Professional Book Interior Design: Turning Your Manuscript into a Masterpiece
Learn what to expect during book typesetting and proofreading to ensure a smooth path to publication and avoid costly mistakes.
Professional Book Interior Design: Turning Your Manuscript into a Masterpiece
Finalizing a manuscript is a huge milestone for any author, but for those who plan to publish, there are still many steps ahead, including the interior design/typesetting phase, which is when your rough manuscript will transform into a professional, bookstore-ready volume.
Understanding this process—and your role in it—will help ensure smooth sailing from manuscript to market.
Why Professional Book Typesetting Matters
In a nutshell, book typesetting is the process of arranging text and images on a page to create a visually appealing and easily readable layout.
Here are just a few of the dozens of crucial elements typesetters consider with each project.
Typeface selection: Choosing a legible and aesthetically pleasing typeface is the foundation of good typesetting. Fonts should suit the book’s genre and target audience.
Leading: Leading is the vertical space between lines of text. Too little leading can impact readability and make text appear crowded. Too much can make text appear disjointed.
Widows and orphans: The first line of a paragraph should never appear at the bottom of a page; the last line of a paragraph should never wind up at the top of a page. Sounds easy enough until another rule kicks in: Facing pages in a book must end on the same line.
Runts: A paragraph should never end with a single word less than five characters long (including punctuation).
Margins and gutters: Proper margins and gutters provide visual breathing room and prevent text from being lost in the binding.
Kerning: Kerning adjusts the space between individual letters to create a more visually balanced appearance.
Image placement and captions: Images should be integrated seamlessly with the text, and they must be high enough resolution for print. Any captions should be clear, concise, and placed appropriately.
Hyperlinks: It’s important URLs don’t break in a position that can cause the link to be cut short and misdirect readers. The Chicago Manual of Style specifies how URLs should be handled to avoid such problems.
Non-breaking spaces: These are special characters that prevent two words or elements from breaking across lines. Sometimes, such characters are necessary to provide a smooth, uninterrupted reading experience. For example, they can help keep a first name with a middle initial, so the middle initial doesn’t break to the next line.
Our Collaborative Book Design Process: What to Expect
Each company has its own process. Some allow authors to collaborate while others are more restrictive.
At 1106 Design, the process is highly collaborative and creative. We don’t just “dump” your text into a premade template; we curate a layout that reflects your brand and genre.
Our interior design and layout process generally follows these steps:
Sample text designs: Our typesetter will create brief interior samples to help determine the desired look and feel of your book, from typestyle to image treatment. We will work with you until a sample is approved.
Full interior layout: After a sample is approved, the typesetter will lay out the rest of the book to match.
Professional proofreading: One of our expert proofreaders will weed out grammatical, spelling, and punctuation mistakes, as well as issues with the typesetting itself, such as excessive spacing, etc. However, it’s nearly impossible for one person to find every issue, especially on a single pass. So, we always send the typeset book to the author, not just the proofreader. This is your opportunity to ensure the layout is as you want it.
Additional reviews: Once proofreading is done, the proofreader’s suggestions will be sent to you for review so you can accept or reject them as you see fit and request any changes of your own. We’ll then enter the desired changes, send you the revised proof for review, and continue to work back and forth with you until you approve the interior.
True Corrections vs. Authorial Changes: Saving Time and Budget
Authors are often surprised that, after proofreading, they still find more revisions to make. Some authors blame the proofreader for this. However, this usually boils down to a misunderstanding about the difference between true corrections and authorial changes.
Corrections seek to remove typos and other objective issues within the text for a professional presentation. These are the kind of changes a proofreader would typically suggest.
Authorial changes are subjective refinements. They seek to polish the text rather than fix actual errors. For example, changing “walked” to “strolled” is a subjective change. You may feel it improves the book, and maybe it does, but the previous text wasn’t incorrect (and therefore, a proofreader wouldn’t normally flag it).
Pro Tip: To save time and money, you should only start design once your manuscript is final. The focus of typesetting should be on making your book beautiful and readable, not rewording passages that were to be revised before work began.
Authors will always find some way they can revise a book, but at some point, you just have to let go. Typesetting is the least efficient time to make any changes, let alone those that aren’t objectively necessary.
We recommend you sleep on your revision requests a time or two before submitting them to ensure they’re truly what you want, and proofread them for accuracy to avoid accidentally introducing errors. It’s the typesetter’s job to enter revisions, not question their correctness.
Perfection vs. Professionalism: The Goal of the Final Proof
Everyone does their best to ensure books are as error-free as they can be. Absolute perfection, however, is impossible. Each review has the potential to bring new issues to light that were overlooked before. This is completely normal.
Even with the academic presses we work with, it isn’t uncommon to have several revision rounds before the manuscript is declared final. Similarly, traditional publishers go through countless rounds of proofreading, and even then, a minor typo can still slip through.
The goal, therefore, should not be unattainable perfection—it should just be to make the book as clean and final as humanly possible within the time frame allowed by your publishing deadline.
Ready to Transform Your Manuscript?
Now that you have a better idea of our typesetting process and your role in it, it’s time to ask yourself if you’re ready to move forward with your book. If the answer is “yes,” 1106 Design is here to support and guide you every step of the way. Contact us today to learn more about our full suite of services.
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