Essentials of Book Layout - Book Typesetting Explained

Have you ever walked out of a movie because the sound was bad or there were issues with the picture? Or maybe you just hated the way the movie was shot and it was not a good experience to watch it. The same thing happens with books, and so few authors truly appreciate this. So if you want to make sure your reader has a great experience reading your book, this video is for you. Hey there, I'm Julie the book broad from Book Launchers. We're your professional self publishing team helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book that will help you have a huge impact on your readers. And done right, it will also help you grow your brand, build your business, and make you money. Have you heard of typesetting? Don't worry if you haven't. It's so 19th century. Literally, the word comes from when people used to physically have to place the letters for them to be printed. These were letter presses, and the words were set into place with one letter at a time and then lock down. During the 19th century, the process jumped forward with the invention of hot metal typesetting. The process used a keyboard like the typewriter, where the typesetter could type out the desired text to be set. Because we live in the current century, at Book Launchers, we call it interior design or interior layout, not typesetting. But I thought you'd like to know a little history now. There is so much involved in creating an amazing interior. It's actually quite complex. As someone who's hired a lot of designers to do this work for our clients, let me tell you something. Just hiring a graphics designer is not going to cut it. If you care about your reader experience. This is truly a specialized skill. They have to understand what they're doing or it becomes a hot mess. And what many people don't realize is that a book needs to be laid out line by line to be done right. More on that in a minute. But you really need to know that this is a specialized skill for someone with patience and a good eye. Nope, that's not my good eye. Ah, now I can read it. So there's a lot of considerations when it comes to the interior design of your book, like size of the margins, trim size of the book, styling, the start of the chapters, placing images and graphs, and choosing the font typeface and the size of that font and the spaces between letters and lines. Before I dive into a few fundamental tips for you, I want to let you know that you can DIY your interior. So many authors on a budget do. And you may start with a template, but using A template means you'll still have to correct each page manually, line by line, and that will be a huge time suck for you. It's better to use a typesetting software like Vellum, which you can find at Vellum Pub if you want to do this yourself. If you have a very simple book and you have time and patience, you can probably do it. For fiction in particular. I've seen good work come from the use of programs like Vellum, so this can work. It's not for me, but for budget conscious eagle eyed authors you can do this. What I do not recommend you ever do is upload a Word document to Amazon. Sure they let you do it, but the result can be horrific. Rarely does it work well and that free conversion to ebook is not effective. Really, almost ever. Don't believe me? Test it out on Kindle apps and iPhones as well as actual Kindle devices. Once you've done it if you're writing a nonfiction book and you want to look like a professional, you need a professional to do it right. So how do you do it right? Or how do you know when you're looking to hire a professional whether they're going to do it right? Well, here's five tips for you. Number one when you choose a font, you want to pick a font that has a full package, meaning it has italics, bold and italic bold plus full punctuation and symbols like the copyright and em dashes. A lot of font packages out there don't have the full selection, and you don't want to get halfway through a project and realize you don't have what you need. Generally for nonfiction, there are some common packages in Adobe like Adobe Garamond or Garamond. That's one of our defaults. Number two Take care of your orphans and your widows. Breaking a paragraph in the wrong place can interrupt a reader's mental flow. Widows occur when the last line of a paragraph ends up at the top of the next page, and an orphan occurs when the first line of a paragraph ends up at the bottom of the page. These things are left hanging and mess up the experience of reading the book. It's like a jolt for the reader. Also, word stacks, where the same word somehow ends up on top of each other on a few lines that will stop a reader in their so you want to check for those line by line. Number three Negative space is the technical term, but to me it's white space. This is your friend. Think about it with kindness, and you want to give your book enough white space or big enough margins so that somebody can hold it to read. And you also want to consider enough white space so there's somewhere for the binding to go. And you don't want the text to be so squished that you can't read it. Of course, you also need space for the text and page numbers at the top and the bottom of the page. The big thing is you don't want a page to be overwhelming and or empty. There's also negative space between each letter and word that you want to be mindful of when you're considering these things. Number four don't go crazy and use every font and style available to you. Remember, this is an experience for a reader and we like to take that font and feeling from the COVID and put in little touches into the interior to flow through. Like having the first letter of a chapter start with the same font from the COVID Or sometimes there's features from the subhead or other imagery that we can then use inside the book. We like to take the font or the feeling from the COVID and take little touches touches from that to put in the interior to flow through, like chapter starts or sometimes some imagery that is featured on the COVID We'll use inside on chapter starts inside of the book. Ultimately though, you want to stick to the most readable fonts for the majority of the text in your book and then only use the flares on the interior from the COVID to bring interest to each page. Number five Ebook conversion is a different game, so you might get this all set for print and then you go to convert to a epub or a mobi and you're going to find that things get nasty. This is actually how we hire interior designers. We have found that experienced designers set them up for a successful ebook conversion and inexperienced ones don't. So we always ask prospective designers to send us their InDesign files. In the words of Jaclyn Kyle, our client care manager, the big thing for designers to know is that the paragraph styles, character styles, and master pages are their friends. Getting to know these features will save a boatload of time and make the export into a reflowable ebook a breeze. So taking that to hiring your designers with we found that if someone already does this in their indesign file, they're likely to be experienced enough to handle everything we need when it comes to creating a great experience for the reader. That said, if you're like me and you don't have InDesign and you don't know what you're looking for, this tip doesn't really help unless you have a team like I do. But here's a workaround you can ask a designer how they prep their files for ebook conversion and see what they say. Your book layout person is as much an interior designer as they are also a grammatical expert. It's a line by line job, filled with choices to make sure the words are split in the right place. Lines end at the appropriate places, hyphens or em dashes are placed in the right places, and it reads with ease. That's painful for some of us to do. I hire pros because I am not that patient or that detailed. Anyone who gets our bi weekly launch letter surely spots my typos and realizes that I am not the team editor. By the way, if you want our launch letter, I highly recommend it. It's not a sales letter, it's tools and tips and insights from the industry happenings, plus links to highlight various videos. You can get yours atbook launchers.com. have you done the inter on your own or have a tip to help other authors with their interior? Let's chat about it in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet noboringbookswag and you'll be one step closer to being one of my beloved YouTube besties, joining the ranks with some of the most fabulous folks like Rachel Robertson, Mike Hurd, Guy Blaise, Keith Wheeler books, And of course, Studio 38 new videos every Tuesday and Friday, except in the summer when we take a break. Make sure you've subscribed and turned those notifications on so you know when a new video is out. It's been so lovely spending time with you and I would like to keep hanging out. Have you seen this video on how much money authors make? Or if that's not your cup of tea, then this one right here is the latest and greatest from the channel. Either way, I look forward to seeing you on the next one.