1. SapereAude

    SapereAude Contributor Contributor

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    A primer on book design

    Discussion in 'Self-Publishing' started by SapereAude, Apr 16, 2021.

    My current interest in DTP is derived from and related to self-publishing books. I'm not interested in doing greeting cards, diner menus, advertising brochures, or any of that sort of output -- although I have done some brochures in the distant past. It's easy in today's world of print-on-demand to get a book in print -- what's not so easy is to do it well.

    I have a friend -- actually an e-friend, since we have never met in person even though he lives in the same state -- who has a number of sci-fi books to his credit. I remembered that he once told me that he just used Times New Roman as the font and uploaded his manuscript to Amazon KDP. Done.

    A couple of days ago I went onto the Amazon web site, called up his books, and used the "Look inside" feature to check them out. EEK! [​IMG] Horrible, horrible, horrible. They look like they were produced by an amateur -- and that's a shame, because he happens to be a good writer. I have read two of the books, and I enjoyed them immensely.

    Which leads me to the point of all this: some time ago, when I was in the process of getting my first book ready to be uploaded to Amazon KDP, I found a web site that offers a number of helpful articles about book design. They cover a number of different aspects, such as page layout, font selection, etc. Rather than post multiple links in different areas of this site, I'll post one link here. If you find it at all interesting and/or useful, at the end is a list of links to the other articles in the series.

    http://theworldsgreatestbook.com/choosing-book-font/
     
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  2. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    point of note the font is about the least important thing in ebooks because best practice is not to lock it as many people prefer to choose it themselves on the ereader
     
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  3. KevinMcCormack

    KevinMcCormack Senior Member

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    Yeah, you kinda pre-empted my response, because every ereader I've used, I just pick the font that works best right now, based on device and lighting conditions. Why should the author have any input on that? (other than font families: body, display, monospace, dingbats, Klingon...)

    And I say this as somebody who did desktop publishing for years (I invested in a full set of AGaramond with all ligatures back in the 90s).

    Ereaders are different. Web pages are different. Give the user control.

    This has actually become much more important in the past 10 years, as the types of readers have expanded. People read on smartphones, tablets, laptops, 30" displays, TV sets... let the user tinker with fonts and background to suit their conditions, give them freedom, and they will be able to read your content.

    One of the things I had to learn back in the mid 90s when the www came along was that the page no longer has a height, a width, borders, colour. The text has no size, justification, leading, or colour. The user will determine all that as required, so let it goooooo.
     
    Last edited: Apr 17, 2021
  4. SapereAude

    SapereAude Contributor Contributor

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    I thought it was clear that any discussion of book design applies only to printed books, but I guess not. I suppose I'm old enough that when the word "book" comes up, my first (and generally only) thought is a physical book. I guess many of you work primarily or even exclusively in the e-book arena. You are correct -- for e-books, discussion of font is largely irrelevant, and it's probably best to just upload the file as an unformatted Word file using Times New Roman 11-point or 12-point and be done with it.
     
  5. marshipan

    marshipan Contributor Contributor

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    You did mention looking inside the book online. The paperback would have a different formatted file than what you saw. Also, the look inside features does not present the book in the normal formatting.
     
  6. SapereAude

    SapereAude Contributor Contributor

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    The look inside feature shows the formatting for the print version if you have the print version selected when you click on "Look inside." I just verified that by checking one of my books. The print version's "Look inside" view is formatted the way it looks in print. The Kindle preview is unformatted.
     
  7. Rosacrvx

    Rosacrvx Contributor Contributor

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    Funny thing, I'd come across with this article before (it's in my bookmarks) and it helped me a lot. :)
     
  8. Rosacrvx

    Rosacrvx Contributor Contributor

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    My ereader allows my choice of font to trump whatever comes on the original.
     
  9. KevinMcCormack

    KevinMcCormack Senior Member

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    Yeah, I admit my context is that I expect to sell somewhere between zero and count-on-one-hand's worth of dead tree copies in my career.

    It's a good question as to whether there's a positive return on time invested in layout for massmarket text based titles these days.

    Graphic novels and special editions, I'd get fussy for sure, though.
     
  10. SapereAude

    SapereAude Contributor Contributor

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    https://www.statista.com/topics/1177/book-market/


    https://www.markinblog.com/book-sales-statistics/


    https://bookadreport.com/book-market-overview-authors-statistics-facts/


    Before I released my first book (non-fiction), I did an informal survey on a general discussion forum where I hang out from time to time. I had fewer than 100 responses total but I was surprised that the ratio was about 60/40 (or maybe 55/45) in favor of print over e-books. I expected it to be much more heavily slanted in favor of e-books. (This was in January of this year.)
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2021
  11. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    Those figures are for the trad industry and have very little bearing on the experience of most self publishers...

    All this ebooks continue to decline stuff is the same tired bullshit that parts of the trad industry has been peddling for years... the reason being that they either don't understand how to sell digital or deliberately suppress e sales, which is why you get trad releases where the ebook is the same price as the print book, or sometimes even higher priced...

    also AAP where this data comes from count ebook sales only from 1100 American publishers, completely disregarding both small independent houses and self publishing
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2021
  12. KevinMcCormack

    KevinMcCormack Senior Member

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    Moose beat me to it. The numbers I'm analyzing are for self pub. If we go trad, we're not expected to do your own layouts. As moose points out, self pub is entirely excluded from the stats you posted.

    Secondly, that probably includes book categories I deliberately excluded by limiting my analysis to massmarket text based: cookbooks, graphic novels, coffee table, &c. There are still categories that benefit from a decent layout.

    I'm not dismissing it as a dead art. Just that for somebody like myself, self publishing in genre, there's probably a better allocation of my resources.
     
  13. marshipan

    marshipan Contributor Contributor

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    I've made paperbacks for nearly all my books and generally sell 0. The more popular books have sold a handful of physical copies. I don't really find it all that much additional effort but I do all the cover design and book formatting myself--therefore it's cheap and easy.

    Both kindle Create and Vellum formatting software don't even require me to make a secondary format for physical copies. I believe it's standard font is bookerly.
     
  14. SapereAude

    SapereAude Contributor Contributor

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    I thought Bookerly was intended as a display (i.e. screen) font. I think it's the default on Kindle devices. It wouldn't have occurred to me to use it for a print edition, but I'm sure there are [many] worse choices.
     
  15. marshipan

    marshipan Contributor Contributor

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    Well, I may be wrong... I'm actually having trouble figuring it out. It's not obvious to me what font is the standard option and googling isn't helping! What an odd thing... Wait, Vellum apparently has 9 font options and bookerly isn't one of them so I definitely am wrong. It seems it presents these options in "book styles" which also determinesnchapter heading options among other things. I used the meridian book style (default) option. Seems they'd use meridian font for that?
     
  16. KevinMcCormack

    KevinMcCormack Senior Member

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    Just a point of order: 'display' type doesn't mean 'screen' type. Display means for something with larger print like a sign (a 'display'). But that's just where the name comes from, we do find them in smaller dimension layouts, such as title pages or business cards. I'm just now doing some business card layouts using some of my favourite display fonts: Copperplate Gothic, and Bauhaus, for example.

    For a book, display type might be used for chapter titles, front/back/spine cover text, any element that's not the body text, really. There is honest debate about page numbering.

    And as mentioned, there are other categories: dingbats, monospace. These may still come into play with an eBook. For example, I use monospace to illustrate computer screen text in my stories. But I don't specify *which* monospace typeface. Just the family. The user can set the tool to present their preferred monospace typeface.
     
  17. SapereAude

    SapereAude Contributor Contributor

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    I know that, and that's precisely why I put "i.e. screen" in parentheses to make that clear. But thanks for reinforcing the distinction.
     
  18. KevinMcCormack

    KevinMcCormack Senior Member

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    OK, I think we're still possibly talking past each other. Screens don't explicitly use display fonts. Most of what we'd see on a screen would be text (or 'body') typefaces, not display typefaces. At least on my browser right now, the typeface this site defaults to for body text is not a display font. It's a body text font, like maybe Times or my system's equivalent.

    Text typefaces are optimized for smaller sizes and denser reading blocks (I think they say 14pt or smaller?) so we tend to see electronic screen tools employ text fonts like Times in the denser text areas and display fonts like Arial in areas where the type is larger or needs to stand out from text.

    Here's a reference that can probably explain it better than I can: https://www.fonts.com/content/learning/fontology/level-1/type-anatomy/text-v-display


    From a site design POV, I have to build my CSS with these generalities in mind: I don't know what device the user is handling, so I have to design in high level categories of Body/Text, Display, Dingbats, Monospace, Script... these will all end up on the 'screen' as best as possible with the interplay of the designer choice, hardware/software limitations, and user preference.

    It's a craft. Paper has a bit of frustrating wiggle room, too, because we have to consider stock and ink when choosing typefaces. For example, a thin serifed text typeface like AGaramond is actually harder to read than some cheaper alternatives, when printed onto fibrous stock with cheap ink. Too much bleed, it gets blurry. I had to learn that the hard way back in the 80s, unfortunately.
     
  19. SapereAude

    SapereAude Contributor Contributor

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    Computer and phone screens are almost universally referred to as "displays." Some modern fonts were designed specifically to "display" better on screens. Georgia is one of those. There are others, such as Bookerly.

    https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/font-list/georgia

    But you are getting off-topic. This thread was supposed to be about print typefaces -- for body text.
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2021
  20. KevinMcCormack

    KevinMcCormack Senior Member

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    Which is why I wanted to make the clarification, for the benefit of others reading the thread. The word 'display' is used in two different contexts (display type as a typographic term, and displays as a product description for gadgets), and it looked like you were getting them conflated. Display typefaces existed before computer displays, and body text typefaces like Georgia and Palatino (and dozens of others) are also optimized for displays. Georgia is optimized for display, but it's not a display typeface. I was offering the explanation for why the term is confusing, in an effort to support thread readers who may have been exploring these techniques.


    Hm. The high level recommendation seemed to be about creating a good print layout, which is a process that can involve different typefaces for different elements. It's true that the Book Design Basics link doesn't include this information because it is 'basic' as described - although worth noting that it does offer an example including monospace, it just doesn't discuss it for some reason.

    I'm posting additional information for those who want to actually do as you suggest: make their paper copies more readable. I'm not sure why you think this is off topic.
     
    Last edited: Apr 22, 2021
  21. big soft moose

    big soft moose An Admoostrator Admin Staff Supporter Contributor Community Volunteer

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    As a moderator I agree with kevin... threads evolve and the thread starter does not control the content... nothing that's been posted here is off topic
     
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