If you’ve self-published a book, you know the many challenges involved. As if writing a book isn’t hard enough, you’ll also need to plan your marketing, determine how to sell the book and know how to lay out a book. Looking at a book off a bookstore shelf, it’s easy to miss the work and time that goes into the book layout. Let me tell you—it’s a lot of work. A lot.
Let’s review the best practice book page layout and page format.
Your book has four essential parts: the front matter, content, back matter, and cover. The first three combine to make your print-ready PDF file, while the cover will be designed separately.
For this post, we will focus on the first three, but if you’re ready to work on your cover, get started by reading this article.
First things first, your book design turns your manuscript into a complete file for your book. Even though both are composed of your content—the story you must tell, a guide or manual, a textbook for the class you’re teaching—the manuscript is the raw content. You’ll need to carefully design your book file using book layout software to turn that manuscript into a print-ready file.
To reiterate, page layout design is not the same as word processing. You want to write and edit your book using a word processor but once the words are there, you’ll switch to a design software for all the book layout.
You’ve got a ton of options for laying out your book file. You can use any program that can export a font-embedded PDF, but I strongly recommend using one of the tools I’ve (conveniently) reviewed in the past:
Using InDesign to layout and prepare your book file has long been a standard. But actually using the software can be challenging. Let’s learn more!
Affinity Publisher is the newest publishing software to rival InDesign in features and pricing.
Let’s quickly review the parts of a book that you design for your book layout.
This is the meat of your book. The story you tell, the manual or guide you wrote to share your expertise, the history you’re recounting, or whatever your book might be. Remember, the content includes text and images, as well as anything else, like tables or charts. All of that is content.
When you open a book, the first page is not the beginning of your story. No book opens directly to ‘Chapter 1’. You’ll see a half-title and full title, a copyright page, a table of contents, acknowledgments, an introduction, and any other information you need to provide a reader before they dive into the main content. All of this is collectively called Front Matter.
Just like the Front Matter, Back Matter is everything after the main content of your book. Usually, this includes the About the Author, any sort of index or bibliography, and often a few blank pages.
Your cover is going to be an enormous piece of how you sell your book. For this post, we will not focus on the cover. But we’ve got some great content about creating a cover.
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I’ve written a great deal about laying out your book, and we even have an entire section of our knowledge base dedicated to these questions. While there are specific details you’ll need to focus on (I’ll get to those next), it’s important to acknowledge that every book layout is unique.
When you approach the problem of how to lay out a book, you need to first clearly define what kind of book you’ll be designing. That might be obvious when comparing a textbook to a graphic novel or a photo book to a fiction book. But even similar books, like a fictional story and a memoir, will have some unique elements—everything from fonts to endnotes to the use of graphics.
Once you have a sense of the book, creating a professional page design hinges on meeting reader expectations. Sometimes an uncommon design can work, but with anything, it’s best to start simple and only approach weird or genre-bending designs once you’ve mastered a basic book layout.
With that in mind, these 11 points are relevant when designing any kind of book. Some details will change, but if you don’t get each of these steps done right, you risk your book appearing unprofessional (and likely causing potential readers to pass it over).
If that first point made you roll your eyes, please stick with me here. It may seem obvious that the content needs to be done before you can start creating the book.
But that’s not always the way our brains (or creative processes) work. I have to restrain myself from tinkering with fonts, adding text formatting or page margins, and working on my page layout while I write.
There’s a very practical reason to finish all the writing, editing, and revising before laying out your book: each edit will change the character count in your file, potentially shifting formatting. Those shifts can affect page layout, numbering, and more.
So the key takeaway here is: Don’t tinker with layout or formatting while you write and edit.
Your book’s spine is an often overlooked piece of your cover. But a book spine requires some special attention. And ignoring it can ruin your cover!
