Book Design—Trim size, margins, and typography

If you plan to publish independently—and have no money to spare—you will need to get your head around book interiors, design, and typography!

What is Book Design

Book design is a group of tasks around the layout of a book—text, content and illustrations; choosing typography styles and formats etc. The aim is to create a product that sits well with your audience, meets their exception, is usable and meets industry standards (or breaks the rules to create attention). The outcome is a pdf that meets the specifications of your printer.

One approach dose not fit all

Book design is dependent on the length of a manuscript—design recommendations for 90k words will not work for 140k!—and the expectations within your genre and audience.

My approach

I found the book design advice out in the wild confusing at best, so here is what I did for the paperback edition of The Fragments, The Spheres Book One. 

Steps in the process

• Chose a printer
• Decide on a trim size
• Get a vague idea on page numbers and spine width
• Check margins and bleed (confirm with your printer)
• Choose a body font and size, words by line, and lines per page
• Decide about running headers and page numbers
• Chose the design for your chapter and part titles
• Add front and back matter
• Check page numbers and spine width
• Set the body type to make the text flow well within the justified borders
• Check the RHS border carefully and make a call on hyphenation.
• Add your illustrations
• Confirm page numbers and spine width
• Proof and repeat
• Export a pdf

Printer

I decided to print a international trade paperback edition with KDP—not by choice: it is the only feasible option if you are based in New Zealand—and an illustrated trade paperback edition printed locally.

My manuscript is about 146k words long and contains full-page illustrations, so printing prices are a factor and need to be balanced with a ‘quality feel’ and readability standards. (I don’t expect to make much money, so I am not so fussed about royalties.)

Software

Do not use MS Word. I have no idea why KDP and other platforms are pushing the idea that Word is a layout—or writing—application. I write in Scrivener, and use Affinity Publisher by Serif for book interiors. Both are very affordable!

Trim size

I recommend What Are the Standard Book Sizes in Publishing? on the Reedsy blog for a crash course in trim-sizes. 

I chose the trade paperback format in 5.5” x 8.5”. The size recommended for my genre by Ingram. It is relatively affordable and suits my word count. Plus, I don’t like the bigger 6” x 9”. The 5.5” x 8.5” (21.59cm x 13.97cm) will also translate to the European Demy size 216mm X 135mm without too much fuss. (She says now.)

I felt tempted to use the smaller 5” x 8” trim size—all the paperbacks on my bookshelf are 5” x 8”. In the end, I chose the middle of the recommended range form 5” x 8” to 6” x 9”.

I’ll continue with US inches rather than ‘sensible’ metrics because it makes it easier with KDP.

Margins, Fonts and Baseline

KDP’s page Set Trim Size, Bleed, and Margins states the minimum or safe margins for KDP paperbacks. Your body text margin will need to be a few baselines larger to allow for running heads and page numbers.

Margins, fonts and baselines go hand in hand, and I decided to begin with the body font, font size and leading. I use Adobe Caslon Pro (via my creative cloud subscription) in 11pt with a 120% leading which translates to a 13.2pt baseline. A top and bottom margin of 0.65” gives me four baselines to place page numbers and section headers. I keep the inner margin to 0.75” and the outer gutter to 0.65”. The bleed is the standard 0.125”

It took me several rounds of trial and error (and printouts), but the current layout allows for 39 lines of text in the main body with 10 to 13 words per line and around 450 words per page with a nice amount of white space. This is well within the recommendations for a manuscript my size and in my genre.

---

Part and chapter headers—even or odd?

That took a lot of backwards and forwards. I started with allowing both part and chapter headers to start on a new odd page, but with 38 chapters in 8 parts, that added a lot of pages, and I decided on a compromise—chapters start on new pages, even or odd, and only parts start on new odd pages.

Book dimensions and spine

The last thing to check is the spine—the approx. 480 pages translate to a 1.1” wide (2.8cm) spine in my paperweight—Black ink and 55# (90 GSM) warm white paper. That is substantial without feeling like a brick.

Lessons learnt

Manuscript length

In hindsight, I should have tried to slim down the manuscript further … maybe aiming for 120k words. Having said this, not a single reader complained about the length, and I had already thrown away about 50k words while writing the final draft.

Scrivener, Affinity Publisher and Styles

The Scrivener styles migrated well to Affinity Publisher—I used the RTF format to migrate the manuscript, not bothering with the images (the illustrations will need to be redone for the print layout anyway)—but I shouldn’t have fiddled with the styles settings in the Scrivener editor … . I had to clean up quite a bit in Affinity Publisher.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯