Creating a Well-Turned Page

Understanding the Basics of Typesetting for Authors

“God is in the kerning.”
—Matteo Bologna

“Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability.”
―Hermann Zapf

Two epigraphs today, friends. Two epigraphs because I love typesetting that much, and also because I love you and I want you to have writing you can enjoy and it would be hubris to gamble on my own. 

In the process of making the exciting leap from writer to author, there is an excellent chance that your manuscript—at some point in the process—will be typeset. I say “an excellent chance” because it’s not a sure thing. If you publish your book only for e-readers (eg, as an .EPUB or .MOBI or .AZW file), then you’re not going to have to worry about it. Different ball game. But if you wish to publish your book in any kind of print format—or your publisher does—then it’s going to need to be typeset. Typesetting, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, means composing the text of your manuscript for visual display—in this case, the pages of your book.

The text of a book on an e-reader is type, but it’s not set. It’s mutable. The end user can change the size of the type and sometimes the font. I’ll go over how to prepare an e-reader file with you some other day, it’s a great skill to have especially if you want to make life nice and easy for your beta readers—but it is not typesetting.

I hope that you will not find yourself undertaking the process of typesetting your own book. My hope is that you sign with a traditional publisher who will handle all this for you, if that is your preference. If a traditional publisher is not your preference but you still wish to publish in a print format, then I hope you will elect to work with a professional to set your book pages. You may think that this is not a valuable aspect of the publishing process to spend money on. Perhaps you have never spent a single second thinking about the typesetting of the books you read. That does not mean it is unimportant. Typesetting is intended to go unnoticed. If it’s noticeable, you did it wrong. It’s easy to do wrong.

Today’s article covers some of the basic principles of book typesetting to prime you to review and evaluate your typeset page proofs when your publisher or typesetting vendor sends them to you or—if you absolutely must—to prepare you to go it yourself for self-publishing in print. This is a big topic, and I have to tackle it in not so many words, so I’ll address it from the top down. Biggest part of the topic first, all the way through to the smallest.

Here’s the number-one most important thing: Do not typeset your manuscript “in advance” to show prospective agents or editors how serious you are about your book. Don’t send typeset proofs to an agent or editor. They’re expecting to see a manuscript. You won’t earn any bonus points or help them out in any way by typesetting ahead of time. They will not appreciate this gesture at all.

Next most important thing: Do not typeset your book until you are completely finished with editing and revision. The only things that come after typesetting are proofreading and incorporating the essential corrections that arise during proofreading. No more editing. Small, non-substantive changes only. It is time consuming and expensive to make text changes to proofs. 

If you get your typeset page proofs and start wordsmithing and copyediting on them, you’re going to create an expensive mess. Your publisher will not foot that bill—book contracts often stipulate that the author must pay for typesetting overages caused by excessive proof corrections. If you have hired someone to typeset your book for you, you’ll pay a fortune in corrections or even have to go back to manuscript and begin again. Typesetters charge by the correction, by the way, unless the correction fixes an error that they inserted. If you find a couple of mistakes on each page of a 224-page book, you’re likely to be hit with an alterations bill exceeding the initial cost of page makeup.

Software and Specs

You want to make sure whatever software you use to typeset your manuscript can generate a PDF/X file. There are many types of PDF, and not all of them are created equal. Printers work with the PDF/X standard because these files conform to printing standards: colors are rendered in CMYK or spot RGB; fonts are embedded in the file (so if the printer doesn’t have a font you used on hand, it will still come out right on your printed pages); and transparencies meet a spec that printers can interpret. If you’re making your own file, find out from your print vendor what PDF/X file type they need and make sure you output that and not anything else. Even within the PDF/X standard, PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-5 aren’t the same thing.

The gold standard for typesetting a book, right now, is Adobe InDesign. If you have never used it, Shelf Life is not the place to learn how. In a future article, I’ll walk you through how to use some of the simpler—and cheaper—tools out there to typeset a basic book like a pro. In the meantime, I will simply say that if you know what you’re doing, use InDesign. If you don’t know what you’re doing, I recommend the Reedsy Book Editor. It’s not perfect but it offers you four of the most useful trim sizes, quickly formats text into a decent-looking text block, and spits out a PDF/X-1a:2001 file, which your printer will be able to work with.

Trim size refers to the exact size—height and width—of the finished book once it has been printed and trimmed. The size you choose will be based on the type of book you’ve written and what your printer can handle. The most common sizes for trade (commercial) books are 6 x 9” or 5.5 x 8.5” (fiction and nonfiction paperbacks, dust jackets, and casebinds) or 4.25 x 7” (mass market paperbacks). I advise you pick one of those if you’ve written prose, drama, or poetry with few illustrations. If you venture outside these common trim sizes, you’ll pay a premium for printing.

Page Design

Once you’ve figured out your trim size, you’ll have to choose the size and placement of your text block. The text block is the area on each page within the margins where you’ll place all your text. Three quarters of an inch to one inch around is fine for margins. If you have a running head, it will be at the very top; if you have a running foot it will be at the very bottom. Design elements can be placed outside the text block, but I don’t recommend getting into something that advanced if you’re going the DIY route. You don’t need to deal with bleeds. Keep it simple, smarty.

The gutter is the part at the center of the book that folds into the spine. For instance when you hold a book open in front of you, the center fold is the gutter. If you are writing an especially long book the spine may be wider and you may need to add extra margin on the gutter (right side for verso, or left-side, pages and left side for recto, or right-side, pages). Here, I made you a thing:

Wow, okay, that took way longer than I thought it would. I apologize—that’s the ugliest book I’ve ever seen but I couldn’t find a better stock photo on short notice. Anyway—see how the margin on the inside is narrower than the margin at the top or outside? That’s because some of the gutter margin is being eaten by the bind. More pages equals thicker spine; thicker spine equals deeper curve at the center when you open the book. If you don’t add extra gutter margin, your printed book may have text “falling into the bind.” Use caution if you’re setting a book with more than 400 print pages. Shorter books should be fine. It’s also normal in print books to have a larger margin at the bottom of the page than the top. Just don’t go crazy with your bottom margin like Mister Uglybook up there.

Are you thinking bigger trim size, bigger text block, fewer pages, cheaper print cost—no drawback? Consider the width of one line of text—the measure of the line—will run the full width of the text block. People prefer a line width of about 9 to 13 centimeters (21 to 33 picas). That’s about how long a line of text can be before the human eye begins to have difficulty tracking from the last character of a line to the first character of the line below. The optimal range for literary material is 9 to 10 centimeters (21 to 24 picas; because we read it carefully, word for word) whereas, for scientific material (which we tend to skim), 12.5 centimeters (around 30 picas) is fine. Look, don’t make your book huge, no one will want to read it.

You should have a running header and possibly also a running footer. There are all kinds of configurations for running heads (what to put on the verso and what to put on the recto, as they need not be the same). Any combo of author’s last name, book title, chapter number, or chapter title (or other division like part or section title) is fine, but keep it to one piece of information on each side. You don’t want your verso head to read “Smith” and your recto head to read “Jane Eyre’s Revenge | Chapter 1: The Case Against Rochester.” That’s way too much information. If you’re not sure how to choose what to put in that prominent real estate—book title verso and book title recto, or author surname verso and book title recto, are always elegant for fiction, poetry, and drama. If you are doing nonfiction, organizational structure is more important. 

Put your folios (page numbers) in either your running heads or feet. If in the head, the folio should be in the outside corner of the text block. If in the foot, the folio should be in the outside corner of the text block or centered. Remember that recto pages always carry the odd page numbers and verso pages always carry the even numbers—the first page of a book is always a recto page (and the last page of a book is always a verso page). If you have a verso page with an odd number or vice versa, you messed up somewhere.

#JustFontThings

Finally, you need to choose a font for your text and, if you’re feeling fancy, a coordinating display font. The display font is what you’d use for chapter numbers and chapter titles and subheadings within the text, if your book has those.  

Your main body text for a print book will usually be in a serif font. The common wisdom on this is that serifs help the eye travel from letter to letter and aid readability and that, in print, a serif font is easier to read for long stretches of time than a sans serif font. Scientific research does not bear out the common wisdom. Sorry, it’s true (see Arditi and Cho in Vision Research). Other factors, like font size and kerning, matter more than the presence or absence of serifs. Still, unless you’re deliberately going for an avant garde look, you should stick with a traditional serif font. You may use a serif or sans serif for your display text and you should use a sans serif font for any image captions. 

It’s important to understand that quality fonts for print are not free and the fonts you have handy probably won’t work well for a high-quality print product. Not every font that comes with every paid copy of Microsoft Word is free to use in commercial products—if you’re using software that’s for “home,” “student,” or “non-commercial” use, then licensed fonts in the software package are not available for you to use in a commercial product. 

Also understand that not every font has every glyph you need. Make a list of any unusual characters you have in your text and ensure that the font you choose has those glyphs. Make The League of Movable Type your best friend. Their Fanwood font is perfect for a book interior and has everything you’re likely to need: 4 styles, 418 glyphs, standard ligatures, lining and old-style numerals (both sets), three common stacked fractions, and basic math symbols—and it would look nice paired with their League Spartan sans.

Here are a few rules for using fonts in a straightforward book:

• Two fonts is the ideal number of fonts for your entire book, three at the most.

• Do not use decorative fonts or elements unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing.

• If you really want a graphic element, pick a simple dingbat (from a font you own) and use it on your chapter openers. 

• The original subtitle of today’s article was Papyrus—Not Even Once.

When it comes to font size, there’s no easy rule for what’s correct. Typeface and leading figure into readability along with the point size. For instance, 10-point Times New Roman is equivalent in size to 11-point Baskerville. Font point size and leading point size are usually expressed as a fraction. For instance, 10/12 (spoken as “ten over twelve”) means a 10-point font with 12-point leading, which is single spacing. That’s probably fine. Set a two-page spread, see how it looks. If the line spacing feels tight, increase your leading. If the font seems small, increase your font size and leading. Descenders from any line should not touch the ascenders of the line that follows.

Finally, turn on auto-hyphenation in whatever software you’re using (Reedsy Book Editor doesn’t seem to have this feature available). Auto-hyph will prevent loose and tight lines from forming by breaking words as needed. Sophisticated software will let you set a tolerance (a three-hyphen stack should be your max tolerance) and what guide the software will use to decide how to break words (follow Merriam-Webster if you have the opportunity to specify). 

Avoiding uncomfortably tight lines or loose lines with gaping holes is more important than keeping words or phrases together. If you’re working with a traditional publisher, please don’t be the author who requests every auto-hyphenation be removed. No, it’s not ideal for “Darcy” to wrap to the next line following “Mr.” but noticeably bad word spacing is more likely to jar your reader out of the text. Manual adjustments to the auto-hyphenation should be done with extreme care. Depending on your software, forcing a manual change to get “Mr. Darcy” all on one line may cause a different bad break somewhere later on the page. You will be messing with it for the rest of your life.

When in doubt, keep it simple and clean and don’t do the dirty work of typesetting yourself unless you absolutely have no choice. That said, in my experience having a basic grasp of the work that is adjacent to your own—in this case, writing—is always beneficial. Hope you enjoyed nerding out on this topic with me! Stay tuned for Thursday’s article, the topic will be a surprise (for you, hopefully not for me). Hit that subscribe button, it makes me smile.

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