Design

This post, by Nichole Bernier, originally appeared on The Millions on 4/2/13.

1.
“Why are they still bothering with paperbacks?” This came from a coffee-shop acquaintance when he heard my book was soon to come out in paperback, nine months after its hardcover release. “Anyone who wants it half price already bought it on ebook, or Amazon.”

Interestingly, his point wasn’t the usual hardcovers-are-dead-long-live-the-hardcover knell. To his mind, what was the use of a second, cheaper paper version anymore, when anyone who wanted it cheaply had already been able to get it in so many different ways?

I would have taken issue with his foregone conclusion about the domination of ebooks over paper, but I didn’t want to spend my babysitting time down that rabbit hole. But he did get me thinking about the role of the paperback relaunch these days, and how publishers go about getting attention for this third version of a novel — fourth, if you count audiobooks.

I did what I usually do when I’m puzzling through something, which is to go back to my journalism-school days and report on it. Judging by the number of writers who asked me to share what I heard, there are a good number of novelists who don’t quite know what to do with their paperbacks, either.

Here’s what I learned, after a month of talking to editors, literary agents, publishers, and other authors: A paperback isn’t just a cheaper version of the book anymore. It’s a makeover. A facelift. And for some, a second shot.

2.
About ebooks. How much are they really cutting into print, both paperbacks and hardcovers? Putting aside the hype and the crystal ball, how do the numbers really look?

The annual Bookstats Report from the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which collects data from 1,977 publishers, is one of the most reliable measures. In the last full report — which came out July 2012 — ebooks outsold hardcovers for the first time, representing $282.3 million in sales (up 28.1%), compared to adult hardcover ($229.6 million, up 2.7%). But not paperback — which, while down 10.5%, still represented $299.8 million in sales. The next report comes out this July, and it remains to be seen whether ebook sales will exceed paper. Monthly stat-shots put out by the AAP since the last annual report show trade paperbacks up, but the group’s spokesperson cautioned against drawing conclusions from interim reports rather than year-end numbers.

Numbers aside, do we need to defend whether the paperback-following-hardcover still has relevance?

Read the rest of the post, which includes a gallery of before and after book covers, on The Millions.

Recently I was asked to contribute an introduction to print book design for a publication that will be out soon. I decided to address the piece to an author who was thinking about self-publishing, but wondering whether it’s worth doing a print book. Here’s my response:

If you want to sell books at events or give them away to reviewers or to friends and family, you’ll want to use print books. And many people prefer reading print books, even people who own laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

So there’s a big role for print books to play in your publishing plans.

But as a new self-publisher, you may not know how to get your book ready for printing.

Print books haven’t changed much in 500 years and they are far more complex than ebooks when it comes to preparing your book files.

With ebooks, you’re just converting your file from one format into another, then adding some cover art.

But with print books you have to know how they will be printed, who will be printing them, and that specific printer’s requirements. It’s good also if you’ve designed a lot of books before, so you know how the image on your screen will translate into paper and ink.

And if you’re thinking about marketing your print books, they will need to look even better. After all, they’ll be competing with books from big publishers, where all the books are designed and produced by professionals.

Now I’m not going to pretend that I can give you an education in book design and production in this article. But what I can do is give you a big head start on your journey to creating a good-looking, reader-friendly, market-oriented print book.

And point out a few things to avoid so you don’t look like a complete newbie. That would be good, right?

Okay, let’s dive in and start at the beginning.

Newbie Mistakes to Avoid

One thing you probably don’t want to happen is have your book “look” self-published.

Honestly, it doesn’t cost any more to print a book that’s properly put together and intelligently designed than it is to print a book that ignores book publishing conventions and looks like an amateur production.

In fact, I’ve got an idea of exactly what would help you get that book, and I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. No matter what you plan to do with your books, they will be more likely to succeed if they avoid the most common mistakes new self-publishers typically make.

Here are some to watch out for.

• Getting your pages switched around—remember that all the right-hand pages in your book, starting with page 1, are odd numbers. All the left-hand pages are even numbers.
• Make sure your blank pages are blank—a blank page doesn’t need a running head, a page number, or “this page intentionally left blank” on is. In printed books, blank pages are just that—blank.
• No blanks on the right—your book should never have a blank page on a right-hand page.
• Forgetting the front matter—you want to include at least a title page and a copyright page, and probably a contents page before you start the text of the book.
• Tiny page margins—trying to save money by printing fewer pages rarely produces a book people actually want to read. Leave enough space on the outside for the reader to hold the book, and on the inside (or “gutter”) so that it doesn’t swallow your text.
• Not capitalizing properly—titles, subtitles, chapter titles and subheads should all be title case, not sentence case. In other words, all words except short prepositions are capitalized.
• Avoiding full justification—you don’t really want your book to have “rag right” typesetting, where the right margin is ragged. You want your book to be fully justified, which means that your page of type is a rectangle with all the lines (except the last line in a paragraph) extend from the left margin all the way to the right margin.

If you’re curious about any of these tips, have a look at some of your own books.

You’ll discover that these are rules or conventions of book publishing. Virtually all books produced by professionals will follow these rules and conventions unless the designer has a good reason not to.

By watching out for newbie mistakes, you’ll make your book look a lot better, and your readers will thank you for it.

Picking Fonts for Your Book

One of the big decisions you’ll need to make when it comes time to get your book ready for printing is: What fonts will you use?

What fonts you have available might depend on the software you’ve installed on your PC, and what fonts came along with the program. Or you might have purchased or downloaded fonts from one of the many font sites online.

In any case, here are some guidelines that will help you choose typefaces for your book.

• Readability—this is the most important quality for your text font, the one that most or all of your book will be set in. Many designers feel that the most reliably readable are fonts based on oldstyle typefaces like Garamond, Bembo, or Caslon. More modern versions include Minion, Adobe Garamond, and Sabon.
• Contrast—you’ll want a different typeface to use for chapter titles or part titles, and for subheads in nonfiction books. Combining a text typeface with a san serif display face can add drama and subtle allusions to a specific era or style.
• Legality—fonts are intellectual property, just like your book manuscript. Make sure you have the rights to use the fonts in a book by checking out the licensing agreement, if possible. Most fonts that ship with software are licensed for commercial use, and there are reliable sites where you can download free, commercial use fonts online.
• Appropriateness—you’ll want a text font for your text, and a display font for your title and perhaps for interior display use. For an academic treatise, you don’t want your chapter titles in Comic Sans, do you? That wouldn’t be appropriate. If you can’t decide, have a look at other, similar books and try to do what they did.

Researching Book Interiors

As many other authors have discovered, there are great guides to how your book should look right nearby. Start taking a critical look at some of the books on your own bookshelf:

• How do they treat the various elements of book design, like the chapter opening pages, the running heads (or running feet, if they appear at the bottom of the pages), the page numbers?
• What do you notice about the typefaces these books use to convey the author’s ideas? Is a separate font used for the chapter titles or part titles?
• How are titles, epigraphs (those are the quotations often found at the beginning of a chapter), and subheads aligned? How are the spaced compared to other elements on the page?
• What are the margins like, are they symmetrical? Are the outside margins larger than the inside margins? How close does the type come to the edge of the page?
• If there are illustrations, charts, tables, figures, graphs or other graphics, do they have captions or explanations of some kind? Are they numbered or referenced to the text somehow?

This is one of the fastest ways to educate yourself about how books are put together and what might work for your own book.

Concentrate on books that have been successful in your own genre or category, that will help keep you focused on finding a style that will work for you.

A few hours absorbing these seemingly minute details will give you a grounding in book design as it affects your kind of books. Make notes on the elements you like the best, you’ll use them later on.

You also want to make sure your book is put together properly, that’s really important.

What Will Help

Okay, I promised to tell you about something that would help.

I’ve been working for years on ways for new self-publishers to produce better books. A lot of the over 900 articles on this blog are a testament to that effort.

But guess what? I’ve had a breakthrough, and I’m almost ready to share it with you.

In about a week I’m going to open the door to a new way for DIY authors to create industry-standard, great-looking books. I’ve seen too many of the other kind of books, and it’s time to do something about it.

I’m really excited about this, there’s nothing else like it anywhere. Inexpensive, simple to use, effective.

So stay tuned, I know you wouldn’t want to miss it.

Publetariat Editor’s UPDATE – Joel Friedlander announces: Self-Published Books Get a Major Overhaul with BookDesignTemplates.com

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

Publetariat Editor’s Note: strong language

Over on Jezebel, blogger Tracie Egan Morrissey has got her knickers in a twist over the cover design for the 50th Anniversary re-issue of Syliva Plath’s The Bell Jar. Tracie rants:

If Sylvia Plath hadn’t already killed herself, she probably would’ve if she saw the new cover of her only novel The Bell Jar. For a book all about a woman’s clinical depression that’s exacerbated by the suffocating gender stereotypes of which she’s expected to adhere and the limited life choices she has as a woman, it’s pretty fucking stupid to feature a low-rent retro wannabe pinup applying makeup. (Also, it’s ugly and the colors suck.)

Way to completely miss the subtlety of a very cleverly and thoughtfully -designed book cover, Tracie.

As we all know, book covers are supposed to convey something about the content of the book, whether in terms of plot, setting, tone or character. And they must evoke something about one or more of those things using the visual shorthand of imagery—typically, symbolic imagery. Still with me there, Tracie?

Let’s start with the publisher’s description of the book:

When Esther Greenwood wins an internship on a New York fashion magazine in 1953, she is elated, believing she will finally realise her dream to become a writer. But in between the cocktail parties and piles of manuscripts, Esther’s life begins to slide out of control. She finds herself spiralling into depression and eventually a suicide attempt, as she grapples with difficult relationships and a society which refuses to take women’s aspirations seriously.

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s only novel, was originally published in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. The novel is partially based on Plath’s own life and has become a modern classic. The Bell Jar has been celebrated for its darkly funny and razor sharp portrait of 1950s society and has sold millions of copies worldwide.

Now, looking back at that cover…is this really just a glam shot of a young, attractive woman tarting herself up, signifying nothing more than ‘girls just wanna have fun and look pretty doing it’? I don’t think so.

First, the background color is a dark red. Not only is it an iconic and representative color for the time period of the novel, but taken on its own, completely out of any context, it’s a symbolically negative color that evokes obstacles, conflict and high energy. Red means stop. “Seeing red” means anger. Red is the color used all over the world on warning signs. Red is also the color of blood, and therefore the color most associated with violence. So the background color should clue the viewer in right away on a gut level: this is not a happy book, you have been warned.

Next, look at the model’s pose and facial expression. She is not smiling, and if anything, the corners of her mouth are downturned. She’s touching up her make-up, but she doesn’t look too happy about that. Actually, her reflection in the mirror shows an expression with downturned mouth that looks more like disgust than anything else. And since the woman is looking at herself, wouldn’t this mean she’s disgusted with herself, and/or with this female obligation to be pretty at all times and at all costs?

And how about that compact? Notice how it completely dominates the image? How it’s front and center, shown in its entirety, while our heroine is only partially visible and off to the side? What message does this convey about the industrial beauty complex versus an individual woman? Also notice – the compact’s red color is being cast downward, partially enveloping the woman’s hand and arm. What does that say about this woman’s relationship with beauty standards and rituals? Could it be that she feels she’s being obscured or overshadowed by them?

Finally, how about the font? Notice how the lines are uneven and spidery, that none of the lines of text are level, and how the text very subtly angles increasingly downward with each line.

Now consider the pre-existing cover designs for this book, in paperback, hardcover and Kindle formats:

Do any of these covers say anything at all about the content of the book? The first one clues you in that it’s about a woman, but that’s it. The second (the 25th anniversary re-issue cover, BTW) looks more like the cover of a romance novel than a semi-autobiographical account of feminist rage and depression. I guess the rain on the third one symbolizes depression, but that’s all it says. Maybe if you saw all three of them together, you’d get some idea of the content. But as standalones, they don’t hold a birthday candle to the 50th anniversary redesign.

Apparently Tracie would’ve preferred a more literal, hit-you-over-the-head cover, perhaps showing a hot mess of a woman slashing her wrists. But wouldn’t an image like that 1) be a spoiler 2) be a tough sell and 3) overpower the book’s feminist message?

2/7/13 Updated to add: Now THIS is a crime against lit – Anne of Green Gables made over into a blonde farm tart on the cover of a self-pub edition snagged from public domain content http://ht.ly/hvSam

 
This is a reprint from April L. Hamilton’s new site, The Digital Media Mom.

Okay, so you’re sitting at your keyboard pounding away, working on your latest work in progress. You get to the end of a section, hit [Enter] a couple of times and then type the subhead for the next section of text.

You’re an experienced word processor—hey, you’re a writer, right?—so you grab your mouse, select the text of the subhead and start formatting it. Maybe you want your subheads to be Helvetica Bold, 12 point, all caps. (I’m not recommending that, by the way, just using it as an example.)

You quickly select Helvetica from your font menu, change the size, change the alignment from fully justified—which you’re using for the text—to flush left (left-aligned), which is what you’re using for your subheads. Maybe, if you’re nitpicky, you also add a little space above and below the subhead, either by using the [Enter] key or going into the Paragraph formatting palette and setting values in the “Spacing Before/After” boxes.

The Problem with Formatting

That was a lot of work to format a subhead, don’t you think? We walked through about 6 steps to get the formatting right. And you’ll have to repeat these steps every time you come to a subhead in your manuscript.

Some people realize this is a lot of repetitive work and invent shortcuts like copying the last subhead, which copies all the formatting with it, then pasting it where you want the new subhead, and then deleting the old text and replacing it with the new text. That saves time, doesn’t it?

But the fact is that all these methods are bad choices.

Over the course of a long book, can you really be sure you’ve input exactly the same formatting values every time? Did you remember to add that “Space/After” every time? Maybe you should check, since there’s no other way to be certain.

Wait, didn’t you try a couple of subheads in the Verdana font? Did you remember to go back and change those? What about if someone mentions that your 12-point Helvetica bold subheads would look a lot better in 11 point? What are you going to do then?

The Answer to the Formatting Problem

No professional typesetter or designer would face these same problems. Would you like to know why?

It’s because professionals are getting paid for their work. The longer it takes to do a particular task, the less money they will derive from a project with a flat fee. Therefore, they will use the tools built into professional-level software to automate and standardize this process as much as possible. And that’s what you should be thinking about also, if you plan to do your own book interior in Microsoft Word.

Microsoft Word and most other robust word processors now contain a few of the same tools found in high-end layout programs. These are the tools that will make your life easier and your work more efficient. The one you really want to learn right now is Styles.

A style in Word is simply a way to capture all the formatting for a particular piece of text so it can be named, edited, and used for all other similar pieces of text.

For instance, in my example, we could do all that formatting once, then capture it as a Style and call it “Subhead.”

When you get to the next subhead in your manuscript, instead of reaching for the mouse and starting to format it, you just assign the “Subhead” style to it. Bingo, your text is completely formatted in one simple step.

If you learn to do this, the time you spend working on your manuscript will be a lot more enjoyable and contain a lot less of the routine, mind-numbing repetitive work it takes to do these tasks manually.

But using styles has three other crucial benefits:

1. All the similar pieces of text—like all the subheads—will be formatted exactly the same way, because they are all assigned with the same Style. There is much less margin for error, so you can be sure your book’s formatting is professional and consistent.
2. You can change the definition of your “Subhead” style—for instance, from 12 point to 11 point—and all the pieces of text with the “Subhead” style will change instantly and uniformly.
3. Your path to eBook conversion will be greatly simplified, because your eBook files need to have all text assigned to a style, and the styles will enforce consistency on the final eBook files.

One of the great things about using word processing software to prepare our manuscripts is its ability to harness the power of our computers to easily and quickly produce manuscripts and books that are consistent.

And knowing that you don’t have to go back and check hundreds of subheads to make sure they are all perfectly consistent? Well, that’s priceless.

The World Up Until Now

Of course, trying to create a book in Microsoft Word is no easy task. I’m pretty sure it would drive me crazy, but that’s because I’ve never had to do it.

I’ve been spoiled by great tools like InDesign.

But I know there are a lot of authors out there who confront this problem, and I have a message for you.

The world is about to change.

In a couple of weeks I’ll have a solution for your problem that I think you’ll really enjoy. It will take away the pain and frustration of trying to get something that looks like a book out of your word processor.

And in order to use it, you’re going to need to know these styles. So take a few minutes to study your word processor’s styles. It will repay you many times over.

Originally published in a slightly different form at CreateSpace as Start Styling! Word Processing Styles & Why You Need Them

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

You’ve been working on your book, getting it ready for publication.

Maybe you’ve hired a designer to create an eye-catching and sophisticated cover, and that’s usually a good idea. But let’s say you’ve decided to do the interior layout by yourself. After all, there are lots of places you can get information about how to create a good-looking book interior. It doesn’t seem quite as difficult to most people, although that might depend on exactly what kind of book you’re publishing.

First Things First

Inevitably, the first decision you’ll make about laying out your book is what size it will be. Vendors like CreateSpace and Lightning Source offer a great selection of sizes for almost any kind of book you might imagine.

For instance, if I was designing a novel for print on-demand, I’d probably pick either 5.5″ x 8.5″ or 5.25″ x 8″, both standard sizes that are easy to hold and feel good in the hand.

The next decision you’ll have to make is what font to use for the main body text of your book. Now, most people have long lists of fonts on their computers, since many programs come with fonts and they often get installed along with the programs. You might be able to find something in these free fonts that will work for you, but many of these fonts won’t be appropriate for lots of kinds of books.

But you – as a wily internet user – know that there are lots of free fonts available online. Why not just surf over to one of those sites and download a font for your book?

Font Warnings

But not all fonts are created equal, and not every font you find online will work for your book. What should you be aware of when you’re searching for free fonts? Here are some things to watch out for:

• Fonts that won’t embed—When it comes time to upload your book files, you’ll need to create a PDF with the fonts embedded in the file. The problem is that some of the fonts you download from free font sites simply won’t embed due to technical or legal restrictions. You don’t want to get to the end of your layout process with hundreds of pages that are now perfect just to find out you’re going to have to replace the main font and potentially re-paginate the whole book.

  How can you tell whether the font you just downloaded will work? The only real way to tell is to set a chapter or a few pages with the font and then try to create the a PDF file for just those pages. You can easily find out if the fonts are embedded by opening the file in Adobe Acrobat and checking under the File/Properties on the Fonts tab. Every font in the list needs to show “Embedded” or “Embedded Subset” for your file to work when it gets to your printer.

  If the font didn’t embed, stop now and save yourself the work of redoing your whole book. 

• Fonts that are illegal—I know, it’s amazing that people post links to property that they don’t actually own, isn’t it? But hey, it’s the internet, and these things happen all the time. If you’re downloading a font from a third-party site, you need to know this. For instance, if you can download a font created by Adobe that you found at “Freddy’s Free Fonts,” you should question whether Freddy bothered to get the rights to distribute it.

  Font foundries often offer free fonts, so you can always go to the foundry’s own website to see what they have available. That way you’ll know the font you have is totally legal, since it came from the manufacturer. You’ll find my recommendation about free font sites at the end of this article.

• Low-quality fonts—Some fonts are enticing when you see them as a sample on a font site, but they might cause you trouble when you try to use them. What kinds of trouble? You might run into fonts that are:
  • Incomplete. Fonts that were created for a specific function, like a headline in an advertising campaign, are frequently incomplete. They might not have all the glyphs and symbols standard fonts have, or they might lack an italic version to go along with the roman. You don’t want that.
     
  • Badly drawn. A sample might look good, but what’s going to happen when you pour your 100,000-word manuscript file into your layout and have thousands of lines of type? Book pages will show off any eccentricity in the typeface, often with nasty consequences. A cute-looking flourish on a lower case “g” for instance, can make your page look “blotchy” or like it has little “flags” popping up everywhere.
     
  • Misaligned. In a sample, you might not notice that the font doesn’t sit properly on the baseline, but in your book this will show up right away. Same for “set width” errors, where the amount of space each letter takes up has not been calculated properly, causing some letter combinations to have too much or too little space to typeset properly.

A Solution for Free Fonts

Because I’ve been typesetting books for many years, I’m pretty careful about the fonts I use. I have no hesitation about downloading free fonts from foundries like the ones in the resource section at the end of this post, and you should be confident about fonts you acquire this way.

The best site I’ve found for third-party free fonts is fontsquirrel.com. This site aggregates fonts from lots of sources and guarantees the fonts are free for commercial use. Fontsquirrel.com also links to foundries and to myfonts.com, the huge site that sells fonts from most font foundries, in case you decide to buy a font instead.

So go out and explore, now that you know what to look for. There’s a whole world of free, high-quality fonts to discover for your next book project.

Resources

Free Font Collections:
fontsquirrel.com
Font Shop’s Free Fonts
Smashing Magazine’s free fonts
Creative Bloq’s 50 Best Free Fonts for Designers

Foundries with free fonts:
Exljbris Foundry
The League of Movable Type
Chank Fonts
Cape Arcona Type Foundry

Roundup of 30 of the best font foundries

Paid Fonts:
Myfonts.com

If you’ve got a favorite free font resource I’ve missed, let me know in the comments [on the original post] and I’ll update [the]  post.  

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander‘s The Book Designer.

This post originally appeared on BookMarketing.net on 7/10/12.

Like it or not, people do judge books by the covers. And poor cover design is one of the areas where self-published authors are most often panned by critics. Self-published authors know this risk, and they know one of the keys to a good cover is a good designer. According to a survey from Taleist, 41% of self-published authors pay for cover design. The survey also shows that authors who get help with editing and design of their books make 34% [more money]—so the investment pays off.

Below is a list of graphic designers who have experience designing book covers. Each has unique strengths and styles, and they range from independent artists to members of larger design groups and publishing organizations. Each shares their advice for authors and a bit about their work in their own words—and they almost unanimously bristled at the “favorite cover” questions. They’re listed alphabetically by first name.

There are many other ways to find a book cover designer. Start with referrals from other writers or by tracking down the designers who created covers you love. The Graphic Artists Guild also has listings of designers to help you find the right fit. You can also find designers familiar with book cover design on LinkedIn, or you can post an ad on Craigslist or Elance. If you’re on a tight budget you can hire students at a local design school.

So how much can you expect to pay? It varies—of course. Some of the factors include who owns the rights to the art, how many sketches and revisions the designer will do, the complexity of the project, whether it’s a paperback or hardcover or ebook, and more. The designers below have a wide range of services from an ebook cover for $395 to original art for $3500. On average (a rough average) an author can expect to pay around $800 to $1000 for a cover by one of these designers. Some are higher, some are lower—but a good price doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a good fit for your book.

Betsy A. Riley

DO find someone who’s familiar with your genre. There are some genres I don’t do—like romance. My style just doesn’t work for that genre.

DON’T forget that you hired the designer because they have some knowledge or skill that you need—give consideration to their advice.

Favorite book cover: Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon Song and The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt.

Favorite cover you’ve designed: That One Left Shoe, edited by me, and Furred & Feathered Friends: Katrina Castaways by Nancy Clark Townsend.

Website: http://brws.com/; http://bluedragonpress.com/

Claudean Wheeler

Read the rest of the post on Bookmarketing.net.