Design Crimes – Redux

[Editor’s Note: While Jonathan’s enjoying a well-earned vacation, we’re going to share one of the best breakdowns of manuscript preparation you’ll find anywhere.]

Here at Selfpublishing.com we receive files every day – some are formatted wonderfully, and some leave a little to be desired. Some defy all the rules – so the following outline of do’s and don’ts should help many of our beginning publishers (and some of the ones who’ve been around for a while) make sure they don’t commit the more common design crimes.

While everything here can be looked at as suggestions only, we do believe that we shouldn’t be giving bookstores reasons to reject our customer’s printed work. Careful attention to the suggestions outlined in this article will ensure a finished book project that will look like it came from a major publisher.

Title Page

Your book title, author name and publisher name, city and state belong here. Don’t put the word “BY” with the author. No need for street address with the publisher. No copyright on this page.

Copyright Page

Always on a left-hand page, and NEVER on the right. Here’s the important stuff you should have. You can copy and paste this – but make sure you use your correct address and ISBN

Copyright © 2011 by Author
Publisher Name
Publisher Address line 1
Publisher Address line 2
Orders: www.your website.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief
quotations in a review.
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 13: here

Order of the next pages

Now, you can have any (or none) of the following – and generally in this order:

• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Epigraph (or a quotation)
• Table of Contents / Illustrations / Tables
• Foreword – Note the spelling here. People regularly spell this as “Forward” but it’s not. This is “words that go before” hence the spelling.
• Preface
• Introduction

Most of these elements should start on right-hand pages.

Running Heads or Headers and Footers

Page numbers (or folios) can start on a Foreword or Introduction, but NEVER belong on your title, copyright, or contents pages. If you’re using Word and have to make a section to turn off the running heads, then do that.

You can use many different styles in your headers – look at a lot of books and then copy what you like most, but once you’ve chosen that style then stick to it –in a novel it could be author on left hand page, book title on right, page numbers at the bottom.

It’s common to have a page number only on a chapter opener page – nothing at the top. Again, if you chose to do this, then be consistent throughout your book.

Page numbers start at page 1 and go straight through to the end (and many people determine “value” by the final page count.) If the book is longer, or perhaps a bit more scholarly, Arabic numbers (i, ii, iii) may be used for material before the first page of actual text, which would be Roman numeral 1.

Margins

Keep all text at least .5 inch away from the edge of your page – including running heads or footers.

Double (or two) spaces between sentences

Just don’t do it! If you learned to use a typewriter (or your teacher in college did) then you were taught to put two spaces at the end of a sentence. This is because all letters used to take up the same width – whether it was letter i, l, or w. A double space helped guide the eye through type. The advent of the computer changed that, and now everyone could have type that looked professional. Now letters all take up a beautiful amount of space and NO double spaces are necessary. You won’t find them in any book from a major publishing house.

New chapter on a new page

That’s the rule, but…

If you’re writing a novel then you can have a new chapter start after just a few line spaces, but the general convention is new chapter, new page. Nothing looks worse, however, than a chapter number at the very bottom of the page with its text at the beginning of the next page.

Blanks on the right?

No, no, no, never ever. Your book has a quote at the beginning of every chapter, you always want that quote on a left-hand page, and the chapter opening on the next right. Your previous chapter ends on a left-hand page, so to get your quote/chapter rule to work you’ve just put in a right-hand blank. Sorry – you’ve committed a crime! Edit your chapter a bit or write some more, change your style so that you only have quotes before chapters when you can, or wput the quote under that chapter title and number, but please – no right hand blanks.

Never? Well, OK, maybe at the very back of the book.

Be consistent

Want your book to look like it has style? Then use styles! Establish your “style” and then stick to it. If you’ve just put CHAPTER 23, then you have to use the word CHAPTER before 24 – you can’t just put the numbers – or spell out “Twenty-Four.”

If you’ve left three line spaces before your chapter number, then do it on EVERY chapter. If you have a drop cap to start your chapter text (a nice idea) then make sure you do it on EVERY chapter.

Fonts

Use as few as possible. Times is a dead give-away for “I did this myself in Word.” Look at that new book table at your local bookstore. You won’t find ONE book from a major publisher that uses Times (or Times New Roman). It just doesn’t look so hot – and don’t use Ariel – a font designed to be easily readable on a computer monitor.

Here’s my rule of thumb: Serif font for body copy, Garamond, Cheltenham, Baskerville, Goudy. Sans serif for heads: Futura, Univers.

Edit, edit, edit

I know, I know. You’ve read this thing so many times you’re dreaming it. The big publishing houses have whole teams of people who read, edit, proof, re-read, proof again, check what the last person did – and there’s still a mistake! That’s the nature of this game – and now you’re a major publishing house too.