Julie Broad shares four research-backed tips for book interior layout: keep chapters short, place sidebars and quotes at natural breaks, avoid the amateurish look that plagues over half of DIY interiors, and match your design across print and e-book formats.
Questions this video answers
November 2, 2018.
Fewer than 10%.
50% or more.
Less than $200.
Chapters
You do all this work to create a fantastic book that will help entertain and engage your readers, but there's more to the book experience than just words. Stick around. I've got some research backed tips to make your book interior worthy of your words. Hey, it's Julie the Book Broad with Book Launchers, a California based company that will help you write, publish and sell and a fantastic nonfiction book that boosts your business and achieves your goals. This is maybe a subject only bookgeek book bookgeeked bookgeek. That's a hard word to say. This is maybe a subject only book geeks will swoon over, but you can probably recall a time when you read a book that wasn't necessarily the best written, but the experience of reading was so good you kept going. Conversely, and almost as important, you've probably read a great book that you didn't like because of how the book was laid out. I I have an example of that book right here. I'm going to hide the COVID But seriously, this book was recommended by so many people, so I bought it and it does have some decent tips in it. But I hated the layout, it irritated me and I had a knee jerk reaction that it deserved two stars because of it. The fonts change on every page, they have examples and the gray word of the example actually gets put underneath some of the text. So what probably is a fantastic book made me miserable. So interior book design matters a lot. And this is even more important when you're converting to E versions. Kobo and Kindle have different requirements and especially if you have images, you need to be careful with how they get designed and converted. I bought a children's book on Kindle that was too small to read and because it wasn't properly formatted for Kindle, I couldn't zoom in or do anything with it. The book basically deserves one star because it was a waste of money, but it had so many five star reviews so it's probably a wonderful story. It just shouldn't be in Kindle or it needs to be done right. So here's tips so you get it right and people love the experience of reading your book. Hate it when you get hairs on your arm. Feels like there's something crawling on you. A lot of these points are coming from David Chilton's course Chilton Method. It's a fantastic course. I highly recommend it. You can actually check it out@booklaunchers.com Chilton that's C H I L T O N here's some observations and points from his extensive experience and research and I think he did thousands of hours of research for this course and for his own book marketing in publishing business. Number one Short chapters. Every single person involved in the studies that he conducted said they preferred shorter chapters. Period. Even some people were surprised that they preferred shorter chapters. This book, the War of Art by Steven Pressfield is one of the best books in my mind. I quote it all the time and it's short and the chapters are super short. That is one whole chapter right there. Short chapters work. Tip number two do not interrupt the flow of reading. Period. Don't do it with sidebars or quotes. Make sure that those things are placed in a way that does not force readers to skip and go back to them or stop what they were reading. Have them placed right after a point where a natural mental break would occur. And it doesn't have to be at the end of a chapter, but don't put it in the middle of a paragraph. Pitch Anything by Oren Clath does this really well. Natural break insert. And just an FYI, the majority of readers don't like pull quotes no matter where you put them. I thought that was kind of interesting. Number three fewer than 10% of do it yourself efforts looked good. 50% or more actually looked really amateurish. Hiring professionals makes all the difference. But if you're going to do it yourself, check out Joe Friedlander thebookdesigner.com for some great tips and templates. Number 4. Your interior design should flow from your cover and fit with the personality of your book. Your book designer should be reading some of your book to get this right. Make sure your interior design will be done to flow through from print to eversion properly converted. As I've already noted, if you want to get the entire Chilton course, I highly recommend you pick it up. It's by far the most comprehensive course on book marketing I've ever seen and it's less than $200 and you can get it at book launchers.com Chilton of course, if you buy it through that link, I get a tiny referral fee, but I've already had people thank me for telling them about the course because it's so great. Like this Tip. Smash that thumbs up button. Seriously, do that right now because it makes me happy and it just feels good. The only thing that makes me happier is when you subscribe to the channel and leave a comment below. When you do that well, we'll become good friends. See you next time.
