Welcome to Book Design 101 – a handy guide covering all the basics of what you need to know when publishing your first book. In this episode, we’ll talk about professional book formatting – and why it’s important to get it right and pay attention to all the details. And if you’re interested in how a layout should look like, check out this article: The Anatomy of a Book (Layout).
Rule 1: Don’t let your readers get tired of reading
Properly done book design in a commercial project has two main goals: aesthetics and functionality.
And it’s functionality that’s more important of the two.
What do I mean by that? Imagine: you’re reading a book, but your eyes keep getting tired after 30 pages – you don’t know why, but for some reason you have to take frequent breaks. You also can’t help but keep noticing some small things that don’t look like they usually do in books, which makes it harder to focus on the story. You’re probably not even sure what, exactly, is wrong, but you’re left with a strange impression. You will probably think twice about picking up another book by this author.
My job is to help you avoid this exact scenario.
What are the things that might have made the reader in the story less than enthusiastic?
For example:
- Text layout – your genre and target group affect what kind of font and line spacing should be used (Is your book for meant for children – and if yes, of what age? Is your book a novel with long chapters, or a non-fiction with a lot subheadings? Is your book meant to be read primarily by the elderly, or by people with visual impairments?).
- All the pesky visual distractions that break the readers’ focus – like widows, orphans, and runts*, inconsistent formatting, uneven paragraph spacing, word ladders*, bad hyphenation breaks, and many more tiny details that matter.
You might wonder if all that is actually really important – but hey, you don’t have to take just my word for it. Book formatting, typesetting, and the experience of reading are subject to scientific research, and there have been studies done on subjects like what font size is most helpful to young children, or what font style or text alignment is most comfortable for the reader when absorbing longer texts.
Here’s a few examples of such studies, if you fancy a more in-depth take on some of these issues:
- Schneps MH, Thomson JM, Sonnert G, Pomplun M, Chen C, Heffner-Wong A (2013) Shorter Lines Facilitate Reading in Those Who Struggle. PLoS ONE 8(8): e71161. – an article about what kind of adjustments can prove beneficial for people with reading difficulties, such as dyslexia.
- Katzir T, Hershko S, Halamish V. The effect of font size on reading comprehension on second and fifth grade children: bigger is not always better. PLoS One. 2013 Sep 19;8(9)– an article about how font size affects children’s reading ability
- Arditi A, Cho J. Serifs and font legibility. Vision Res. 2005 Nov;45(23) – an article about the age old serif vs sans-serif dilemma
D I C T I O N A R Y
Important! Removing these is always context based – sometimes it’s better to leave a runt alone if removing it means generating a much more serious problem a few pages later.
- Widows – A widow is 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).
- Word ladder – presents itself when the same word appears at the end of several lines in a row.
Rule 2: The layout should help tell your story
Fonts have histories. Fonts have personalities. Some fonts are better suited for different purposes than being used in books, and some should definitely not be used if you want to be taken seriously.
These statements might sound a bit enigmatic to you right now, but they do mean a lot to your readers – even if they sometimes don’t realise it themselves.
For example – if you wrote a non-fiction book about tech, you might want to use a body font that will look sleek and modern. But if you wrote a historical novel set in the 19th century, you might want to reference the era – maybe by using an updated version of a font that was popular in that time, or by otherwise looking for inspiration in the layout and placement of various elements. If you want to highlight a passage or a phrase, you might want to use cursive, or switch fonts – but remember to stay away from the ones that are overused or carry other connotations that you don’t want to bring up.
A good designer will explain to you why you shouldn’t use Comic Sans or Papyrus, or probably even Times New Roman. An even better one will propose a font that will match the tone, genre and purpose of your book.
And yes, there has also been research done into font personalities and how differently can readers interpret text written in different fonts. For example, psychologists Samuel Juni and Julie Gross asked 102 New York University students to read a satirical article from the New York Times once – and gave it to them printed in Times New Roman and in Arial. Afterwards, they were asked to rate their response to what they had read – and apparently, the article was a lot funnier and angrier in Times New Roman. If you’d like to read the study – here’s a link:
- Juni S, Gross JS. Emotional and persuasive perception of fonts. Percept Mot Skills. 2008 Feb;106(1)
And if you’d like a lighter reading recommendation, check out “Why fonts matter” by Sarah Hyndman.
Rule 3: Follow the rules!
Book design has been practiced literally for hundreds of years, and modern typesetting has grown and evolved since the invention of the printing press. This means that it had plenty of time to develop dozens of rules and regulations – and following them is not only what makes your book functional, but it is also what makes it look professional.
The rules and regulations of book formatting make sense – they make the text easy and comfortable to read, and following them helps to ensure that your reader won’t give up halfway through your book. Most people can tell if something is well-designed, even if they won’t be able to pinpoint the details – if you stray too far from the baseline, and your book is not a purely artistic project, your readers will feel that something is off.
Following the rules also helps avoiding technical mishaps – for example, using a grid to structure text in a novel is vital for legibility, especially when printing on thin paper, as it makes all lines on all pages sit at exactly the same height.
That’s it!
I hope you found this short article useful – let me know if you think it’s lacking something, or if you have an additional question.
I’m always up for a chat – get in touch via marta@martadec.eu.
