Why You Need a Book Designer/ Layout Artist

July 2nd, 2012

In no particular order …

• To make sure you use proper ellipses … with space around them
• To guard against widows and orphans (If you don’t know, please look it up before you self publish your first book.)
• To see to it that only a single wordspace follows the end of a sentence
• To prevent stacks of more than two hyphens or the same word at the end of a line
• To give a page of type proper leading and margins, so the white space makes reading comfortable, and the wordspacing is never wide enough to drive a truck through
• To choose typefaces that somehow “go with” the text
• To prevent the running of leader dots from the end of chapter titles to page numbers in Tables of Contents
• To make sure the book looks typeset—no extra lines of white space—rather than typewritten

And these are just a few of the things I’ll do to make sure your book doesn’t look like an amateur hour production.

Entry Filed under: book design