treatments and then come to a final design after feedback from the author. A great book design can range from a typographic treatment without any graphic elements, to an elaborate design using several different design elements. Some effective designs use a repeating image—often a line drawing or simple graphic—on chapter and part opener pages.
A professional designer can help an author determine the best size for their book. Considerations include the topic of the book, the prospective audience, the desired page count, and the most readable type size. There are several standard different book sizes. The most common is 6″ x 9″ but many books are set at the slightly smaller 5.5″ x 8.5″ size. If an author wants a book to have a higher page count, the 5″ x 8″ size is sometimes the best choice. Books with a lot of photographs are often set at larger sizes such as 7″ x 10″ or 8″ x 10″. Workbooks are usually set at 8.5″ x 11″. All of these are standard sizes offered by most print-on-demand services, including Amazon/KDP, IngramSpark, and most print-on-demand and traditional printers.
A professional designer makes sure that your book is properly formatted and adheres to the best practices for typography and layout. Many decisions go into formatting a book, including fonts, proper hyphenation, line endings, and page breaks. Most nonfiction books have chapters that always begin on a right-hand page, whereas the chapter openers for fiction books usually can begin on either left-hand or right-hand pages as they fall. There are good reasons for these long-standing publishing traditions. One big reason is that right-hand chapter openers make it easier for readers to find the beginning of chapters. Another reason is that if there is a change to any chapter that adds or deletes a page, it doesn’t affect the left/right page orientation of the rest of the book. Another consideration in deciding whether to begin chapters on a new right-hand page is the number of chapters or pages in a book. If there are less than 20–30 chapters in a nonfiction book, it’s usually a good idea to start chapters on a right-hand page. If there are more than 30 chapters, publishers often choose to begin chapters left or right in order to avoid having too many blank pages in the book and adding unnecessarily to the page count and printing cost.
Books that have part openers pages often start the part openers on a right-hand page and then the following chapters right or left as they fall, with the first chapter after a part opener usually beginning on a right-hand page.
A professional designer frees up an author’s time to focus on other aspects of publication. Books that are mostly straight text are relatively simple to format using online tools, but books with multiple levels of subheads, extracts, footnotes, and other elements can be a challenge to properly format even for an experienced designer.
Too many books are published with charts and graphs that makes them look amateurish, unprofessional, and are often difficult for readers to understand. Well-designed charts and graphs can set a book apart from those that are done using just basic Microsoft Word functions or produced through online formatting tools. A professional designer will know how to set tabular information in a way that is easy for readers to follow, taking into consideration factors like hyphenation, line length, and aligning numerical text on the decimal point.
A professional book designer ensures the best placement of photographs and images in the book. There are many conventions for proper placements of photographs and images, including the placement and formatting of captions. Most photographs and images are placed at the bottom or top of the next available space after they are called out in the main text. Most nonfiction books will call out a figure in the text by figure number. Some images can be placed within the flow of the text, but it’s often not possible to do so. Determining the best placement requires experience and good layout judgment. Most of the online tools do an inadequate job of formatting pages with images or photographs, often leaving large blank spaces at the bottom of pages. A professional designer knows how to fill out every page in the book in the best way possible and will rarely leave short pages with unused space at the bottom unless there’s a good reason for doing so.
A professional book designer focuses on well-balanced pages. Online tools can produce uneven pages that aren’t balanced across page spreads. In a professionally formatted book, all page spreads are bottom aligned at the same point. Some pages may run one line shorter or longer than the typical page length, but a short page should never be followed by a long page or a long page followed by a short page. There also should never be more than two short or long pages in a row. These are the rules that have been followed by professional designers and typesetters for many years. It may not sound like a huge matter, but it’s one of the factors that go into making a professional-looking book.
A professional book designer pays attention to all page and line endings and breaks, setting each in the best possible manner. Professionals know many ways to finesse line and paragraphs endings and page breaks. A book that is set with bad or awkward endings and breaks can be annoying to readers and lead to a book being perceived as unprofessional and less credible. For good pagination, layouts should avoid widows and orphans, which are single lines appearing at the top or bottom of pages. Most books are set with hyphenation, which can be customized to specify the number of hyphens allowed (it’s best to set the hyphens for a maximum of two in a row with a minimum of three characters at the end or beginning of lines). Children’s and poetry books are usually set without any hyphenation. A professional book designer will know how to apply the rules, and in some cases, where to break or modify the rules to achieve the best possible layout.
A professional book designer can produce ebooks with advanced features. An ebook can look great on your computer screen, but appear terrible when uploaded to Amazon or other sites. Troubleshooting the errors can be a challenging process for even experienced ebook designers. Unfortunately, ebooks often end up looking like stripped-down versions of the print book because some of the features of print design don’t translate well to the ebook format. However, a good ebook designer can do many things to produce a better-looking ebook, including adding color to headings and subtitles and using color versions of any photos and images in the book.
A professional designer can help the author troubleshoot and fix any issues that arise when uploading files to the printer. All book printers, including Amazon and IngramSpark, require that files be formatted exactly to their specifications. It’s not uncommon for the printers to reject files for any number of reasons, sending cryptic error messages that can be difficult to interpret. Even files prepared by professional designers are sometimes rejected by printers for not exactly following their specifications. The issues are usually easily resolved, but for authors who format their own books, having their files rejected can be very frustrating and time-consuming.
While some authors can well format their own books, a professional can save you time and produce results that exceed the abilities of available online tools. As a professional book designer and formatter, I am honored to be able to use my skills to help authors produce attractive and readable books that enhance the reading experience and add credibility to their writing.
Andrea Reider is a freelance book designer and layout artist with many years of experience working with authors and publishers on just about every type of book, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and children’s books. She lives in West Hollywood, California. Learn more about her work at reiderbooks.com.
Loved reading this! As a book designer / typesetter myself, I really enjoy hearing other designers talk about their experiences laying out books and what decisions they make. Thank you Jane and Andrea!
Very useful info. Thanks so much.
Very informative piece. Thanks you!
Such helpful information. Thanks so much!
Wonderful. This should be a book in and of itself. I think it fills a knowledge gap out there.