- Have you ever walked out of a movie
because the sound was bad?
Or there were issues with the picture?
(TV static)
Or maybe you just hated the way the movie was shot
and it was not a good experience to watch it.
The same thing happens with books,
and so few authors truly appreciate this.
So, if you want to make sure your reader
has a great experience reading your book,
this video is for you.
(soft rock music plays)
Hey, there, I'm Julie the book broad, from Book Launchers.
We're your professional self-publishing team,
helping you write, publish and promote a nonfiction book
that will help you have a huge impact on your readers.
And done right,
It will also help you grow your brand, build your business,
and make you money!
Oh-hoo-hoo!
Have you heard of typesetting?
Don't worry if you haven't,
it's so 19th century, literally.
The word comes from when people used to physically
have to place the letters for them to be printed.
These were letter presses,
and the words were set into place
one letter at a time and then locked down.
During the 19th century,
the process jumped forward with the invention of
hot metal typesetting.
The process used a keyboard.
Like the typewriter,
where the typesetter could type out
the desired text to be set,
because we live in the current century at book launchers,
we call it interior design or interior layout,
not typesetting.
But I thought you'd like to know a little history.
Now, there is so much involved
in creating an amazing interior.
It's actually quite complex.
As someone who has hired a lot of designers
to do this work for our clients,
let me tell you something.
Just hiring a graphics designer,
is not going to cut it if you care
about your reader experience.
This is truly a specialized skill.
They have to understand what they're doing
or it becomes a hot mess.
And what many people don't realize,
is that a book needs to be laid out,
line by line, to be done right,
more on that in a minute.
But you really need to know that this is a specialized skill
for someone with patience,
and a good eye.
- Nope, that's not my good eye.
Ah, now I can read it.
(children cheer)
- So there's a lot of considerations when it comes
to the interior design of your book.
Like: Size of the margins,
trim size of the book, styling the start of the chapters,
placing images and graphs, and choosing the font typeface,
and the size of that font,
and the spaces between letters and lines.
Before I dive into a few fundamental tips for you.
I want to let you know that you can DIY your interior.
Many authors on a budget do.
And you may start with a template.
But, using a template means
you'll still have to correct each page manually
line by line and that will be a huge time suck for you.
It's better to use a typesetting software like Vellum,
which you can find at vellum.pub,
if you want to do this yourself.
If you have a very simple book
and you have time and patience,
you can probably do it.
For fiction in particular,
I've seen good work come
from the use of programs like Vellum.
So this can work.
It's not for me, but for budget conscious
eagle eyed authors you can do this.
What I do not recommend you ever do
is upload a Word document to Amazon.
Sure, they let you do it,
but the result can be horrific.
Rarely does it work well and that free conversion to ebook
is not effective really, almost ever.
Don't believe me, test it out on Kindle apps
and iPhones as well as actual Kindle devices,
once you've done it.
If you're writing a non-fiction book
and you wanna look like a professional,
you need a professional to do it right.
So how do you do it right?
Or how do you know
when you're looking to hire a professional?
Whether they're going to do it right?
Well, here's five tips for you.
Number one: When you choose a font,
you wanna pick a font that has a full package.
Meaning it has italics, bold, and italic bold,
plus full punctuation
and symbols like the copyright and M dashes.
A lot of font packages out there
don't have the full selection,
and you don't want to get halfway through a project
and realize you don't have what you need.
Generally, for nonfiction,
there are some common packages in Adobe
like Adobe Garamond or Garamond.
That's one of our defaults.
Number two: Take care of your orphans and your widows.
Breaking a paragraph in the wrong place
can interrupt a reader's mental flow.
Widows occur when the last line of a paragraph
ends up at the top of the next page,
and an orphan occurs when the first line of a paragraph
ends up at the bottom of the page.
These things are left hanging
and mess up the experience of reading the book.
It's like a jolt for the reader.
Also word stacks where the same word somehow ends up
on top of each other on a few lines
that will stop a reader in their tracks too.
So you wanna check for those line by line.
Number three: Negative space is the technical term,
but to me, it's white space.
This is your friend.
Think about it with kindness
and you wanna give your book enough white space
or big enough margins so that somebody can hold it to read.
And you also wanna consider enough white space
so there's somewhere for the binding to go,
and you don't want the text to be so squished
that you can't read it.
Of course you also need space for the text
and page numbers at the top and the bottom of the page.
The big thing is you don't want a page
to be overwhelming or empty.
There's also negative space between each letter
and word that you wanna be mindful of when
you're considering these things.
Number four: Don't go crazy
and use every font and style available to you.
Remember this is an experience for a reader.
And we would like to take that font
and feeling from the cover
and put in little touches into the interior to flow through.
Like having the first letter of a chapter
start with the same font from the cover
or sometimes there's features from the subhead
or other imagery
that we can then use inside the book.
We like to take the font or the feeling from the cover
and take little touches from that
to put in the interior to flow through like chapter starts
or sometimes some imagery that is featured on the cover,
will use inside on chapter starts inside of the book.
Ultimately, though you wanna stick to
the most readable fonts
for the majority of the text in your book
and then only use the flares on the interior from the cover
to bring interest to each page.
Number five: Ebook conversion is a different game.
So you might get this all set for print
and then you go to convert to a .epub or .mobi
and you're going to find that things get nasty.
This is actually how we hire interior designers.
We have found that experienced designers
set them up for successful ebook conversion
and inexperienced ones don't.
So we always ask prospective designers
to send us their InDesign files.
In the words of Jacqueline Kyle, our client care manager,
the big thing for designers to know,
is that the paragraph styles,
character styles and master pages are their friends.
Getting to know these features will save a boatload of time
and make the expert into a reflowable ebook a breeze.
So taking that to hiring your designers,
we found that if someone already does this
in their InDesign file,
they're likely to be experienced enough
to handle everything we need
when it comes to creating a great experience for the reader.
That said, if you're like me and you don't have InDesign,
and you don't know what you're looking for.
This tip doesn't really help,
unless you have a team like I do,
but here's the work around.
You can ask a designer how
they prep their files for ebook conversion,
and see what they say.
Your book layout person is as much an interior designer
as they are also a grammatical expert.
It's a line by line job filled with choices
to make sure the words are split in the right place,
lines end at the appropriate places.
hyphens or M dashes are placed in the right places
and it reads with ease.
That's painful for some of us to do.
I hire pros because I am not that patient or that detailed.
Anyone who gets our bi weekly launch letter
surely spots my typos
and realizes that I am not the team editor.
By the way, if you want our launch letter,
I highly recommend it.
It's not a sales letter.
It's tools and tips and insights
from the industry happenings plus links
to highlight various videos.
You can get yours at booklaunchers.com.
Have you done the interior on your own
or have a tip to help other authors with their interior?
Let's chat about it in the comments below.
And when you comment the day a video is released,
you'll be entered to win some sweet #noboringbookswag.
And you'll be one step closer
to being one of my beloved YouTube besties
joining the ranks with some of the most fabulous folks like
Rachael Robertson, Mike Hird,
Guy Blaise, Keith Wheeler Books
and of course Studio 38.
New videos every Tuesday and Friday,
except in the summer when we take a break.
Make sure you've subscribed
and turned those notifications on,
so you know when a new video is out.
It's been so lovely spending time with you
and I would like to keep hanging out.
Have you seen, this video on how much money authors make
or if that's not your cup of tea,
then this one right here is the latest
and greatest from the channel.
Either way, I look forward to seeing you on the next one.
(background music plays)