Book Design and Typesetting
Book Covers
Your book’s cover is the first thing a prospective reader sees; it’s not the place to cut costs. Covers are so important that, unless you have a cover concept and are willing to obtain original art yourself, I recommend hiring a specialist in cover design.
If you already have a concept for your cover, I would be glad to prepare your cover for printing.
Covers are almost always printed in process color, or four inks — cyan, magenta, yellow, and black — blended together on the printed page to produce a range of colors. Not every visible color can be represented in ink. Some publishers also have the covers embossed or foiled, or add a fifth ink in a spot color. A spot ink is mixed before printing so that it will be the exact color desired.
Covers are laid out in a flat, a single sheet of paper for front, spine, and back. The paper is larger than the actual cover to allow room for the bleed, where the ink extends past the design. The bleed will be trimmed later. The designer needs to know the final trim size of the book, the number of pages, and the paper used. These last two details allow the designer to calculate the spine width.
Book Interiors
Designing the book interior is a separate task from designing the cover.
Interior book design involves selecting the typeface, its size, and the leading; deciding how to indicate section breaks and the various levels of headings; selecting a format for tables and figures; and more.
The design should match the book’s subject matter in tone, and be appropriate for the intended readers. For example, children’s storybooks normally use large, easy-to-read fonts. A fantasy novel may have a special treatment for the first page of each chapter.
Please see my interior design samples below.
Typesetting and Layout
Typesetting and layout involves setting the book’s text and graphics into a layout according to the designer’s specifications.
If the manuscript has not been cleaned up during editing, then it must be prepared before being imported into the layout software. Extra spaces and carriage returns, unneeded tabs, and manual page breaks all have to be removed.
The cleaned-up manuscript is placed, or imported, into the layout document. The typesetter will look for poor hyphenation, large gaps between words, and other issues that affect the page’s beauty and readability.
While some self-publishers use Microsoft Word or Publisher, I believe professional page layout software, like Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress, produces a better-looking book. For instance, InDesign can automatically replace characters that bump against each other with ligatures, specially designed characters that combine multiple letters such as ff, fi, or ffi.
Samples of My Work
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| These covers were designed using original art provided by my client; please click the image for a larger view. The interior layouts below are based on client projects. Right-click (PC) or click and hold (Mac) to download them. Adobe Acrobat Reader is required to view them. |
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Poor_Jane ( 82 KB)
Fiction, 5.5″ × 8.5″, CIP, preface, note, verse, graphics, 24 pages in a 13-page spread |
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Field_of_Thorns ( 131 KB) Fiction, 6″ × 9″, LCCN, dedication, verse, graphics, 20 pages in an 11-page spread |
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Edward_and_Jane ( 84 KB)
Fiction, 5.5″ × 8.5″ inches, CIP, dedication, verse, 20 pages in an 11-page spread |
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Walls_of_Glass ( 221 KB)
Fiction/nonfiction, 6″ × 9″, CIP, dedication, epigraph, footnote, graphics, 20 pages in an 11-page spread |
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The_Nonfiction_Sample ( 81 KB)
Nonfiction, 5.5″ × 8.5″, LCCN, TOC, part title pages, epigraphs, table, multilevel headings, numbered paragraphs, 22 pages in a 12-page spread |
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Fiction_and_Nonfiction ( 100 KB)
Nonfiction, 6″ × 9″, LCCN, TOC, foreword, block quote, multilevel headings, notes, glossary, references, index, 28 pages in a 15-page spread |
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On_Language ( 208 KB)
Nonfiction, 5.5″ × 8.5″, LCCN, TOC, figures, multilevel headings, numbered list, block quotes, 22 pages in a 12-page spread |
For more information, contact me.