Book Typesetting Tips

Hi, I’m Dale Beaumont and welcome to another episode of Get Published TV. This is the only dedicated show on the internet to help you to write, publish, and market your own best selling book. In today’s episode, we’re going to continue on from yesterday’s video where we’ll be looking at type setting. Now, type setting is a really important process so if you’re watching this video first please go back to watch yesterday’s video and then come back and keep watching this video. So here are some of the fundamental decisions that you need to make when it comes to this all important process. Now, before we go into them I might just kind of mention that this is obviously particularly important to people that make the decision to self-published their books. Because when you sell published, you’re actually like acting as the publisher, so therefore, you’re responsible for the editing the type setting, the design, the printing or managing the printing or doing the printing and all the media and publicity, etcetera. So this would be one of your areas of responsibility. Now, I’m guessing that you want to do this yourself. You should actually engage as I was saying yesterday a professional that would actually do it but you need to go to them with a plan of what you want and what you don’t want as well because they’re going to be working based on your instruction to them. So you really want to make sure that you’ve thought this out before you meet with them personally. Now if you are an author that is going through a major publisher, that’s great. You probably don’t need to be responsible for these directly because the publisher will make all of these decisions for you. However, you still should at least have a bit of an idea of what you would like. You know, you can’t demand that they take you up on all those different decisions but you want to have thought this through a little bit because you know your target market. Hopefully, you do better than anyone else. So you want to have thought about what fonts do you think would work, what sort of style, what feeling do you want to have come across. And you want then express that to your publisher and even show them some examples. So, here are some other books that I like to look and feel and I’d like to incorporate these elements. Would you mind if I have a quick conversation with the type set up that you’re going to be using, so I can communicate to them or can you just take some of these books or these photocopies to use as inspiration when it comes to the type setting process. So I want to empower people no matter which option you choose to be really involved in this process as much as possible because at the end of the day you know, it’s your book and unless you know put forward your own ideas, someone else is going to make all these decisions for you and unfortunately they maybe the wrong decisions. All right, so you want to be in control, is the main message. Let’s talk about some of the decisions that you’re going to have to make. Let’s get into them right now. I’m going to kind of go to them fairly quickly. I’m going to give about you know this much depths to each of the points and we’re going to cover each of them in more detail in future episodes. Okay, so let’s talk about them now very quickly. The first one is with regards to your font. What font you’re going to use? This is one of the most critical decisions that you have to make when it comes to the type setting process. When we’re talking about fonts, there are obviously thousands it not tens of thousands of different type of fonts that you choose. Most of these would be familiar if we used words with things like Times new Roman or also an Arial, is a very popular font as well but there are literally thousands of different ones that you can choose. So picking the right font is really essential. There are different types that can be broken up into zero four-sense if you could just Google those terms you can kind of get a bit of an idea of what the difference between the two. But also not just these the font that you use but also the size of the font and you really need to think through who is your target market for the book. If your target market is maybe baby boomers or people that are 50 plus then clearly you want to have a big font because you want to make is easier for them to read or if you know targeting people that are teenagers, then maybe you want to make again different decisions around that and maybe you want to go with more classical font for someone who’s—the market is more mature. And if they’re younger, then you may want to go with some that is little bit more funkier and a bit more hip. So anyway, think that through and the best ways to look at examples of other books and see what you’d like or what you respond to and also who your market response to us well. So even if you have a few examples and get together some people who you considered to be your target market and put different fonts and pages in front of them saying what do you think, what do you response to, what do you like to look up, and take those ideas all on board. And then ultimately, you make that final decision that you think is best. I don’t know why you try to please everybody because you can never please everybody. You got to make that decision based on collectively all of that knowledge, all right. So font, font is big. The next one is in relation to the paragraph style. Now this normally from ways in which you can do paragraphs, one is more of the classical one which is pretty much used for most fiction books and then in this way you actually have no space between the paragraphs but the first word of the next paragraph is indented. So most fiction books are like that, some nonfiction books also have no spaces but they have indentation. So that’s one style, would be normally seen as more of a classical style. A lot of new books today and certainly my book, I actually chose to separate paragraphs with an actual space. So let me just show you what I mean here. So here, there’s actually no indentation. All of the words stop with a margin here but there’s actually a wide space between every paragraph. And the reason why I chose to do that was to break up just the monotony of heavy ticks. So when someone fix it, it doesn’t look as intimidating when they see those bite size paragraphs that they can read as opposed to you know other books where they look at it and go “Gee this is going to take me forever to read this, because it just looks I’ve been intimidating. That’s just my personal view. You can make your own personal view based on what you like and what you don’t like. So font is so important. Paragraphs are important as well. The other thing that we’ll look at very quickly is in relation to chapter titles. What it meant by that is that every chapter would start with ideally something different. Now sometimes books just literally have chapter one and maybe they’ve making it bold, they’ve making I underlined but they don’t increase the size of the font and it just—all pages look pretty much the same. There’s nothing that sort of stands out. But what some people do is obviously take up maybe half a page for their actual chapter title. Just turn that off because I’m using a time, make sure that I stick under eight minutes. Some people use half a page, some people even use a full page and some other people even go to the extreme of actually starting each of their new chapters on the right hand-side of the page with sometimes means there is a blank here if the that actually finishes on this side here. I’ve actually made that decision with my books that each new chapter starts here on this side of the page and sometimes this page is blank or you know I actually give a way some free gifts in my books which I talked about why I do that you know in the future episodes. So I still use that space there. But all of the new chapters start here. So think that through. It’s an important decision because again, when someone picks up your books and flicks through then they’re kind of getting a feel for the—they get a bit of a sense of do I like this book or do I not like this book. So here’s another example, this is one that looks very professional but also looks quite you know modern as well which I like. So the main thing is go through lots, lots of books and photocopy or just you know if you own the book, so you just circle them or tab the ones you’ll actually like. And then ultimately, you’re going to have to make some decisions. Now, I run out of time with this video, so I’m actually going to continue this conversation again on the next video because I got a few more points that I want to go through to wrap up you know some of the key things you’re going to look at when it comes to the type setting process. So again, it’s important whether you’re fiction or nonfiction or whether you’re a self-published author or you actually go through a main stream publisher. Please leave us your comments below. We love you to get involve in this conversation. Let us know what you think and we’ll see you again on the next episode of Get Published TV. Thanks for watching.