Typesetting II
By Zac Smith
Editor, Back Patio Press
Editor’s note: There’s some overlap between Zac’s advice and our Intro to Typesetting, but we still felt like it’s a good supplement to that piece and the things that are repeated are worth repeating.
here are some recommendations for making the inside of your book look good
0. you don't need to use InDesign or anything
You can typeset a good-looking book using google docs or MS Word. In many ways word processors are easier to typeset a book with than something fancy like inDesign. Also, if you're using KDP, a word doc makes it easier/possible to create an ebook version.
1. Use Styles
This means making use of Header, Subheader, and Body defaults in your document. This is supported by both MS Word and Google Docs. This makes tinkering with the fonts and sizes easier - setting all the chapter titles to the Subheader category, for example, allows you to change all chapter titles at once by just changing the subheader formatting. I find myself tinkering with chapter/story titles and body text formatting well into the last stretch of making a book, and it’s a huge pain in the ass to manually change everything every time.
These are useful for two other reasons: creating tables of contents, and creating ebooks on amazon KDP. It’s very much worth doing.
2. Digitally-printed books need fat gutter margins
The ‘gutter’ is the special inside margin. Set your document to use ‘mirror margins’ with the same dimensions, e.g. .75” for top, bottom, left, and right, and then a gutter margin - the gutter will be added to every inside margin (left for pages on the right, right for pages on the left). Professionally printed, offset print run books have binding that enables them to often not even use a gutter, as the books open wider and lay flat well. Digitally printed books do not open as wide and do not lay flat at all, and the space you lose on the inside margins due to this increases the larger the book gets. So if you’re doing a 100 page book, have a gutter of like .35”. If you’re doing a 400 page book, have a gutter of like .5”+.
Also, in general, your book should have bigger margins than you think. Indie books always have really tight margins and it’s a tell-tale sign that your book is a shitty indie book. I recommend taking a ruler to some of your favorite big press books and some of your favorite indie books to see what I’m talking about.
3. Print physical proofs early and often
It is very much worth spending the $10 or whatever for a single proof of your book to check the margins, formatting, etc. It’s the only way to really get a sense of how things will look when printed. Please do this. Don't cheap out. This is someone's book, probably their first book. The author is excited. Spend the $30 to make sure it looks good before you print a whole bunch of books or put it on Amazon.
4. You can use line breaks as an easy hack for vertical spacing but it comes with its own problems
MS Word makes it easy to format certain things and hard to format other things. Something it doesn’t do well is add vertical space before a section/chapter title - the option is there, but it doesn't work, for complicated reasons. You can create vertical space by hitting the enter/return key, but this can cause unexpected problems later on. In my case, i noticed chapter titles weren’t perfectly aligned to the same height on some pairs of pages - turns out the line breaks i had used to create the vertical space before titles were formatted differently. Some were in different fonts, or different sizes, or both, which can add up to several millimeters of height difference. I had to manually go through and make sure all my line breaks in chapter titles were the same font and size. I’m unsure why they were different at all, but, well, it’s MS Word.
5. Use page breaks
If you don’t already do this and you’re sending manuscripts to people, you need to stop doing that and learn to use page breaks. Don’t manually hit the enter key a whole bunch after a poem or story or chapter - use a page break. This allows to maintain page-by-page formatting regardless of the paper size. On MS word, a page break is done with CMD+SHIFT+Return / ctrl+Shift+Enter. just using shift+enter will create a nonbreaking paragraph break, which is why you get those weirdly stretched lines in the last line of your justified paragraphs.
6. Find and use interesting fonts
Everyone is a font snob. I think most people dislike the idea of using default or common fonts in your books, like Calibri or Times New Roman. These make indie books look cheaper/shittier, I think. There are a lot of nice fonts for free on the internet. I like to use dafont.com and search for 100% free fonts. Grab whatever you think looks good or interesting for whatever projects you have coming up or are working on, and install them all. This way you can quickly cycle through a bunch of nice new fonts when typesetting your book. I also recommend saving/sharing the font file itself with whoever you’re working with, or in a centralized backup location, in case you have a computer disaster or someone else needs to finish the book - MS Word won’t ‘save’ the font - if someone else opens it on their computer, it will use a different font they have saved locally instead. There are also nicer fonts that cost money, but you can find them if you search on github (look this up - it’s interesting). Also make sure your fonts have Italics. Most books, I think, use italics at some point, but not all fonts online have italic versions.
7. Divide by 4
This is a cool thing, but basically, printed books (offset or digitally printed) are made by printing your content on 4x4page sheets that are then folded and cut. If, say, you have a book with exactly 161 pages, your book will be printed with 164 pages - your 161 plus 3 blank pages at the end. Knowing this going in, you can more tactically add or remove blank pages throughout the book to prevent having some number of trailing blank pages.
8. Page numbering sucks ass
I still struggle with getting page numbers right because MS Word sucks ass. Basically, MS Word by default starts page numbering on the first page and doesn’t allow you to selectively remove page numbers from random pages. The solution is to create section breaks and ‘unlink’ headers/footers from each other. Spend some time researching this and fucking around when you are in a calm state of mind and not anxious about doing something within a certain amount of time. It is incredibly frustrating. Like, really really frustrating. My go-to hack is to manually cover up page numbers with a white box if needed, and to sometimes create multiple separate files that I then merge as PDFs. I recommend, if you're using a single document for everything, to right off the bat create a front section, a middle section, and an end section, each with their own unlinked page numbering - this way you can add content as needed without having to later add in section breaks and fiddle with page numbering.
9. Learn terms and keep notes
Most of typesetting is actually googling how to do something and reading various forum posts or watching youtube videos. This is made easier if you know the right search terms. Make and maintain a list of these terms to make your searching easier. Here are some good ones:
drop caps
hanging indent
small caps
gutter margin
ligature
dingbat
fleuron
line spacing
10. Justify the text
This just means that paragraphs are big fat squares instead of having a ragged edge on the right side. By default, most docs are left-aligned with ragged right edges. For books of prose, the text should be justified (not left-aligned, not centered, etc). Poetry I think should be left-aligned with hanging indents (a hanging indent is the opposite of a normal indent - the row of a given line is unindented, but the remaining text of that line is indented….hard to describe…just look at some poetry books).
11. Look at books
Realized most of my advice is to just look at books. Go to your bookshelf and look at many books. Look at the sizing, spacing, formatting. Look at how sections start, look at how things end. Take some notes on a piece of paper. Look for blank pages, which pages are located where, the order of sections, when people use italics and bold and small caps. Look for what things are indented, and how much they’re indented. Look at many books, both indie and big press, to look for common formatting things and then be selective about what you choose to ignore or subvert. Just spend some time looking at books. Look at a fucking book before you print a book. Jesus Christ.
Zac Smith makes books with Back Patio Press. He is the author of 50 Barn Poems (Clash Books) and Everything Is Totally Fine, due out from Muumuu House in December.