If you plan to publish independently—and have no money to spare—you will need to get your head around book design!
This is a quick write-up while I have all of this fresh in my head. I’ll add more links and images later. Promise :)!
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 plan to do 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 with KDP first and close any gaps in distribution with Ingram Spark. (I also plan to have a limited hardcover edition printed locally, but that is a topic for another day.)\
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 the most affordable, quality layout app I could find is Affinity Publisher by Serif. 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”, and the 5.5” x 8.5” (21.59cm x 13.97cm) will translate to 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”—and I hope I will not regret the slightly larger 5.5” x 8.5”… . In the end, I went and 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 0.75” 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 38 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.
Update a few days later: The margins above are still my preferred set-up, but after I cleaned up the manuscript further, making sure that the part and chapter title pages start on odd pages, my pages count blew out to over 500 pages. So… I needed to compromise and reduce the top and bottom margins to 0.65″ to gain one more line of text per page, now 39. This reduced my page count to 483 pages and allows me some wriggle room to place the full page illustrations. There are other ways to save pages—more about this in the next post—but for me this solution is the lesser evil … . Well, onwards and upwards.
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) white paper. That is substantial without feeling like a brick (I hope.)
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 first 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)_/¯
So, I have set a new target for the second book at around 120k words and will review the styles I just imported from Book One (ARGH!).
