Quality interior design enhances credibility and makes your book look “real.” Creative book covers generate consumer interest. Creative interior designs encourage page turning and pick up where the cover leaves off to convert that interest into a sale. A graphics pro can complete your book in a timely manner at an affordable price.

Book design is a specialty like any other, and without training in typography and experience in graphic design, a “do-it-yourself” interior can quickly undermine the good first impression a professional cover creates.

There are many elements involved in a successful interior design. Size, binding, paper, page layout and typography work together to present your subject matter in an appropriate and attractive way. An experienced graphic designer creates appealing pages that hold interest and convince the reader that your book is the one to buy. If the interior design of your book doesn’t surprise and delight you, don’t expect it to impress anyone else.

One way to make your book stand out is to adopt an unusual page size and orientation. Standard sizes exist primarily for printing efficiency, but that doesn’t obligate you to use them. With a few limitations imposed by bindery equipment, a book can be almost any size or shape — horizontal, vertical, square, oval or even a star. Standard is another way to say ordinary.

Paper can also enhance your book. You don’t have to use white. There are hundreds of papers in a variety of colors, weights, and finishes. Your designer can show you samples and help you choose a paper that enhances your message, feels good in the hand, and adds a sense of value to your book.

While “non-standard” options will cost more, they could provide the visual interest that causes the buyer to stop and look at your book.

We have all seen confusing ads and articles that leave us wondering what to read first. Novels, directories, reference books, computer manuals, and magazines each require a different approach to page layout. Successful page layout invites the reader in and subtly leads the eye from one section to the next. The right fonts, careful spacing, and a pleasing arrangement work together to make reading a pleasure instead of a chore. An experienced typesetter has the tools to carefully adjust justification, word spacing, and letterspacing to give your text an even “color” that’s easy on the eyes, and that delivers better reading comprehension as a bonus.

Interior book design is much more than decoration. When all the elements of good design work in harmony, the result is a beautiful book, inside and out. Your manuscript represents an enormous effort. Creative interior design will bring it to life — make it a “real” book that you can promote with pride and more importantly, sell.

What do you want to know? What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

(1) You build a business one customer at a time;

(2) Find the right product, then find a way to mass-produce it;

(3) An innovative product will set you apart.

It occurred to me that these three statements perfectly illustrate everything that’s right about working with an individual book designer, and everything that’s wrong with working with a “POD publisher.”

All good graphic design, including book design, involves a surprising amount of collaboration between the designer and the client.  On book covers, there’s just no substitute for offering concepts, receiving client feedback, and adjusting those concepts, sometimes many times, to arrive at exactly the right solution for the job. And when it comes to book interiors, there’s just no substitute for the fine typesetting produced by professional page layout software in the hands of an experienced designer who knows how to finesse the settings for beautiful results. And no substitute for the professional proofreading that follows.

To say that book designers work hard to build their businesses one client at a time, while offering innovative products that will set their client’s product apart, is an understatement.

Which brings me to the Bell’s second “recipe” for success above, “Find the right product, then find a way to mass-produce it.”

POD publishers are mass-producers of books. They are very successful, and that’s the problem. THEY are very successful…their authors are not. By their own reported numbers, the average author who works with one of these firms sells 50 copies of their book. Why?

Because good books can’t be mass-produced, even when very big companies offer the tools to do so to unwitting authors who have not educated themselves about the proper way to go about it. Cover design software and Word templates will never produce the same results as an experienced designer, no matter how fervently the author may wish it to be so.

Bell succeeded beyond his wildest dreams mass-producing tacos. But I live in Phoenix and I can tell you that a Taco Bell taco bears no resemblance whatever to a REAL taco. And subsidy-published books designed and formatted by inexperienced authors are no better than than low-grade ground beef compared to a carefully edited, designed, typeset, and proofread book.

With books, as with tacos, progress isn’t always real, and it isn’t always good.

What do you want to know? What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

Chapter 2: You’ve been working in the design field for a few (or for many) years now. Your skills are top notch and you’ve even won a few awards. You understand a myriad of issues and can custom design solutions for almost any marketing problem. You collaborate with clients, learn their unique needs, and negotiate a fair price that will allow you to spend enough hours together to find the exact combination of products and services that will help them achieve their sales goals. Life is good…the client receives value for the dollars spent, you make a living, start a family, and in your spare time, give back to your community and your country…things are looking up.

Chapter 3: You’re working on a book cover for a client. After presenting a number of designs, she abruptly cancels the agreement, telling you she has discovered an online “crowdsourcing” website. She has started  a  “contest” and offered people around the globe the “opportunity” to design her cover. None will be paid for their time. Only the “winner” will earn less than $100, an amount that is, in her view, “enough.” CAN THIS BE HAPPENING?

Even though the designs are clearly amateurish, your former client thinks this is just wonderful, because she was able to name her price and look through 80 entries to pick the one she likes best. Never mind that 79 people wasted their time and worked for free. Never mind that the client has no idea if the “winner” even knows how to build a file that will successfully print. Never mind that the client cannot confirm that the artist owns or can acquire the rights to any images that were used in this design. This, dear friend,  is the latest rage in the field of graphic design. No, I am not making this up.

Before you, too, decide that this is great idea (as long as it applies to someone else’s job and not to your own), I’d ask you to reflect on the true ramifications of this work method. Forget about the fact that  it only applies to graphic designers at the moment. Are you ready for this sort of mob mentality to take over, and for ALL of us to work this way? Make no mistake, it can happen. Would  YOU work this way? Would YOUR business thrive, or would it wither away and die?

Peer ahead. Can YOU encourage your children to go to college, and spend years learning their craft only to show up for a “job” with a one-in-eighty chance of being paid? If YOU were expected to correctly guess the solution to a problem with no opportunity to discuss the project with the client, how good would that solution be?  If YOU were expected to spend hours on a project, without being paid for one minute of your time, would you feel encouraged to contribute your best work?

Before you use a crowdsourcing site, please ask yourself, “Is this really something I want to encourage as a way of working?” Aren’t we all in this together? Saving money is one thing, but this is beyond the pale. At what point does everything come crashing down so that nobody can make a living?

What do you want to know? What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

Competition was generally limited to others in your own community, so pricing was based on the local cost of living and local client expectations. These expectations, in turn, were shaped by the condition of the local economy at that point in time…or, to state it another way, the playing field was relatively level.

Not so today. Now, with the prevalence of freelance design sites, and heaven help us, freelance contest sites, book designers must defend ourselves against a global, 24/7 assault. Why? Because in many cases, common sense is no longer driving the decision-making process.

Hey, don’t get me wrong. I welcome the opportunity to work with people from other states who need book design services. What I don’t welcome is the way that services are now “shopped for” as if they were commodities.

Like everyone else, I look for the best price when I buy retail products…the supermarket that has Oreo cookies on sale this week is more likely to get my business than others that don’t. But products and services are two different things, and they shouldn’t be shopped for in the same way. This message has been lost in our new, online world.

Products are identical from one store to the next. It’s easy to compare package size and features, then conclude that the cheaper price makes sense. Services are intangible and a determination of quality must be made before purchase, including how well the human beings who offer the service will treat you, how quickly they will respond to your questions, how quickly they will produce your book, and how competent the book design will be.

Asking for a price before understanding these intangible, but crucial, factors doesn’t provide enough information. Services offered at the same or lower prices cannot be objectively compared — they must be experienced. Choosing a service provider with the lowest price can easily disqualify the best designer for YOU.

Low prices usually correlate with low experience. Higher price usually means that the designer has been around the block a few times and will spend much more time creating a truly unique book cover instead of cutting corners and using a template.

An experienced book designer  understands that a great deal of collaboration and communication is necessary to arrive at a cover design that works, and they build this time into their estimate. A beginner may not anticipate this and quote a price that covers the design time alone. When you exceed this amount of time, the beginner may get cranky, or abandon the project entirely.

An experienced designer also knows what NOT to do. We’ve fixed book covers for clients who chose a low-cost designer who didn’t understand that creating a file for print is very different than creating a file for the web.

An experienced designer knows that next month, or next year, or the year after that, they’ll be spending big bucks for new computers and software. Beginning designers who charge low prices often use outdated equipment or software that will cause problems at the printer.

An experienced designer incurs the expense to archive your job safely, so that two years from now, when it’s time to reprint  your book, the files will be available. Beginning designers who find that their low prices do  not provide an adequate living may move on to another career, taking your precious files with them.

You’ve spent a lot of time writing your book. When it’s time to shop for the good design you need to help it sell, my recommendation is to buy experience…after you talk with the person who will provide it, and determine if they are the partner you need. Yes, experience costs more, but you will receive true value for every dollar spent, and the process will be enjoyable rather than a nightmare.

Have questions about self-publishing or book design? Ask us! We’re happy to help. Learn more at http://www.1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

Spacing after punctuation: When you typeset a book, be sure to insert only a single space after all punctuation. (It’s OK to disobey your high school typing teacher, I promise). A double space after a period used to be necessary when we prepared text on a typewriter, because the “width” of each letter, whether it was a “w” or an “I” was exactly the same. But that issue was resolved long ago with digital fonts.

Proper dashes: There are three kinds of dashes in every type font. Most people are familiar with the first two, hyphens and em dashes. Hyphens are used to hyphenate words and separate phone numbers. Em dashes are a form of punctuation, used to offset clauses in a sentence. The third kind of dash is an En dash, typically half the length of an Em dash, which used to denote duration, as in 8:00–5:00, or August 12–14. In most software packages, you can access the En dash by typing Option-hyphen.
Proper quotation marks: Use true (curly) quotation marks and apostrophes. Using tick marks directly from the keyboard sends the message “I don’t care how this stuff looks.” This is a preference that can be defined in InDesign.

Use of small caps: Set all uppercase text slightly smaller than the surrounding text. Otherwise, your capitals will SCREAM at the reader. The size of small caps can be customized in InDesign.

Letter spacing of capitalized text: Add letter spacing to capitalized text and small caps. Capitalized text or small caps appearing within normal text can appear too tight and crowded; they need to be loosened up a bit. Avoid letter spacing in lowercase book text. Looser spacing always decreases readability.

Old style numbers: Use old style figures when available and appropriate. Old style figures are also known as non-lining numerals, because they don’t line up on the baseline. They can be thought of as lower case numbers, and look better in text passages than the usual lining numerals. Use a slightly smaller point size for numbers when old style numerals are not available. They blend in better and don’t jump out at the reader.

Use of boldface and italics: Use boldface text sparingly. Bold text is like a magnet to our eyes, and will ruin the continuity of your text. Italics and bold text, when overused, can appear condescending to the reader…as if you are saying, “I don’t think you’ll understand my words unless I emphasize what’s important.” There are exceptions to this rule, of course. In a textbook, bold face is often used to denote important terms that appear in the glossary. Judgment is the key.
Avoid underlined text: Even more distracting than boldface text is underlined text, which is a typographic abomination that should be avoided.

Special characters: The © (copyright), ® (registered trademark), and ™ (trademark) characters almost always need to be reduced, sometimes by as much as 50%, depending on the font.

Proper formatting of ellipses: According to the current Chicago Manual of Style, ellipses should be set with a word space on either side and a word space between each dot. Format these with a non-breaking space before the ellipsis and between each dot, but a normal word space after the ellipsis,  so that the ellipsis won’t break in the middle or begin on a new line.

Size of ballot boxes: Decrease the size of ballot boxes. As a general rule, these characters should be about two points smaller than the surrounding text.

Use of bullets: Consider using other characters besides bullets. They’re rather boring and overused. Just like ballot boxes, whatever you substitute should also be two points smaller than the text. But don’t go overboard. Your text shouldn’t have too many different kinds of bullet characters. That will make your book look homemade and amateurish.

Word stacks: Avoid beginning or ending three consecutive lines with the same word. Override your software for a better look, by adjusting word spacing or tracking manually in that paragraph only, or by rewriting the text.

Congratulations! If you’ve read all nine posts, now you know why it takes a pro so long to typeset a book, and why it costs money. If you’re the type of person who just loves to tackle this level of detail, then by all means try to typeset your book (or call me, I may have a job opening for you). If not, then consider hiring a book designer. Believe it or not, all of these rules are just the basics. We’re just getting started. Now, we have to make your book beautiful!

What do you want to know? What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

Hyphenation: When you typeset a book, it helps to understand that hyphenation works hand-in-hand with justification settings to create book type that is easy to read. Hyphenation should be set so the reader isn’t annoyed by too many hyphens generally, or too many hyphens in a row. I allow 3 hyphens in a row. More than that, and it starts to look like ladders on the right margin. Some publishers prefer no more than 2 hyphens in a row. Some publishers specify a limit for the number of hyphens on a page, a rule which can’t be defined in software, which means the designer has to manually adjust every paragraph on the page!

In InDesign, I set the minimum number of letters in a word before a hyphen to 3, because a hyphen after 2 letters is really distracting. The reader has to guess what the word may be. I set the minimum number of letters after a hyphen to 4, so that the common suffix –ing doesn’t wind up on the next line. You can also choose the minimum length of the word that may be hyphenated. I choose 7 for regular text. If you’re allowing hyphens in ragged text as discussed above, you may want to set this value higher, so that only very long words are broken.

In book design, it’s best to avoid hyphenating the last line on the page, because once again, it forces the reader to wonder what comes next, and hold that partial word in mind as they continue reading. The stub end of a hyphenated word should never be the last line in a paragraph. Ugly.

Avoid hyphenating capitalized words such as names, locations and titles. InDesign has a checkbox for this preference, but if you’re working in an application that doesn’t  offer this feature, then you can enter the “no-break” character before such words.

In the next post, we’ll get even further into the nitty-gritty of typesetting. Yep, you’re not done yet…there’s even more to think about!

What do you want to know? What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

Word spacing: Word spacing in a book should be fairly close, it’s easier to read. When type is justified so that the left and right margins are flush, any typesetting system will adjust the spacing between words to accomplish this goal. Here is where InDesign and other page layout applications leave Word in the dust. In any page layout program, the built-in justification algorithms are much more sophisticated than those found in a word processor, so that the variations in spacing are more consistent. This issue is generally known as the “color” of the text (even though the text is all black). A page of text should look uniform in color without overly tight lines (which look dark) or overly loose lines (which look light). The “color” should be even. This is accomplished by changing the justification settings.
There are three settings in InDesign’s Justification dialog box: Word Spacing, Letter Spacing and Glyph Scaling. I set the minimum word spacing to 100%, the desired word spacing to 105%, and the maximum word spacing to 133%, and vary the settings as needed (different fonts require different settings).
I set minimum letter spacing to -5%, desired letter spacing to 0%, and maximum letter spacing to 5%. These settings allow InDesign to add space between letters, as well as words when necessary to justify the text, but only by an imperceptible amount that won’t disturb the reader.
The third setting in this dialog box is Glyph Scaling, which allows InDesign to condense or expand the letters. Again, you don’t want this to be noticeable to the reader, so the settings I use are minimum, 98%; desired, 100%; and maximum 102%. Just as you did with choosing a type font and type size, don’t get hung up on numbers…experiment with different settings and let your eyes tell you what looks best.

What do you want to know? What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

Now that we’ve dealt with the “big picture items” in the last five posts, we can begin to address the finer points of typography that should be considered when you typeset a book.

Line spacing: Lines of text that are too close to each other can be difficult to read. That’s why you’ll often see line spacing of 4 or more points in books. That means, if your text is 11 point, your line spacing should be 15 points or even more. Line spacing (also known as leading) should be significantly greater than the space between words for maximum legibility, and should increase proportionally as the line length increases.

Line spacing can help expand the page count of a small book, or decrease the page count of a long book to save on printing costs. Small changes here can make a huge difference, so feel free to experiment, as long as you don’t sacrifice readability in the process. (Try printing out sample paragraphs and folding your page vertically to compare your leading to that in books that you like. Book designers will often roughly format all the text in a book to get a rough idea of the page count before attending to smaller details to make sure the page count doesn’t exceed the amount the client budgeted for printing. Another bit of advice: A short book can’t be made into a long one, so please don’t try to fool people by adding so much line spacing that it looks silly.

Paragraph spacing: In most cases there should NOT be a line of space above each paragraph in a book (the exception might be a training manual, where the reader will be looking away from the text to follow instructions, and then looking back.) A line space above a paragraph can be used sparingly to indicate a scene change or a new section. Whenever there is a line space above a paragraph, eliminate the first-line indent on that paragraph. Both indents and line spaces say “stop” to the reader, so you don’t have to send the message twice.

Alignment: In books, an easy way to make the type conform to the book block is to set line spacing for everything as a multiple of your primary leading so that text lines up across the page. For example, if your text is 11 point on 16 points of leading, then your subheads might be set up as 20 point type with 11 point leading and 16 points (or one full line) of space above them.

But what if your subheads are two or more lines? You can’t set 20-point type on 16 points of leading, or the words will overlap. Neither can you set 20-point subheads on 32 points of leading, because that’s just too much space. But you still want your text to line up across the page. Here’s the solution: Set your 20-point subheads on 22 points of leading (which looks nice). This gives you 2 lines x 22 = 44 points. 44 isn’t an exact multiple of 16, but 48 is (16×3) so just add one line (16) plus 4 extra points above each 2-line subhead and the problem is solved. (Or you can add 16 points above each 2-line subhead and 4 points below.) I usually make two style sheets in InDesign: one for single-line subheads, and another for two-line subheads. If you have a 3-line subhead, you can follow the same process, but it might be better to whittle these down to fewer words instead.

What do you want to know? What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

The book block: It’s not until you typeset a book that you really understand insanity. If you follow the rules, that is. The main reason that a book looks like a book (rather than a brochure or a report) is that the text is confined to a tightly-defined area on every page called the book block. When a book is opened, facing pages should end on the same line. Sounds easy enough, but this is, in fact, the area where book designers spend an inordinate amount of time for the following reasons.

Line widows and orphans: Within the book block, there’s an additional set of rules in book design and typesetting that must be addressed: that the first line of a paragraph shouldn’t fall on the last line on a page, and the last line of a paragraph should not appear on the top of a page. Why? Because each of these situations makes the reader stop, and this impedes reading comprehension. So how does a designer accomplish this feat? There are various ways. The most common way is to allow the page bottoms to vary, making pages one line longer or one line shorter than the established baseline, as long as facing pages still end on the same line. Even with this flexibility, it’s often necessary to rework a number of pages to accomplish the goal.

Word Widows: Another rule of book design, which varies from publisher to publisher, is that the last line of a paragraph should never be a word less than 5 characters long, including punctuation. Some publishers do not allow a paragraph to end with one word on the last line, regardless of its length. The way around this is to adjust word spacing and tracking values within the paragraph, but very subtly, so it’s not noticeable by the reader.

Lines after a subhead: Another rule that aids reading comprehension is that at least two lines of text should follow a subhead at the bottom of the page. You guessed it, while still maintaining the book block. To do this, a book designer will typically go back and forth and rework pages as needed until the goal is accomplished.
With certain kinds of text, it’s flat-out impossible to maintain a rigid book block. Text with many subheads, or many bullet items often can’t be made to conform to all the above rules, no matter how much time the designer spends. In this situation, the rules can be relaxed and the goal becomes to keep the pages as balanced as possible. As a last resort, sometimes it’s necessary to rewrite text to add or delete a few words to lengthen or shorten a paragraph by one line, if maintaining the book block can’t be accomplished any other way.

What do you want to know? What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design

Font size: When you typeset a book you can probably set the text smaller than you think. Because nearly everyone is familiar with Word, which uses a default type size of 12-point, most people who attempt to lay out their own book choose this size. This works fine on an 8.5 x 11 page, but it’s usually too large for a book, where the line length of the text is much smaller. Type that is too large can make your book look self-published, and reflect poorly on the credibility of your message. The rule of thumb for easy reading used by typographers (who typically work in measurements called picas, rather than inches) is that the number of characters (letters, punctuation, and spaces) on a line should not exceed 2.5 times the line length in picas. There are 6 picas to an inch. Using a 6×9 book as an example, the width of the page is 36 picas. Subtract 3 picas for the outside margin, and 4 picas for the inside margin and you’re left with a line length of 29 picas. So you should choose a type size that gets no more than 70 characters per line for easiest reading.

But don’t get hung up on the math. Print out sample paragraphs in different sizes and in different fonts. A common mistake made by inexperienced folks is to work in isolation, to imagine what a good book should look like, and then declare the results acceptable. Don’t imagine. Print out your samples, fold them and compare a line of your text to books produced by major publishers and adjust accordingly. Some typefaces look larger than others, even if they are the same size. For example, 10-point Utopia, a modern font, has very round, open characters, and so it looks much larger than 10-point Adobe Garamond or Goudy Oldstyle, classic fonts often used in books. Forget rules and numbers. Trust your eyes.

What do you want to know? What topics should we explore together? How can we help you along your publishing journey? Everyone here at 1106 Design wants to help. Post your comment here or email us at office@1106design.com

Michele DeFilippo, owner, 1106 Design