I have designed several books, some for clients, some for other self-publishers, and some for myself and family. When all your writing and editing are done and you’re in the layout phase, you need to decide on your book size, margins, gutters, fonts, and a myriad of other considerations in designing your book.
There are many questions with these projects, and for each there are lots of [sometimes conflicting] answers. Which rules should you follow? Rather than going into any detail on that in this post at all, I want you to pause, step back, and approach this differently.
There are five questions you need to answer (or have your client answer) before you proceed. Two of these, the foundation questions, you should hopefully already know the answer to, as they apply to every aspect of your book. Then the remaining three questions need to be answered for each and every decision you need to make.
While this post goes into plans for designing your self-published book, it doesn’t take the next step into the huge topic of how you promote and sell your book. Putting this as eloquently as possible: That’s a whole ’nother topic!
The foundation questions
I call these the foundation questions because the answers will influence everything you do in the project. For every decision you must make about your book, your answer should be in the context of your answers to these two questions. Having a clear idea here should guide you, if not while writing your book, then at least by the time you are editing and doing the layout.
1. Who is you audience?
Who are your readers? Picture a few of the people who would read this book. What are these people’s education level, vocabulary, location, general life experience, etc.? Why do these people give a damn about what they are reading? Everything you do needs to be done with this audience in mind.
2. What is your goal?
To define your goal (or goals), think of it in terms of what you hope your audience will feel, think, or do when they read your book. Sure, you want them to like it and tell everyone they know to buy your book! But go deeper than that.
Do you simply want them to have learned something? Do you want them to be motivated to make a change in the way they do things? Do you want them to be motivated to do something, or to contribute to a cause?
It’s perfectly fine for your goal to simply be that your readers will enjoy the experience of reading your book. Just be sure that you have defined what your goal is.
The reasons behind the rules
With the answers to those first two questions, your audience and goal should be firmly in your mind. Let’s get back to the topic of book design and the remaining three questions. When you design any publication—whether a specification, a brochure, or a book—you need to make a large number of decisions: page size, fonts, leading, margins, headers, front matter, chapter leads, tables of contents, cover design, and on and on.
You don’t have to look very hard to find many books and web sites with suggestions and rules to answer your questions, some more authoritative than others. But to make any decision based on these rules, you need to look at the considerations behind those rules. For each decision, ask yourself the remaining three questions:
3. What does your reader expect?
Go to your own bookshelf, or if you don’t have a big collection of books, go look on the shelves in your local library or at a book store (yes, a place where there are actual printed books on actual physical shelves!).
Look at books that are in the same category as yours: What do you see? Take books off the shelves and flip through them. What do you like? Or, more importantly, what will your audience like? How would aspects of this book contribute to your goal?
Now ask yourself some specific questions: What is the size of the book? Is it paperback or hardcover? Do most of the books use serif fonts, or sans-serif? Do they have extra spacing above chapters or between paragraphs? Do they include an index? Do they have section names in the headers? do they have a large left margin?
I could go on and on here. The point is that borrowing on some of these ideas would not be a bad way to go, as many of these books were designed by large publishers who usually know what the heck they are doing.
4. What are the impacts on your goals?
For each question you must consider how it will affect your audience and goals. I am primarily directing this post at self-publishers who must make all these decisions on their own, but even then, there are some decisions that are out of your hands.
Is your audience typically going to be reading your book while on the go? Then consider using a book size that is more convenient to carry around. Is your audience generally older? Then consider whether one font is more readable than another, and if you should use a larger text size. Do you want wide margins that someone can write in? Will this need to be spiral bound to lay flat and allow writing? Is there a certain mood or style that might work better with your particular audience?
For every design decision, weigh it in the context of your answers to the foundation questions.
5. What options does your publishing method allow?
If you are working with a publisher, then many of these design decisions are likely out of your hands. That said, if you have strong opinions, don’t be shy about expressing them! When I see a book put out by a major publisher that has unique typesetting or strange design features, I love imagining how hard the author must have pushed for this!
If you are a self-publisher using a print-on-demand (POD) option, then you will have a set list of book sizes and paper types to choose from (see POD options below). The design of the book’s interior will be entirely up to you, though you may be limited by the size options offered by your POD option, the fonts you can afford to buy, the capabilities of the layout tool you are using, whether you can hire a designer to produce your book, and much more.
Some self-publishers may decide to work with a local printer to produce the books then take care of their own distribution. Only take this route if you have carefully planned your options, have made arrangements with booksellers, etc.
An example
For example, let’s assume you are self-publishing a book that has photography along with text. Here is how the answers to the five questions will shape this book.
- Who is your audience? While you may have more details than this, your audience is other people like yourself who might enjoy your photography and be inspired by the mini essays about each image.
- What is your goal? While it would be nice to sell as many books as possible, for the purpose of this example, your main goal is simply to share your work and hopefully inspire others.
- What does your reader expect? If you will want the emphasis of this book to be on the photography, this might be a “coffee table book.” But if the photography serves more as illustrations for the text, then it should be a portrait-oriented book that would fit on a bookshelf.
- What are the impacts on your goals? A coffee table book would be large enough to show off the photos with adequate white space and also with room for text without crowding the photos. But if the photos mainly serve to support the text, this book is meant more to be read than to be looked at. For this example, let’s assume it is the latter: a book of short essays with photography that supports the text. In this case, this should be a portrait-oriented book that can be comfortably held in the reader’s hands and that can fit on a bookshelf with the spine showing.
- What options does your publishing method allow? Now that it’s time to tackle the layout, look at the specifics. If you are working with a publisher then they will let you know your options. But when you are self publishing, each alternative comes with different options and limitations: see POD options below for more on this.
With all of these questions nailed down, you can now produce the files for book and submit them to your chosen publishing solution.
POD options
How to decide between the POD options is quite the rabbit hole. One place to start is to look at the available book sizes:
When I create a book to print and distribute myself, I tend to use Lulu, as they provide bulk print pricing options. But if my goal is to list the book on Amazon, I use KDP. I have heard good things about Ingram Spark, as well.
That said, the options and opportunities change all the time, so I encourage you to invest some time to investigate the options yourself. There are of course other options. Here is a list from Forbes.
