Layout and design
We'll show you how to choose the best type styles and type sizes for your book and its cover.
 The two styles of type
Like a roadway, your readers need lanes, edges and direction to follow in order to better comprehend your writing.
Your eyes read from the top left corner to the bottom right corner. This is the way we were taught to read when we were children. Keep this in mind when you begin to plan your book's design. Think of this rule as 'gravity of the page'.
Research proves that by following this rule in your page layout, your readers will better understand what you are saying. A major study was undertaken and reported by Colin Wheildan in his book "Communicating or Just Making Pretty Shapes". His study showed that:
- Good layout and use of gravity resulted in 67% good comprehension.
- Bad layout resulted in just 32% good comprehension.
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Text pages and typestyles:
There are two broad categories of type used in printed documents: serif and sans serif. Most books that contain large amounts of text are typeset in serif fonts.
Serif fonts feature a slight projection finishing off a stroke of a letter - like a cross stroke at the end of letters. Some serif fonts are Times, Times Roman, Times New Roman, Palatino, Garamond, Century, and Baskerville. Serif fonts in body type are easier to read:
- 67% good comprehension with serif fonts
- 12% good comprehension with sans serif fonts
Sans serif fonts are commonly used for road signs, newspaper banners and multimedia presentations. There are no cross strokes on the letters. Some typical sans serif fonts are Helvetica, Arial, Franklin Gothic, and Futura.
There are two usual ways to arrange body type. Each has some benefits that depend on their use. They are:
- Unjustified range left: the ragged right hand margin looks informal, friendly, provides more white space on the page, is easy to read in narrower columns of 6 or 7 words. Be sure to use a larger sized type if your column is wide. You may choose to use a non-proportional type (like courier).
- Justified has even edges on both left and right sides of the type. Smaller type reads ok, it looks more formal, serious, and professional.
You were probably taught to put a double space between sentences. Well, when this becomes justified type in a book, and extra space is put between words to spread the line out from left edge to right, that double space gets double the amount of extra space too. Go through your computer file using 'find and replace'. Find a full stop and space space. Replace this with a full stop and space.
You have probably typed your manuscript with two spaces between paragraphs. When this becomes justified type on a book-size page, the result is a large awkward gap between those paragraphs. Go through the document using 'find and replace'. Find a line return and another line return. Replace this with a single line return.
Microsoft Word often defaults to US paper sizes and inches, and unless you adjust your system to A4 metric, your layout will not look as it should. To change the unit of measurement to millimetres, go to Edit-Preferences-General and at the bottom of the chart is a selection. Choose millimetres.
Photographs
There are three basic layouts to put photos into a book.
- In a section on their own: in 2, 4, 6, 8, or so pages. This is the easiest way.
- At the beginning or end of chapters. Try to arrange all chapter starts on a right hand page, and ends on a left hand page. It will be easier to put your photos in if you do this first, even if it means rewriting or editing some text. You're the author, and this means you have the power to do it.
- Arranged throughout the text. A very difficult but very attractive way to design your book.
When you present your materials to a printer, and you use a page layout program such as Word, PageMaker, Quark Xpress or In Design, scan your photos at 200dpi, convert to grey scale, insert each photo into the page at 100%. If you must enlarge or reduce the picture in the page layout, be sure to keep the same proportions. Don't stretch it or you'll distort it.
Try not to enlarge or reduce the picture by more than 10%. If all photos are imported in the layouts at 100%, they will have the same density, resolution and quality. Photos that vary from the "standard" will print with a slightly different look to them.
Save your finished layout in Adobe PDF format to make sure it prints just like you've designed it.
Illustrations
Publishers make all the decisions about a book including cover design, illustrations, photographs.
When you sign a contract with a publisher, it should cover things like who provides the illustrations, who pays for them, who chooses them.
When you self publish, these matters are solely up to you.
The range of illustrative material for a book can include:
- illustrations
- photographs
- charts & graphs
- maps
- family trees
Over 80 professional Australian illustrators are featured on The Style File website. This is a great resource.
There are 4 sample illustrations from each artist included on the site, together with information on the sort of work they do. For example, the page for award-winning artist Pamela Allen features 4 illustrations from her Penguin book titled POTATO PEOPLE, published in 2002.
Her details say:
AGE-GROUP: pre-school
SUBJECT: animals, people, sci-fi/fantasy
STYLE: conceptual/interpretive, humour, stylised
This would match your funny children's picture book about a cow because your manuscript is for young children (pre-school), the subject is an animal, and its style is humourous. There is a link that allows you to contact the illustrator.
Covers
The cover sells your book, so make it as attractive as you can afford to. A well-designed cover will compensate for amateur text page layouts.
"Never underestimate the power of the blurb. It'll be read by more people than the book." - Alice Kahn, LA Times, in The Quotable Writer.
Data in 'The Bookseller' (Weekend Australian April 2, 2005) reveals that on a scale of 1 to 10 for importance, descriptions on covers score 6.6, while design rates 5.3. The magazine goes on to state that people are mistrustful of the jacket blurb. Some words (ground-breaking, brave, important) are seen as a turn off. Terry Jackson (Time Warner) says that often, people neither trust quotes, find them helpful, nor believe them. Nor do they want to know about the previous book. "What they want is a quick precis of what they're buying".
The cover has to attract the buyer to your book, then its up to the book itself to get them to make the purchase. Often buyers will pick up a book, and do 'the first page test'. For those of use who are more skeptical, a buyer may flip to somewhere in the middle of the book to get an idea of the writer's style.
But something (the cover) has to attract them to your book rather than the dozens on either side of it.
If you can't afford to print your cover in colour, then remember that a black & white cover will have more impact if you use bold heavy lettering rather than pale skinny type.
Use words that are emotional rather than technical in your title. And remember, a picture is worth 1000 words.
Every book has a front cover, back cover, and spine. Don't forget the spine. It's what most people see when the book is on a bookshelf. This is how you'll find your own book in your own library.
The title of the book as it is printed on the spine, reads from top to bottom on English-language books, and from bottom to top on French, Italian and other languages.
You can fit 8 point type all in upper case on the spine of a book of 60 pages.
The Back Cover
- 50% of the time the book will be face up on the table. 50% of the time it will be face down. If the back cover is blank, who's to know what book it is? Write a blurb and put this on the back cover.
- The back cover should tell you about the book: its features and its benefits. It may also tell you something about the author: his or her qualifications to write the book.
- barcode for automatic scanning in retail applications which will include the book's ISBN
- a recommended retail price if you wish
- publisher name
The Front Cover
- People generally 'read' a page from top left to lower right. This was the way we were taught to read. Thus, if you put some heavy visual stuff into the middle, their eyes won't go on to read the lighter stuff beneath. Try it and see for yourself.
- I call this the 'gravity of the page'. Another trick is to put something at the lower right hand corner of the cover. It will draw your readers' eyes across the page, taking in all the information on the page.
Examples of cover designs
"The Johnsons of Castle Hill" uses a horizontal (landscape) format photo to fit onto a vertical (portrait) shaped book cover. The most interesting part of the photo is the kids in the cart. So we make this element as large as we can, by wrapping the picture around the spine and placing the photo so the kids appear on the front cover. This book cover has good 'gravity of the page': the subtitle and authors' names are at the bottom right hand corner.
"Small Stories Big Business" by Denis Jen is an example of a contemporary cover design: there are lots of words on the cover, the author's name is very large, the image is small. There is good 'gravity'.
Michael Wilding's "Academia Nuts" is a very clever cover that makes a play on the book's title and uses raw nuts that look like chocolate.
The worst covers of 2003 were picked by readers of the trade magazine Australian Bookseller & Publisher.
There are many different ways to use faces on book covers. The books shown here are displayed in a retail "dump bin".
"Letters from Mary Rose" by Diana Braun is a young adult storybook. The author and her friend composed the photo (shown on the left) and allowed plenty of vertical space for the book's title, subtitle and author's name. It's easy to create your own cover this way, and it's even more remarkable when we tell you that Diana is blind.
The spine
The spine is the most important part of your book. Consumers buy books with their eyes. They browse. Because most books are arranged in bookshops like they are arranged on your shelves at home, consumers only see the spine.
"Get yourself a sexy spine," says Tower Books Distribution's director Michael Rakusin. Use colour: not black on white, or white on black.
Very rarely will you every see a mass-market publisher using the word 'by' together with the author's name. In these examples of book jackets, the title appears, sometimes a subtitle, then the author's name. No 'by'.
Colours & Trends
Colours to avoid. These colours don't work. They just don't 'sell' a book.
- Black background
- Dark brown
- Navy blue
- Olive green
Currently popular presentations are:
- Matt celloglaze over colour printing
- Embossed type
- Lots of words on the cover
Book cover designs go through faddish periods. At present, we're seeing a lot of trees, burning fires, country views and windows. Type is large and there are lots of words on the covers.
Images
Photo agencies licence reproduction of their images either exclusively or non-exclusively, and may charge different rates according to the print runs and market.
- You will pay more for exclusive use
- Will it matter to you if the same image appears somewhere else some other time?
- A few years ago, Lonely Planet's AUSTRALIA travel guide carried the same stock image photo of Uluru as appeared on the cover of a competiting travel book publisher's Australian travel guide.
The tree photo shown here appears on both the cover of Tim Winton's book DIRT MUSIC and an unrelated music CD.
Turning your text and cover into PDF format
The process goes like this:
- Pages formatted and saved in Microsoft Word, Quark Xpress, PageMaker, InDesign, or other program
- Then 'print' it to PDF using PDF Writer or Distiller. For Windows users, there is a new free PDF converter at http://www.dopdf.com/
- Be sure to embed all fonts. You'll find this under 'settings' then 'job options'
- Check the results in Acrobat Reader and verify that the results are as you intend.
The full version of Acrobat offers special features.
- You can insert pages. This is especially useful to correct Word's inability to deal with page numbers correctly.
- You can add page numbers.
- You can export pages to a new file. This is a workaround to unlock pages that are locked.
Watch out for:
- Embed all your fonts so that they will print correctly.
- Pictures cannot be in .jpg format in word. They should be .tif formats.
- Sometimes the page size defaults to US letter size. This will reflow and change your text. Make sure you always select A4.
Special Cover Effects
Embossing, raised type, glitter, extra gloss on a matte finish - all these techniques are possible. Generally, the costs range from $1500 up, depending on treatment. Thus, $1.50 per book for 1000 copies, $15 per book for 100 copies. Further instructions are available to members.
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