Authors. Should You Design Your Own Interior Layout?

We are very pleased today to have for Our Little Books Guest Post Wednesday, Susan Wenger, a designer at Wheatmark, Inc.. She presents points on designing your own interior layout that, as a writer, you probably never thought about. Make sure you check out her publishing company, Wheatmark.

Having made the decision to publish independently, many authors attempt to cut costs by doing their own book design.  Some leave cover creation to the experts, but keep interior layout for themselves. “I know my way around Microsoft Word,” they think. “How hard can it be?”

It’s true, interiors will be easier for a novice to learn than covers. While cover design requires knowledge of sophisticated and expensive image-editing software (think Photoshop), you can get away with using whatever word processing program you used to write your book for your layout. Additionally, the bar is lower. Your cover is one of your most important marketing tools, and as such it needs to be exceptional. The interior only needs to look professional and readable—you don’t have to get too fancy. 

That’s the good news if you’re a do-it-yourselfer. The bad news? “Professional and readable” is harder than you think. A lot harder. Before you jump in, take this quick quiz. Answers are below.

1. Which typeface do you want to use for the main text?
2. Where should you set your margins?
3. Where should the page numbers go?

• Typeface.

Many authors pick Times New Roman because it’s the default in their word processing program. It seems like a reasonable choice. It works well onscreen. The problem is, its aesthetic charms don’t translate to the printed page. The results look more like they belong in a Word document than a professional book. Other body fonts are a lot more readable and much nicer looking.

• Margins.

If you make these too narrow—another common mistake—you’ll lose readability. The human eye doesn’t like to horizontally scroll too much, and it’s impossible to decipher text that’s too close to the spine.

• Page numbers.

Did you say the top of the page, away from the spine? That’s a good answer ... most of the time. On pages where a new chapter begins, the number goes at the bottom, and there are no running headers. And on blank pages, there’s no page number at all. (Sounds obvious, but a lot of do-it-yourselfers get this wrong.)

Am I saying that you shouldn’t design your interior if you didn’t know the answers? Not necessarily. In making your decision, you should take two factors into account: your goal for the book, and how much time and effort you’re willing to put in.

Your goal for the book

A professional interior enhances your book’s credibility. An unprofessional one destroys it.

So if your goal is to sell as many copies of your book as you can, or to use it to promote yourself as an expert in your field, your best bet is to hire somebody who designs for a living. If, on the other hand, you’ve written a family history whose intended audience is ... your family, you might be able to get away with do-it-yourself. Aunt Tillie isn’t going to refuse to read your book because the blank pages have numbers on them.

Time and effort

If you’re into do-it-yourself projects—if you’re the kind of person who gets excited about remodeling your own kitchen, or putting furniture together—then you might find the process fun. That’s important. It means you’ll do your homework, and you won’t give up when you run into the inevitable obstacles, such as Microsoft Word refusing to leave the page numbers off your blank pages. (I said you could “get away with” using a word-processing program for layout, but Word, WordPerfect, and the like aren’t really layout programs, and getting them to do some of these basic things can be monumentally frustrating.)

If none of this sounds interesting or enjoyable to you, you might want to rethink the idea. Yes, you can save money by doing your own design, but what is your time worth?

Ultimately, the decision to do it yourself or hire out is yours. My advice is to take into account everything you’ll need to learn and do before making that decision. It isn’t as easy as it looks!

Susan Wenger is a designer at Wheatmark, Inc., http://www.wheatmark.com, a company that helps independent authors achieve publishing success. You can find more of her writings on the Wheatmark Publishing Success Blog, http://www.wheatmark.com/index.php?/blog.

Traditional vs. Self-Publishing. Is One Better Than the Other?

Everyone knows about traditional publishing. That is where a publishing company offers you a contract, pays you an advance and publishes your book for you. In the past, traditional publishers would accept around 2-3% of all the manuscripts sent to them, either unsolicited or via an agent. Unfortunately, nowadays, due to numerous different factors, many publishers are not even looking at unsolicited manuscripts and only publishing less than 1% of the books they see from agents.  

If you were not in the lucky 1-3% accepted by traditional publishing houses, and if you wanted to publish your work, you needed to somehow get your book out there by self-publishing whatever way you could. So, for publishing purposes, anything other than traditional publishing fell under a “self-published” umbrella. 

Although there have always been very successful self-published authors (e.g., Willa Cather, e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Franklin, Zane Grey, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen King, Rudyard Kipling, Louis L'Amour, D.H. Lawrence, Beatrix Potter, Anis Nin, Gertrude Stein, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoi, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Virginia Woolf just to name a few), self-publishing has always been under a “not as good as traditional publishing” stigma. However, with recent technological advances, various different methods of self-publishing have come into their own in the recent years and self-publishing has taken on a more respectable label. 

There are still the “vanity press” houses which will publish anything that comes their way (hence the name “vanity press- i.e., publishing houses which court the vain people who want to see their name in print). These vanity publishing houses do not do justice to the self-publishing industry by allowing poorly written, and poorly edited works to be published. 

However, there are many and varied kinds of self-publishing houses out there that do care what they publish and these companies are slowly eroding the self-publishing stigma. They provide all editing services for an author and want to see a good book getting out into the market. 

The bottom line for authors that do not have a contract with a traditional publishing house is to do their homework and find a self-publishing company that will enhance their writing experience and produce a work that they can be proud of. Self-publishing can be a viable way to get your masterpiece out into the public.