Interior Page Design

An important step

Most self publishers know that a great cover is a necessity when publishing a book. It grabs a potential reader’s attention and tells them, in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, what to expect from your story. Unfortunately the inside pages (book’s interior) are sometimes not given as much attention or thought.

Yet, the book formatting and interior layout process is one of the most important steps in the publishing process … it delivers your story. Book designers attend to an astonishing number of typesetting details when laying out a book. In the end, the presentation of your words is profoundly important. Your readers demand a comfortable reading experience and will be critical of any layout issues.

“A book with a great cover but messy interior content is akin to great food product packaging. When you open it, if the food inside looks bad, it might be still edible but the desire is gone.”

Our book design team will firstly clean the clutter (format) your word document. The next step is layout with professional software (Indesign). In particular overseeing text tracking, leading, font size, style, chapter breaks, contents, front matter pages, index, glossary and footnotes. As well as graphs, diagrams, and illustration, where necessary, to ensure a professional result.

As professional book designers, we have the skills to transform your raw manuscript into a professionally laid out book file.

A strong interior layout is a collection of small decisions on the designer’s part

From leading to font choice to margin size, the most important principle is strict consistency—if we make a design decision on page nine, we have to to stick with it through all chapters and that could be two-hundred or more pages.

Our aim is to create an exceptional designed book based on your thoughts

Before diving into your book layout project, we work with you to ensure these six areas of the page are carefully thought out: trim size, margins, typeface, running heads and feet, art and images, and contrasting lead lines. Thoughtful decisions at the outset of the book layout ensures the process runs much more smoothly and the final product will be comfortable and well-appointed for the reader.

How we work

When it comes to interior layout we want to make sure we incorporate your ideas and feedback. We provide you with a custom interior style guide with customizable options (body copy font, accent font, fleuron etc.), so you can control the look and feel of your book layout. We then produce a style sample (usually the first chapter of your book) so you can confirm that it looks how you imagined it.

Once you approve the book style sample, we complete the entire interior layout of the book and present you with an electronic proof. You receive (1) round of minor revisions to correct anything you missed (anything we missed is corrected at no charge). After this stage if you require additional author alterations a fee for service applies.

We provide you with a support sheet / checklist to validate and confirm each component of the interior is correct. Once we receive your consent/forms, the books print ready files are produced. It is that simple.