The Design Process: Your Book's Interior
Your Book Should Be a Pleasure to Read
The interior of your book should be inviting to the reader. A reader knows instantly if reading your book will be a pleasure or a chore. Good design helps makes it a pleasure. The essential factors are appropriate font selections, proper column width, margin width and the ideal amount of space between the sentences and paragraphs. A great interior design is intuitively understood by the reader. If done right, it allows the book's narrative voice to take over, and the design of the book becomes nearly invisible.
Your Book's Interior Layout
We work with you during the design process to determine the ideal layout for your book. We discuss with you your book's presentation in depth and are always open to your feedback on how to make it better.
The Elements That Make Your Book
Some of the most fundamental questions will be about your book's interior structure. For example: what kinds of frontmatter are to be included (title page, table of contents, author foreword, etc.)? How should the main text should be presented (with chapter headings, images, captions, page numbers, etc.)? Is there backmatter to be included (index, footnotes, afterword, etc.)? For more detailed information on book structure please visit our article Anatomy of a Book.
Styling Your Book
After discussing your vision for your book, we will generate sample layouts of the interior text pages. We will present them to you for your comments and make any changes required. Then we fine-tune the design until you are completely satisfied, and give us the go-ahead to base your whole book on the approved style.
Proofing and Finalizing Your Book
We then set about laying out and producing your book so that it's ready to publish. But before we submit it for publishing we create a proof (a printed version) of your book for you to comb through and correct any mistakes. We strongly encourage you to employ an editor/proofer. But even when you do that, sometimes the conversion to a new format (a book) can reveal subtle mistakes in the copy. We are happy to make the corrections for you (within reason) and even encourage you to run the proof by your editor again to comb thoroughly for mistakes.