Interior Page Design

An important step
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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.

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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.”

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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.

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

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

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

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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.

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How we work
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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.

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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.

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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. 

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Moving forward. 

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Call us directly on 1300 88 5858 or place an enquiry to find out more about our interior layout service.

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Why is interior page layout important?

A professionally-designed interior gives your book instant credibility with buyers. Designing and preparing book pages, whether for print or eBooks, goes well beyond choosing fonts and setting margins. ​ During the typesetting of your book a vast number of items are taken into consideration and it can be overwhelming for self publishers: -Text style: justified or ragged -Margins: important to the eye and the printer -Font: serif type is better for text as they form a link between letters and easier to read. -Font size: choose a type size that gets no more than 70 characters per line -Widows and orphans: the first line of a paragraph shouldn’t fall on the last line of a page, and the last line of a paragraph should not appear on the top of a page -Word Widows: the last line of a paragraph should never be a word less than five characters -The book block: when a book is opened, facing pages should end on the same line -Lines after a subhead: at least two lines of text should follow a subhead at the bottom of the page -Alignment: text lines must line up across the page -Boldface and italics: use boldface text sparingly -Line spacing: Lines of text that are too close / far from each other are difficult to read -Paragraph spacing: there should NOT be a line of space above each paragraph in a book -Word spacing: should be fairly close to make it easier to read -Hyphenation: should be set so the reader isn’t annoyed by too many hyphens - more than two hyphens in a row and it starts to look like ladders on the right margin -Proper dashes: there are three kinds of dashes that should be used correctly -Proper quotation marks: curly quotation marks and apostrophes -Use of small caps: uppercase text is set slightly smaller than the surrounding text -Underlined text: even more distracting than boldface text is underlined text -Special characters: almost always need reducing - © (copyright) -Proper formatting of ellipses: should be set with a word space on either side and a word space between each dot. -Word stacks: avoid beginning or ending three consecutive lines with the same word. Are you going to control all these as a professional desiigner would?



Why can't I just use my word document?

We can do so much using Word BUT the initial intention of Word was never to be a page layout program. It was meant to be a word processing program, meaning something you can use to create letters, proposals, etc. It was never meant to be utilised to create book layouts, brochures, detailed fliers etc. despite the fact that it now has templates to do all those things.

It’s therefore tempting to believe that anyone can be a graphic designer and that they can create beautiful publications using Word. This is a huge mistake.

Good graphic design is a subtle art that takes into account many skills like typography, white space use, image selection, alignment and the creation of tone and texture etc. Needless to say graphic designers spend many years learning these skills to create professional layouts. We like to use the following analogy when authors want to use word for book layout … You know how to change a light bulb but would you rewire your own house.

We have InDesign and Word on our computers.

We use Indesign for… well… design

We use Word for… opening other people’s docs!

Word is NOT a graphic design application.



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