How to Prepare Your Book For Layout

Planning ahead to set your book up for layout is the move of a savvy author. It will save you hassle, pain, money, and it will probably help you get the exact look for the interior of your book that you want. If you want to learn the pro insider secrets to setting up a book for layout, then this video is for you. Hey there. I'm Julie the book broad. I'm a multi award winning author and the founder of a fabulous professional services company, Book Launchers. If you've watched a few videos on Book Launchers TV before, you might think I'm the expert in all things publishing. But the truth is I'm a generalist and the people on my amazing team at Book Launchers are the true experts. Today I'm really excited to share some secrets from our production supervisor, Melissa Sobey on what we do during the editing phase that sets your book up for success when it goes to layout. And she's got a few other cool strategies and tips to get an award winning interior after the editing is done too. Take it away, Melissa.

One thing I would highly encourage is if you're doing this on your own without help from another company like, you know, Book Launchers, is that you do hire a book designer so somebody who has worked on interiors and can set up the layout the best way possible if that's not something that you're wanting to budget in. If you feel like you can take on the task of creating your layout, there's lots of great like skillshare courses that can help you find the right way to do that, things like that. But there's a few things to keep in mind whether you're doing it or a designer is doing it. And we actually start prepping for layout when we're in editing phase. And one of the things that we do is, is we work with our editors to create what we call headings. And those headings are things like, you know, your chapter names, your sub heads, any bulleted lists, things like that that are going to be specific formatting issues. And you want to go through and apply headings in Word or whatever application you' to create your document, you want to apply these headings. There's an option in all of them, all of the word processing software where you can apply headings. And what this helps do when you start to set up your book for layout is it helps the designer or yourself create little sections that are going to be formatted specifically one way so that as you're creating this book layout, you've got something that is repeating itself and is consistent throughout the book.

I just wanted to hop in here and share a couple of things we talked about later, which, which was the fact that we generally end up moving all manuscripts into Microsoft Word during the editing phase because all other software adds these weird little coding things, especially Google Docs, which has to be stripped from the file. So when we hit Copy Edit and are starting to build the structure of the book by applying headings and formatting styles throughout the manuscript, we prefer it to be in Word because Word is the only one that doesn't import weird things into InDesign. You'll know this has happened to you, the weird importing thing, if you end up with a zillion weird squares all over your manuscript. So even though Melissa says that you should start building that structure of your book in Edit and applying the heading styles, know that if you're doing that in Google Docs, it pretty much has to be stripped down to text again before it goes to design. So you're just better off to put in all that effort in Microsoft Word. Okay, where were we?

Melissa are helping us during the editing phase to start creating those. So that you'll see sometimes if you're working with us, you'll see, you'll get your edit back and you'll see editor name, applied style 1, or something like that. And those are there for a purpose. So while you're in the editing phase, the way that the book looks on your Word document is not how it's going to look when you lay out the book for your actual physical copied book. So yes, you're going to get something back from your editor, and maybe your paragraph shifted or maybe the numbers didn't look the same as they did when you sent it to them. But those are all things that you are going to be changing later on anyway. So as long as they're applied to a specific style and that style is consistent throughout the document, that's what matters. During the editing phase. You actually format and make it look the way that you want it to look later on in the process.

Now, if you're using track changes during the editing process, which I highly recommend, make sure you go through and accept or reject all track changes before your book goes to layout. Otherwise, your layout person will be automatically accepting all changes when the book is imported into InDesign. That's how you can end up with a weird sentence where you're like, I don't remember writing that, but an editor inserted it and you didn't reject it.

So.

So take the time to get it cleaned up before you send it to the designer for layout. Now, Melissa went on to say that you need to prep your images for layout. So let's take it back to Melissa.

It's really important to prep your images. And by that I mean if you're going to have pictures or images or charts or graphs or any kind of illustrations in your book, you want to make sure that, number one, they're high res so that when they're being formatted into the layout, they don't look pixelated or low quality. But one of the things you can also do is have them recreated by a designer of some kind. So we do have a couple of people that we have that we work with who will take a chart or a graph and make it look spectacular. And they'll take that rough design or that rough outline that you send us and they will recreate it and they'll use your book cover as a foundation for the style or the design of the book to recreate that graph so that we have a consistent look throughout the book. As far as images go, make sure that the royalty free, make sure that they're public domain. And if they're not, then you need to obtain permission to reprint them. And if you can't get permission to reprint, but you really like that image, you can probably have it redone by a designer, as long as it's not a photograph. Obviously photographs can't be recreated too easily, but those are things that I definitely recommend because you don't want that to come back later and you find yourself locked up in some kind of crazy litigation over an image.

And we've talked about graphs and images in a different video which I'll link to at the end. Now, Melissa is not quite done, but my goodness, isn't she awesome? Go ahead and smash that thumbs up button if you're loving what she has to say so far. Now, my own tip for images is to not put them into your Word document while you're writing. Just make a note and say image one, backpack in Utah. You know, number the image, give it a description, and then create a folder of your book images and put Image one in there and label it the same thing. Trying to put your images into Word while you write is a recipe for pure misery. Those of you who've done it know what I'm talking about.

Think about where in the book you want them to be and keep in mind that the flow of the pages may not allow you to have it exactly next to the sentence you want it to be. Next to. But if you have a general idea of where that image needs to belong, then you can say, I'd like it in this section or I'd like it to be on a page where this information is. And that'll help keep the designer aware of where you need that information and that image to correspond together.

And just to show you how all this work looks when it's done, Melissa has some examples to show you to tie all of this up. Now, before I show you that, if you're wondering where this came from, these are excerpts from a Deep Dive training session we did. These Deep Dive training sessions are things we do at Book Launchers on a Saturday, where I showcase authors, experts, and members of the book Launcher team to help you with writing a book, publishing it, and marketing it. If you're not getting our launch letter, you might want to pause this video, hit up book launchers.com 7steps and get yourself on that newsletter right now so you can be a part of our next Deep Dive training. All right, back to you, Melissa. Show us how all this looks when it's done.

Books that we've launched. And this kind of is an example of applying those headers, but also how you want those chapter starts to look and all of those sections to look. So if we take a look at this, I don't know if you can see this or not. So here we've got that chapter title that's in a heading one, and it's exactly like the book cover. So we've created a consistent style there where we have that first chapter, that chapter start that looks just like the book covers design. Okay. And then we've got, down here, we've got a drop cap. So a drop cap is that first letter of the first paragraph of the chapter being large. I don't know if you can see. If I put in a little bit closer, you can see that. Okay, there's a couple of options here for chapter starts. So this, this chapter, we have the chapter title here, we have the quote here, and then we have the actual start of the chapter. This chapter starts halfway down the book. The chapter title is up here, but the actual chapter starts here. So you can have a chapter that starts up here like this one does. So you have it start higher on the book. You can have one that starts all the way up at the top. Those are all things that you should keep in mind when you get to this layout phase. You should look at books that you like the way they look and take photos or if it's on Amazon, and they have a look inside features. Save that link. So that, you know, these are examples I want to send to my designer. Okay. Or that I want to create on my own. So here we've got another example of formatting style. So this is a subsection in the same book that we were just looking at. This is another heading style right here. So we applied a heading two style here. So throughout the book, this is a consistent heading style for these sections in this book, and these sections of these books, of this book in particular, they require that the photo be right under that subsection. So in this case, this is not somewhere where we can say, this photo needs to be somewhere near this area. This is a case where this photo has to be exactly, exactly where this heading starts. So what you'll see happen down here is that there's a blank space. So this is in the same chapter, but there's a blank space right here because this photo has to start with this heading. And if you're okay with the way that looks, it's totally fine. There's nothing wrong with that. That's wonderful. It's consistent, it looks good, it's clean, it looks fantastic. But if you have a photo that has to start somewhere, you have to be prepared for that photo to drag your section to the next page, which can create a gap.

That was a lot. And if you can believe it, Melissa still had more to share during that deep dive training. But after this, you've got the overview to set yourself up for layout success. Whether you're working with book launchers, doing it yourself, or hiring a layout pro from somewhere else, the best layouts start in editing. Consider images, and also include the style from your cover to create that end to end reader experience. I think you might be wondering about permissions for those pesky images or quotes you've put in the book. So this video right here is all about permissions. And then this video right there is the one I mention on images and graphs in your book. Both are pretty much essential viewing, and really, I just want to hang out with you a little longer. So please click on over to the next video and I'll see you there.