The goal of correctly formatting a book is giving your reader a comfortable reading experience… but sometimes, you’re faced with a choice of “what will make the reader the least uncomfortable” (because fixing one thing will make other, worse mistakes pop up two pages later). When you’re not a professional, it’s not that easy to make the call and decide what to keep, and what absolutely needs to be fixed. Here’s a list of 6 book formatting mistakes that you should definitely avoid if you want to make your book look presentable.
1) Lack of a half-title page
Every book starts with a front matter – which includes things like a half-title page, a title page, a table of contents, a dedication, a foreword… and so on.
A half-title page is the very first page of the book, featuring just the title, in a smaller font size than on the actual title page on the following spread. It’s practical purpose is to serve as an additional layer of protection between the title page and the cover. Sometimes – especially when they want to limit the page count – authors skip it, which is never done in traditional publishing.
If you want your book to have a professional, polished look – use the half-title page.
2) Widows, orphans, and runts
The most common typesetting mistakes that will immediately make your reader feel like something’s not quite right? Widows, orphans, and runts.
- Widow – the end of a paragraph (a single line of text consisting of one or more words) that appears at the top of a column.
- Orphan (sometimes called a runt) – A paragraph-opening line that appears by itself at the bottom of a page or column,
- Runt – A word, part of a word, or a very short line that appears by itself at the end of a paragraph (how permissible this is varies in different languages and depends on word length, but it’s important not to have too many of these).
If your pages are littered with these – it’s a dead give-away that your book was not typeset by a professional.
BUT if you pick up a traditionally published book off your shelf, you’re very likely to encounter at least a few of them as well, especially orphans and runts. Why? Because removing them is always context-based. It’s possible that removing a runt will make the spread have an uneven number of lines, or will make another, worse mistake appear two pages later.
In a hierarchy of typesetting crimes, I would personally say that widows are the worst; uneven pages are the second worst; orphans are annoying, but sometimes unavoidable, and runts should be avoided, but can be overlooked, especially if they’re longer than the indent of the following paragraph.
3) Incorrect indentation
Speaking of indents – you should either use indented paragraphs, or blank lines between them. Combining the two is overkill, and is absolutely never done in properly formatted books.
Secondly, the first paragraph after a chapter title, should not be indented. The exception are dialogues, but only if you’re writing in a language that uses dashes to mark them (like Polish). If you’re using English, or Norwegian, or any other language that uses quotation marks for dialogues – don’t indent the first paragraph.
4) Page numbers and running headers where they shouldn’t be
Should all pages in a book be numbered?
No. No, they shouldn’t.
Page numbering in a novel usually starts with the first chapter, or with a prologue/foreword. This means that the first page number in your book is likely to be 7 or 9 or 11, depending on how much content you have in your front matter. You can, of course, also omit the front matter entirely and just use “1” as the first page number in your prologue.
A similar rule applies if, let’s say, your chapter 2 end on the left side of the spread, and chapter three starts to the right. The left hand page should not have a page number, no matter if there is text on it, or if it’s blank.
And when it comes to running headers – avoid them in the front matter, as well as on chapter opening pages.
5) Inconsistent formatting and spacing
One of the most important rules in typesetting is consistency. This means that you should always have the same amount of space between chapter headings and the top margin, between headings and subheadings, between subheadings and body text. If you’re using italics to highlight quotes, use them consistently. If you’re using different fonts on different parts of the text, use them consistently. You should be using one set of rules for typesetting the entire book.
6) Lack of hyphenation
Sometimes, we learn in school that we should not hyphenate words. That is makes it more difficult to read, or makes the text look ugly.
If a teacher has ever told you that, let me know their address and I will send them a very sternly worded letter, because when it comes to typesetting a book, or really – making any printed text have good flow – lack of hyphenation is a serious crime.
Not using hyphens – in any language, but especially if you’re writing in a language that has a lot of long compound words – will make your text have either very large or very tight word spacing, which will make it a nightmare to read.
Hyphenation needs to be controlled and needs to be done correctly, and yes – each language will have different rules for it. But if your book is a novel, your target group is between the ages 8-90, and your text is justified, USE HYPHENATION.
If your target group is below 8, however, you can consider using a right-aligned text and no hyphenation, because yes – for small children, hyphenation might make text comprehension a bigger challenge.
That’s it!
I hope you found this article useful – let me know if you think it’s lacking something, or if you have an additional question. Would you add something else to this list of 6 book formatting mistakes?
I’m always up for a chat – get in touch via marta@martadec.eu.
