Not Just Covers, But Every Page: Why Writers Should Talk About Book Design Early On

Readers spend most of their time inside books. That’s where the action is. But when talking about a book’s design people usually focus on the covers: ooh look at that beauty or how interesting, I want to pick that up. But you might not realize that the inside of books is also designed, every single page.

Interior design’s aim is to make reading easy. It creates order out of chaos and bestows authority (warranted or not) on an author’s words. Type, hierarchy, and space guides readers, showing them where to look and how to make their way. Flip open a book and you’re on the half title page. Someone’s thought carefully about how that should look.

Interior design is both micro and macro. It involves technical prowess and creativity. There is line-by-line typesetting and there is translation of vibe.

Take, for instance, chapter openers. Most books are divided into chapters and an author has decided if they each have chapter titles or just numbers, or both, or neither, or additional info like a subtitle or time stamp or narrator name or geographic locator or setting-up-an-idea pull quote.

The designer, then, must figure out how to make those pieces of text—many or few—look nice and clear on the page and put forward an aesthetic, bringing visual voice to the writing voice. Which font? How big? How bold? Italic? Centered or no? In a single line, neatly stacked, cascading? Each decision is literal and expressive.

And chapters don’t get going at the tiptop of a page. There is space at the start of a new chapter, announcing to the reader: new subject, new idea, new time period, new location, new character, a pause in the story, or whatever the author is doing dividing up their text. Designers signal this literal break with a visual break. Empty space. Quiet.

We consider how far down on the page we want to place the chapter titling and how far down from that the text starts up again. A book may have six long chapters or sixty short ones, and the treatment of the chapter opener should reflect this rhythm—longer chapters demand a more emphatic break, a rest stop after a long climb.

Design arises out of an author’s work and is created by someone who is not the author. And that’s true of chapter heads but also the table of contents (an editorial and visual snapshot that readers come to right off the bat), the treatment of the running heads (which sometimes end up as running feet or even running shoulders), and the page numbers themselves. There’s the design of part openers, when they exist. (Those pages often end up with a lot of empty space. That’s a way to announce their significance.)

And there’s the look and treatment of dedications and epigraphs. There might be sidebars and footnotes, perhaps charts or images, a bibliography, an index, and on and on. All will have a visual style. All will be thought about and through.

Have I mentioned the body text? That too! The designer is working from and with every word in a book. Our ideas are layered on top of the author’s and editor’s.

Is layered the right word? Design and editorial concerns are, in the best situations, partners. Spinning around the dance floor, totally entwined. Manuscripts live in author’s minds and on their computers, but books exist out in the world. No one wants to read your Word doc no matter how beautifully written it is. A book is not a book until it is designed to be a book.

Authors who work on visually-oriented books—let’s say a cookbook or an art book or a kid’s picture book — often talk interior design early on. Color, photos, or illustrations are usually thought through during the early stages of development often with the editor, art director, and designer. But what about novels? Or longform non-fiction? Books that will be printed all one-color (black) with nothing but words for a few hundred pages.

Some of these authors think about how their book will look from early on. A picture in their mind of their printed and bound book on the New Releases table—its size, its cover, maybe the font all their prose will be set in. (But probably not the size of that font, or how about the line spacing, or the margins? Those are all design aspects.) Other authors really don’t think what their book will end up looking like while they’re writing. That phase feels distinct and separate, and maybe unrelated to them as the writer.

Publishing is a long process and design often comes late in the game. I’ve spent two decades designing books and still am surprised by how separated the two stages can be. And here’s my thought: what about touching base between writers and designers, early. It’s good to explain to designers what you’re thinking about and what you need. Or to say, I don’t really know how to think about it, but this is what’s going on.

How fun to have a conversation between authors and designers about how it might work for a book and its distinct qualities. Allow us to engage editorially with you, and the work, while choices are still being made. Is it crazy to design a chapter head and a few pages when the book is still being written? Not to me.

When design is most effective it is baked in with your content. Not smoothed on once the cake is already out of the oven. Let’s integrate, or at least have a conversation, about writing and design from the earliest stage. Not just covers but interiors too. It will make every book better. 

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The Design of Books: An Explainer for Authors, Editors, Agents, and Other Curious Readers by Debbie Berne is available via The University of Chicago Press.