Advanced Typesetting for Authors
Formatting Your Manuscript for Print Publication
So you’ve written a manuscript, revised it to the best of your ability, and polished it to a mirror shine. Now all you need to do is publish it. That must be the easy part, right? If you’ve decided to self-publish, you have a difficult decision ahead: Pay professionals to manage the production of your manuscript, or produce the publication-ready book yourself.
The decision doesn’t have to be all or nothing. You may decide to hire professionals for some things and tackle other parts of the production process yourself. For instance, you may hire a copyeditor and then handle the final proofread yourself. Or you may hire a cover designer and take on the interior formatting yourself.
If you’re going e-book only, you have less formatting to manage. But what if you want to make a print book available? Today’s Shelf Life is on how to format your manuscript for a print edition of your book if you decide to do it yourself. Since Shelf Life is software-agnostic, I won’t get into the specifics of how to format in Word versus in Publisher, for example, but will go through the decisions you need to make to arrive at a well-formatted page for the printing press.
Text Block Size
The very first thing to determine is how large your text block should be. The text block is the area of the page in which all text will print; put another way, it’s everything inside the margins.
Your text block size can’t be determined without knowing your book’s trim size, or the final dimensions of the finished book. For obvious reasons, your text block size cannot be larger than your trim size. The text block has to fit within the dimensions of the trimmed page and leave margins all around.
While your text block will not be placed in the center of the page—more on that in the next section—a safe bet is to plan your text block to be one inch smaller all around than your trim size. For example, if your book’s trim size is 6 inches by 9 inches, then your text block could safely be 5 inches by 8 inches. If your trim size is 5 by 8, then your text block can be 4 by 7, and so on.
Margins
The text block can’t simply sit in the center of the page; no, that would be too easy. Instead, the text block is traditionally offset both vertically and horizontally.
The vertical offset is simple: Traditionally, the top margin is smaller than the bottom margin. The degree to which you make this different is up to you. If you’ve left enough space for an inch all around, for example, you could do a half-inch margin at the top and a one-and-a-half-inch margin at the bottom. To be honest, it doesn’t need to be that precise. You can shift the text block up the page from center until it looks right to you.
I suggest opening a few books and looking at the top and bottom margins to see how these are usually offset and follow the model of one that looks best to you.
The inside (gutter) and outside margins are a little trickier. The text box should always be shifted slightly toward the outside of the page, leaving a larger margin at the gutter. This is because the binding is going to “eat” some of that margin space. If you leave the left and right margins the same size, then after binding and trimming your text block will appear to be shifted toward the binding.
Unless you’ve written a doorstopper of a tome, a half-inch offset at the gutter should be plenty. This means your gutter margin should be larger by half an inch than your outside margin. Again, if you’ve left an inch of space all around, that means shifting the text block to the outside of the page such that the gutter margin is 1.5 inches and the outside margin is .5 inches. A gutter margin of 1.25 and an outside margin of .75 would also work just fine.
If your book is unusually long (500 pages or more), you will want to add further gutter margin. The greater the width of the spine, the more page real estate “falls into the bind.” Remember: You can make your text block slightly narrower to accommodate more gutter margin if you feel you need it. The text block does not have to be in exact proportion to the trim size.
Heads and Folios
Folio refers to the page number and where it is placed on the page. Heads refers to your book’s running head, the text at the top of the page that gives you information about what you’re reading.
The running head and folio should be within the text block. They are typically the very first line at the top of the text block. If you are using a drop folio, or a folio that appears at the bottom of the text block rather than at the top with the running head, it should be the very last line at the bottom of your text block.
Could you have running feet instead of running heads? Yes, but they’re much less common and I definitely don’t recommend them for a novel. The interest in a novel should come from its text, not from the interior book design.
The type size of the running head and the folio may be smaller than the type used for your main body text; they may even be in a different font or style. For instance, you may use a sans serif font or small caps for your running head while you use a serif font in standard type style for your body text.
If your folio is in line with the running head, keep in mind that recto (or right-side) pages are the odd numbers and verso (or left-side) pages are the even numbers. The folio should always be to the outside margin, meaning the folio should be placed on the right for odd-numbered pages and to the left for even-numbered pages.
The text of the running head may also vary from verso to recto page. Or you may opt for the same text on both sides. A simple running head would be Book Title on both verso and recto. You could also go with author name on verso and book title on recto, a very standard head setup, or chapter number on verso and title on recto.
Font, Type Size, and Leading
Now the fun part: Choosing your font. Traditionally, books use a serif font for the main body text. There’s a lot of more recent science around the ease of reading sans serif fonts such that I don’t believe, any longer, that sans serif text is harder to read for long periods of time. However, I still recommend a serif font for the main body text because—again—the interior design of any novel should look pretty much like the interior design of every other novel on the shelf near it. There’s no reason for or benefit of getting avant garde with the design.
Some perfectly great fonts to use for interior book text, that pretty much everyone is likely to have if they have Word installed on their computer, include Garamond, Palatino, and Sabon. Lora and Libre Baskerville, which are available for free through the Google Font Foundry, are also excellent choices.
Traditionally, leading (that is, the space between lines) should be 120 to 140 percent of the type’s point size. For instance, 8 (font point size) over 10 (leading point size) and 10 over 12 are popular size combo choices for type and leading. However, most word processors don’t let you work in point sizes.
In Microsoft Word, you can set your line spacing to “multiple” meaning a multiple of the font size, and go with a multiple of 1.2 or 1.4 to achieve the effect. A font size of 8, 9, or 10 is appropriate based on the font. Fool around with these variations (eg, Lora 8 at 1.2, Garamond 8 at 1.4, Palatino 9 at 1.2, and so on) until you find one that looks good to you.
Chapter Openers
The last element you’ll need to design—not counting your front matter—is the look of your chapter opener. Each chapter opening page should be uniform in design with each other and should contain the chapter number and chapter title (if your book has chapter titles).
The top of the chapter opener should sink about one quarter to one third of the way down the page. It should not start at the very top of the text block. Further, chapter openers should not have a running head and may or may not include a folio. If you do include a folio on the chapter opener, it should be centered at the bottom (a drop folio) rather than at the top of the text block.
The chapter number may be displayed as a numeral (9) or written out (Nine), and may or may not include the word “Chapter,” depending on your preference. Just keep in mind that you have to design for the longest version you’ll have to display: “Chapter Twenty-Two” is significantly more characters than “22.” If you have chapter titles, the title should follow a line or two after the chapter number. Both the number and title should be in larger text than the main body.
File Type
Finally, a word on saving your file. Whatever program you’re using to create your formatted manuscript file, you’ll likely need to deliver a PDF to the printer or their intermediary. If you have the option of PDF type, make sure you are saving as a type X PDF (eg, X1A). If you are asked during the saving process whether you would like to embed fonts and images, you should choose to do so. The PDF file you create for the printer should contain all the data the printing press needs to print the book.
If you have any questions about file type or any concerns, ask your customer service rep at the printing press to have the prepress team check on those concerns during preflight. You don’t want to find out that a special character dropped out when you’re thumbing through one of your 2000 printed copies.
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