What Authors Need to Know About Typesetting Books | Live Replay

Hello and happy Tuesday, everybody. It's so good to be here. So today. Man, did I end up down a rabbit hole when I started prepping for this one. We are going to be talking about typesetting, probably in my world anyways, more commonly known as interior layout or interior design for your book. So when you get here, make sure you say hello, because as always, there will be prizes for those of you who have taken time out of your day to join us. And if you're watching the replay, of course, go ahead and comment because the day of you're still entered to win our sweet book launcher swag, which of course you know by now is this fabulous noboringbooks mug and our oh so soft journal, which here it is. All right. Hey, Vince. Welcome. Andy. John. Ron. Woohoo. I've got your book right here, Ron. I'm going to be mentioning it. Angela, thank you for being here. And here is the oh so soft journal. All right, folks, so a biggie. So I'm just gonna dive right in. And I think Jacqueline's gonna come on the line too, who is our client care manager, because she actually is the one that gave me a lot of these great tips, and she knows a lot more about interior design and layout when it. When it comes to books than I do. She's the one that really handles all the hiring of our professionals on our team and all those things. So, yeah, let's just dive right in. Hey, Ben, welcome. Kevin, you stayed up for me again. Thank you. All right, guys, so first of all, I want to kind of tie this back to something you guys can all relate to, because for some of you, you know, I know you've been in this world for a while and you get it, but for those of us who aren't, like, haven't really dove into the weeds, so to speak, of publishing your own book and laying it out, you might not get it. So, you know, if you've ever watched a movie or even like, I've gone to short film festivals, right, where some of the story's really compelling, but the way they shot the movie is just really, really hard to watch. Maybe, maybe the sound was bad. Whatever it is, it wasn't a good experience. So even though it was probably one of the. Maybe, even though if it was one of the best stories you've ever heard, you still didn't enjoy it because you had a bad experience consuming that story. And that's what happens with books. And so few authors really, really appreciate this issue. And this thing really jumped out at Me, last week I was at Podcast Movement here in Los Angeles and I was speaking with someone who has a small publishing imprint, so he publishes other people's books. And we were talking about our process and he was just asking some questions and I mentioned that we wait until we have the COVID design before we start designing the interior of a book. And he asked why? And I said, well, how. How do you make sure the same experience that somebody has when they look at the COVID flows through to the interior if you don't already have that cover design? And the person was a little bit dumbfounded and kind of went, reader experience. So I was a little stunned. And then I realized this is definitely something that, you know, I need to talk about a little bit more. Is that reader experience and the things that make the reader experience good beyond just the words that go on the page. There's so much that goes into this that makes a great book. Now at Book Launchers, we're pretty much self proclaimed book nerds. So we think about reader experience all the time and we put time and money into our clients books. So in that I thought that we could chat about some of the basics and advanced tips when it comes to typesetting, which is the industry term for what happens when you do the layout and design of the interior. But typesetting is a word I don't ever use because it really comes from when people had to physically take the letters from a little box, place it, and then make the words and sentences and lock it in. And fun fact for you. So this is something I learned when I was starting the company and researching all this stuff. The lowercase and uppercase naming of, you know, capital letters and the non capital letters is because the capital letters, the uppercases got put into the upper box and the lowercase got put into the lower box or the lowercase. So there's a fun fact for you but. And another fun fact for you that I, that I was thinking about was if you think back like on historic documents, I think like the Declaration of Independence, those were created by somebody just sitting there putting one letter at a time up. And then this all changed when there was the mention of the hot, I think it was called the hot metal typeset press or something like that, where they actually got to use a keyboard, kind of like a typewriter to type out the desired text to be set. So that's where the word typesetting originates. That's not how I think of this. Which, which is why internally at bookwantras, we call it interior layout for your book. So I'm just going to say hello to a few more folks that have joined. So. Hey, see, I told you Jacqueline was going to be here. She's the true expert here. She can correct me when I say something wrong and she can also answer your guys questions if you guys have a specific interior design question. And April, hello. And yes, please do like of course always like. And oh and yes, Dave's here too. Thank Dave. And he's commenting on the wall thing up here. Artistry as he called it. And whoever hung that did a great job again give you guys one guess as to who came to my office and hung that for me. Right. Thanks Ron. Great to hear. Alright, so if you're here, if you joined in, do say hello because we will be giving prizes. Angela at some point in the session will pick a number and Angela will count and find that person. There's also going to be a skill testing question and I already know what it is this time instead of trying figure it out on the fly. Okay. Oh, Jacqueline. I just taught Jacqueline something, you guys. I'm very excited. The origin of uppercase and lowercase where that came from. So yeah, you know, verify it, fact check it. But I do remember learning that and being ooh, that's cool. Okay, so we're hit on some basic tips today and Jacqueline gave me a couple really cool ones, something I hadn't thought of but I want to touch on the kind of the do it yourself side of this. There are templates that you can use for the interior design of a book. And of course when I'm talking interior, like I said, I've got your book right here, Ron. So here's the Green Wizard, Ron's book. And I'm talking the interior of the book. So the choices that go into the fonts, the margins, the type space, the trim size of the book too. Because I have other books here too like Leslie Quince's Legacy as well. So there's, there's choices, a lot of decisions that go into designing the interior of the book, the, the reading experience, both in print. I'm holding up print books, but this also applies to the, there's some things I'll mention with regards to the ebook conversion as well. So anyways, you can use templates and that can work, but you'll have to correct each page manually. And as you'll, as you'll see as I explain some of this stuff, you're going to get a whole new appreciation for the work and skill that goes into good interior layouts and designs because you have to go through and manually make choices on each line to make sure that a bunch of problems don't arise that will cause jolts for the reader in their reading experience. So a template can work, but it can still take a lot of time, generally from you know what everybody tells me. And again, I have never done this myself. I've always hired a professional because I've always just a known that I don't have the patience or the eye for detail at all to tackle something like this. But also just I always wanted my books to look good, as good or better than a traditionally published book. So I had zero design experience, so I didn't want to tackle this. But I do know that a lot of authors use vellum. You can find it at Vellum Pub. And my understanding is that, you know, if you have a fairly simple book, you can do this yourself with vellum. You do need to have some patience and understand grammar rules and things like that. But I have seen some good work, especially books come out of vellum. But again, I'm all about not having to painfully go through these things myself. So I haven't done it. But I know there's some folks here that have. If you have questions, some of them will probably answer. I think maybe Kevin has even designed some of his books himself. I'm not sure. And yeah, that's a great. Actually, I just saw a tip from Vince. He said I was stumped by interior design. In my first book. I went into a bookshop and picked up books that I liked the look and feel of. I tried to copy that and Derek says he made his interior so you guys can ask him question. And you know what, looking at other books is really important. We always ask our clients when we're coming to Covers and Interior for preferences and styles and other books that they already like because it's great to have something to model after, otherwise you have an unlimited number of choices and that can be a really daunting place to start. For those of you joining in, hello, welcome. Do say hello in the chat and it's great to have you here. Okay, so carrying on, I'm going to dive right into the five tips, but I actually think this is one of the hardest parts of the entire book production because even in the hiring side, it's been really interesting to me because somebody with a good graphics design background isn't skilled enough to do this job unless they've done it many times before. And we've even hired people from magazine publishing with magazine publishing backgrounds, so they get the visual experience of reading something. But there's some nuances that are very specific to books that made in many cases it not ideal to work with them. And they found it very time consuming because they didn't understand some of the principles of this. So it is something that is a very specific skill. It is not just any graphics designer can pick up and do it. They really need to learn it and study it and really dive into some of these things. So here's five tips for you. Whether you're hiring somebody or you're doing it yourself, I think that these will really help you get a good solid awareness of what you need to watch out for. And the first one I actually got from Jacqueline, which I hadn't thought of, so it kind of. It kind of blew me away. So number one is you can. You do get to choose the font, right? So the interior, the typeface, you know what this is called right here? You get to choose that. When you do that, you want to make sure it has what's called full package, meaning it's got italics, bold, italic, bold, full punctuation and symbols, you know, like the copyright symbol, all those kind of things. And the EM dash, which I had to look up, you guys, I didn't know what an EM dash was. And it turns out there's actually three different kinds of dashes. So now my question, my skill testing question for you guys today is what are the three kinds of dashes? There's an EM dash and then there's two others. Do you guys know what those are? That's the skill. First person to get those three. And now everybody leaves my video to go Google this, guaranteed. But anyways, a lot of fonts out there don't have the full selection of them in this font package. And Jacqueline kind of warned that you can get halfway through a project and realize that your font that you chose doesn't have the full package and you're missing some of the things that you need, which would be pretty upsetting to discover that halfway through a project. Now, the other thing is, when you're choosing that font besides that package, is to really think about the reading experience, because there are studies that have shown certain fonts are better for folks with dyslexia to read. And some fonts, I even read studies and I'll try to find one, because New York Times actually did a study on fonts and trust, and they printed the same article in multiple different fonts and then kind of tested the believability how much you believed that article. And they did find a significant difference in certain fonts that you actually trusted and believed what was being said with certain fonts more than others. So choosing that font is very, very important. And of course, a bad font. If anybody's ever tried to read something in font that was way too creative, way too many doily spinny doodly things, it can really ruin your reading experience. Or if you've looked at a book and just kind of felt dizzy looking at that page. So font selection is really, really important for all of those reasons. Generally, I think a lot of the fonts that get chosen are in the Adobe packages. One that Jacqueline mentioned is Adobe Garamond, however you say that, so that can be a common one that's used. You can always research common fonts for nonfiction or genre specific because you might want to have. I know for a fact horror books in general tend to veer towards one kind of font versus other kind of types of books. So. Okay. Oh, thank you, Beachside. Appreciate it. So, Benjamin Preston. Oh, okay. I'm looking for. I want both. Here we go. Oh, there. Vince. Vince won. But word changes the money. Sorry, I don't mean to laugh at your pain, but here's the thing is, I didn't even realize they had names, right? I thought they were all just dashes. Yes, it's true. That's why I hire great people who know these things. So, yes, there you go. Pins. You are our winner. I think you said you're in New Zealand. I don't know what kind of a fortune it will cost us to send the book the Oso Sub Journal or the Mug youg Way, but shoot us an email@teamokhunters.com and you got the answer right. That's fantastic. Okay, I handed Jacqueline a mess and she handed me back an incredible book everyone loves. Thanks, Ron. Thank you. Made it. Bonjour. Okay, so which font was trustworthy? I will find that article, and I don't think it necessarily applies directly because it was a New York Times, so I don't know if it applies direct to books. I believe for dyslexia, I think it was sans serif was one of the ones that was better for dyslexics to read, but I'm not sure. Oh, Veronica. Hey. Welcome, Mike. Yay, you made it. Okay, awesome. So, yeah, I'll find that article for you guys and I'll try to post it down below in the comments. Post the post live and. Or maybe Angela's already trying to find it, but it was a New York Times study that they did, and then there were some other studies that kind of came out of it about that trustworthy font. Okay, so number two, take care of your orphans and your widows. This is something Jacqueline taught me early on. Again, something I did not know about. So what is an orphan? Well, it's basically breaking a paragraph in the wrong place. I think it actually is when the orphan is the one at the bottom of the page and the widow is the one at the top. So you've got a paragraph is, you know, it's the first line of the paragraph is going at the very bottom. So it's like two or three words, and then it ends. So, you know, you'd be sitting here, and in this page, right down here, there'd be like two or three words, and that's the start of the paragraph. And now you have to flip the page with the contrast being the widow is when the top line of the next page, the paragraph just suddenly ends. Right. First line over there. So in just, like, a couple of words, I think I got those definitions right. And it's a jolting experience. You don't have to worry about it in ebook because you. It kind of flows through it. It's a different experience reading an ebook, but in a book, you really want to try to avoid those orphans. I think it's just, like, one or two words. I think that's how you would categorize them. Jacqueline can clarify. Oh, and Jacqueline is also noting there's a specialty fonts for dyslexics where it's more weighted at the bottom. Okay, so basically, it's really things that are left hanging because they'll mess up the experience of reading the book. That's really what I'm trying to say is you kind of, when you're looking at it, you just want to notice anything that just doesn't look right. Because if it just doesn't look right, the brain stops. Right. You get pulled out of the experience of reading, and your brain's kind of going, oh, and you know that feeling. So that's what those things are, and that's really what you're trying to avoid. And that's where a professional does that for you, or they should be doing that for you. Number three is negative space, which is white space. But, of course, everything seems to have its own terminology in this world. So negative space. And you want to think about it. You know, if you're not giving your book enough white space here, I'll pull out another book for You Oscar's book. This one is. We've changed the title since this one. I think it's now the A Guide. I think we did to Band Director's Guide, a veteran band teacher's guide to Teaching Music. It's a very cool book. And so one of the things we always talk about is the feeling of the COVID going to the interior. So you can kind of feel that same experience going from here. I don't know if you guys can see this very well. And then into the chapter headings there. It's not like you're going to choose a fancy font for this font here, but you still have the same feeling going through in those nice touches on the chapter heading. Anyway, when you're reading this book in a print version, you need somewhere to hold the book so your fingers aren't over the letters. So you want to have white space in the margins. You also need to have enough white space so there's room for the binding to go without having the words too tight into the middle of the page. And of course, you need space at the top for text, for page numbers and words. So you also want to consider white space between the letters and between the words, because if there's too much text on a page, it just feels overwhelming. And also, you know, not enough text on a page. So too much white space can also have a feeling as well. So, again, it's that experience and really judging what you want to create for your reader. Those are some decisions that you might need to make when you're doing this. And, you know, again, we have standards and recommendations, but all of our clients make different choices. So every one of our books has a slightly different feeling and different spacing, different fonts, all those kind of things. Number four is I don't want you to go crazy. And this is, again, Jacqueline's tip is don't go crazy and use every font available to you. Remember this as an experience for your reader. And I kind of giggled when Jacqueline was telling me this, because I thought about my very first job out of university, and it was, you know, email was still really new. And I got this email account where I could actually put fonts and bold and color and size. And I'm pretty sure that some of my early emails to my boss and to my team looked like a clown had thrown up on the page because I would use all colors and highlighters and all these things in the emails because it was all new and so exciting. And so I think some authors kind of get and even obviously beginner Designers get like that, and they try to use all the different things. And again, that can be quite a traumatizing experience for a reason a reader to have all this stuff coming at them. So, yeah, I probably owe my. My boss an apology for those early emails that I sent. Again, it's really taking little touches from the. The COVID and bringing it throughout. And, you know, using the tools that are at your disposal, like bolds and italics, is to emphasize words and make reading easier, not trying to cram every tool, everything you've got, into one spot. This is Yolanda ae. Welcome. Yay. And fast. Company says the winner is Baskerville. All right, that is the font winner for the most. The font that is most trusted. Is that correct, Kevin? Orphans are the starting line of a paragraph, and the rest of the paragraph is on the next page. I was right. And a widow is alone at the top. Yes. Okay, I got it. So that's great. Thank you for clarifying and verifying that I was right. Oh, Angela. It wasn't for dyslexic friendly type settings. It was actually a study on the font that was more likely to create trust or believability in the same article. That was the New York Times study. It wasn't a dyslexic font. Let's see. Oh, and then. But Kevin also was Googling like crazy and found that the. It was Baskerville is also the most trustworthy font, so yay. All right, so I have one more tip for you guys, and in the meantime, I'm gonna do another draw, and then we're gonna pull a number. So if you're here and haven't said hello yet, now's your chance. Okay, so this is for the draw for commenters. So when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win our famous noboringbooks mug right here or our oh so soft journal. When you win today, you just need to email us@teamteamooklaunchers.com and of course, we'll need your mailing address and your choice, and then Angela will make sure you get your prize sent to you. So let's see who today we're going to do two of these. We're gonna do two. So our first winner today is none other than Poetry from the Heart. I don't know how many times Poetry from the Heart has won. It's like there's people like Studio 38 who work really hard to get a victory and have not yet won. But your time is coming. I'm sure of it. Okay. Oh, goodness, Alan, I didn't know you were in Tokyo. Are you always in Tokyo? Are you just traveling there right now? Anyways, hello and welcome. That's a. That's quite a time zone difference. I can't even do the math right. Cool. Okay, so I'm going to go back, and while I'm over here, let's do. What's the date today? We are the 19th. All right, so, Angela, let's go from Jacqueline's. No, actually from Kevin's comment where he says fast Company says the winner is Baskerville. Go forward 19. Because today is. No, it's not. Today's February 18th. Go forward 18. Thank you. I just realized that at least I knew today was Tuesday. Winning. I know. I thought that, too. Yeah. So you're. You are in Tokyo. Wow. I didn't know that. That's very cool. Okay. I learned something new every. Every day. Oh, and Benjamin's in D.C. yay. We have another client in. In and around the D.C. area now, too. He's not on the live stream today, but. But he's. He's near you, Ben, so that's kind of cool. Okay. I know. I figured out it's day 18. Thanks, everybody. So Angela's gonna figure out the winner. Angela's also located in Texas, so there you go. Okay, so the final tip that I have for you is number five, and it's actually something we do to test out our designers once we go through in our hiring process. So. But before I tell you what that test is, because you can use it, too, in a different version, it really comes down to the ebook conversion, because a lot of people think that you can just take the file and convert it into, you know, the flow through document. But ebooks are actually really kind of a fascinating thing because you can make the fonts bigger. You know, you can read it on a mobile device in this size, or you can read it on a. Like, a reading device. Angela has a new one that she's super excited about. I can't remember which one you got the Kobo. I think she got the Kobo, the latest Kobo reading device. Ebook reader. So everybody reads the ebooks in a different way and has a different preference for how they read them. So you have to create that flow through. But if you try to just straight up convert a document, it doesn't have the flow that it needs to have. And so the experience is jarring. And I actually bought a children's book on a Kindle, and it, you know, it was A Kindle book. So it was for sale on a Kindle, but I was trying to read it and it wasn't a Kindle friendly or it wasn't a mobile friendly document. So clearly it had just, just tried to do some sort of a conversion. So we couldn't actually, like, you couldn't actually see the pages on the Kindle device. So it's really, it's really more complicated than people think. So what we do is we, we actually ask for the, the InDesign files from our designers that we're potentially hiring because. And some of them are kind of like, why are you asking for this? You want to steal my template? And again, a template does not solve anything. So we're definitely not interested in their template. What we are interested in is whether they are setting themselves up for ebook conversion success or not. And in the words of Jacqueline, who is the one that does all of this, again, I can't emphasize that enough. I am not the expert. She and her team are the expert. But the big thing is that she's looking at, to see if the designers have used paragraph styles, character styles and master pages, because if they know those features, they're going to save a lot of time when, when they go to export it into that flow, that flow through ebook. So, and there's also scripts that you can do in Adobe InDesign that will make your task as a designer easier for these things that you're doing over and over. So from a hiring perspective, if you're like me and you don't have InDesign, don't know what you're looking, probably aren't going to ask for an InDesign file because again, I go, jacqueline, hey, what do you think of this file? But what you can do is first of all ask to see it in a PDF so you can see that you like their design choices. And I would ask to see multiple books, but the other thing is you can just ask them, hey, listen, how do you set yourself up so that you're going to have an easier time converting it to ebook and see what they say. And this is where we find that the graphics designers that have a great eye for graphics designer design, but they haven't done this, this is where they fall down. This is also where they get frustrated working with us because they don't have those systems, those scripts in place, they haven't done these steps that make the ebook conversion so much easier for themselves. So then they get frustrated with our timelines. Whereas our designers that are experienced at this, they Already do this, and they've got scripts for the things they're doing over and over again. And, you know, the process actually goes fairly quickly for them. So that's really. That's the big tip. And, you know, you may not know a lot of these details, and I certainly didn't before I started book launchers. And I still managed to self publish a couple of books, but again, I hired professionals. And I think really what I did is something you can do too, is you can just look at that, at that, you know, preview file and go, like, does this look professional or amateur? You'll have a real good gut feeling for that. And you'll also have a sense of things that you. You may not know the names for. Like, what do you call it? I think that the technical term, and again, Jacqueline can tell me or not, is a word stack. So in a book, if you open it up and there's actually the same word, somehow manages to fall on top of each other. It's a word stack. And again, it's like a visual mind game that can pull a reader out of the experience. You may not know what that's called, but you will go, oh, that looks weird. So looking for things like that and kind of paying attention to your gut instinct, kind of like those EM dashes, but that's really, you know, an end. And again, the EM dash is like a punctuation mark that can take the place of a comma and a parenthesis. And I use them all the time, and I didn't know what they were called. But your designer needs to know where these are appropriate and where they're not. So there's almost some grammar work to this job. And that's, again, why you have to go line by line by line, which is why it's a detailed work, and it takes a lot more effort and patience and technique and expertise than you guys might think. So, again, that's why I hire professionals and why I have an awesome team that knows all this stuff. But I thought that a lot of these things would help you, whether you're doing it yourself or you're hiring designers. Okay, Alan West. We are going international today. I think we're going to New Zealand and Tokyo, if I'm reading this right. Okay. It was a Kobo. Cool. Ebooks are laid out properly. Can be reflowable based on the reader's preference. Exactly. Yes. You know, it took me probably five minutes to say that, so. Thanks, Jacqueline. Basically, anyone can make a PDF look good, but the indesign source file will show whether they have a fundamental understanding of the program and are thinking on the next step, which is the ebook expert. Thank you. Kevin uses affinity publisher, designer, and photo. But vellum formats all my books, so I use publisher for low context, which is nice. So that's cool. Thanks for sharing that, Kevin. A word stack is when two or more lines have the same word directly above or below. See, I kind of said that. That's what I was trying to say. There's also something which I don't really see ever, but I read about it, actually. Just kind of reading some tips today, and it was called rags. And I guess that's where words get all raggedy on the right side. But most of the books I went through and just checked, we. You know, they all get space right across like that. Right. So I don't know what that's called either. That's why Jacqueline's here. All right, let's do our final draw of the day. So far, we have three winners. We have Poetry from the Heart, Allen west, and Victor. Victor. I've just forgotten your last name. Or Vince. Was it Vince? Vince won. Yeah, Vince. Vince Warnock. Not Victor. I'm sorry. Okay. It's like live. It's like doing math live. You don't ever try to do that. Okay, so my other. My final YouTube commenter winner of the day is See, what do we have? Mike heard. Yay. Congratulations. All right, and we got England. There's, like, nobody in the states today. You guys are really challenging my shipping budgets. Okay, so send us an email@teambookcrunchers.com with your choice of what you want and where we should be sending it, and Angela will get that off to you. All right, so thank you guys so much. If you guys have a suggestion for a future topic for our next live stream, which will be happening in two weeks, let me know, and I would love to hear it. And thank you to everyone for joining today. And, yeah, Ghee said, I've learned book jargon. We justify. I hate ragged edges. Justify. That's the word I was looking for. Thank you, Jacqueline. All right, so email your winner. Email your victory into teamapricultures.com and again, thank you guys so much for being here. It was fun to hang out with you, and I can't wait to see you guys again in two weeks.