Be Your Own Editor

Before I started working in the book business, it somehow never occurred to me that the inside of a book needed designing. Oh, sure, I saw those “About the Typeface” pages that appear at the end of some books and give a brief history of Bookman Old Style. But that’s the publisher’s only decision, right? It doesn’t take a whole person to do just that. And if it does, it’s probably the same person who designs the jacket. You give them the words, they print them on paper, someone makes a pretty cover, and that’s that. What’s left to complicate matters? A whole lot more than which typeface to use, it turns out.

If you’re getting published, it behooves you to understand the interior design process because you may actually find you don’t like something about it, and you need to know how to express that and know what you’re talking about. (It’s always nice to know what you’re talking about when you want to express how much you love the design, too.) If you’re self-publishing, you might just end up doing this stuff yourself, so you’d better at least know the basics.

The first step with any manuscript, after you and your editor are done with the substantive work, is copyediting. Copyediting polishes the manuscript and prepares it for typesetting, but it’s not only about grammar and writing style. Part of the copyediting process is identifying “design elements” within the manuscript and marking them with a code assigned to each element, each time it appears, so the typesetter knows how that element should look.

That’s where the designer comes in. Some books are designed by an in-house employee at the publishing house, some by freelancers. Either way, the designer is given a copy of the manuscript and a list of design elements that have been identified. They’ll either be given a list of corresponding codes or come up with those codes themselves. Their job, then, is to decide what each coded element of the book should look like, based on issues ranging from budget to readability to the nature of the book’s content.

The designer has to please a lot of people: often the editor and/or author have strong ideas about how the book should look—and they may not express those ideas until after the designer has done his or her work and they aren’t happy with it. The design affects and is affected by the book’s page count, which brings sales and marketing into the picture. Not to mention budget, which also comes into play in such design decisions as what type of paper to use.

Let’s back up: What do I mean by “design elements”? And what are these secret “codes” everyone passes around? Designers and publishers vary in how heavily they code specific elements of a manuscript, but common elements include chapter titles and numbers, part titles and numbers, epigraphs, extracts (quotations set off from the text by a different type size, margins, etc.), subheads within chapters, and line breaks within text. Codes are usually just a few letters: “CN” for a chapter number, “EXT-L” for an extract that’s a letter, etc. The designer has to provide specs to the typesetter for each code. That way, when the typesetter sees “HA” in the text, they’ll know that it’s an A-level subhead, and exactly what size, placement, typeface, etc. the designer wants for that element.

Some designers take more care than others in making the book’s interior appropriate to the book’s content, readable, and aesthetically pleasing. It’s a subtle craft and a beautiful one when done well. Pick up a few books off your shelf with the name of a major publisher on the spine—grab some whose authors are well-known and/or literary; they’re more likely to have placed great importance on the design.

Look at the title page; if things have been done right its look will not contrast with the style and colors of the book’s jacket, even though (in most cases) they are designed by different people. Now look at the first page of a chapter. Note the number, the title if there is one, the special text of the first letter or few words of the chapter. Compare a few books and see how different their chapter-opening pages look, and you’ll begin to see just how vital the work of a good designer is.

Everything you see on the page looks the way it does because a designer made a decision. Page numbers, aka folios, don’t just magically appear there, nor do the “running heads” at the tops of pages that remind you of the author’s name or book title or chapter title. If the book has illustrations, the designer determines their size, layout, and how their captions look.

In a good design, every element works with every other element, and all come together to form a cohesive aesthetic that you may not notice but that affects you deeply. The more the form of the book meets its content, the more likely readers are to be drawn into that book’s world. So if you’re lucky enough to be excited about what your jacket’s going to look like, don’t stop there. Look forward to seeing the art of an unsung hero on the pages in between.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 12:52 am and is filed under Self-publishing, The Book Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.