Interior book design

Good book design involves more than just an eye-catching cover. It’s vital that your book looks as professional inside as it does outside, and that means preparing your manuscript correctly. 

This is often known as typsetting and includes:

• selecting an appropriate book size
• choosing an appropriate font
• page layout, including setting appropriate margins
• placing front matter and end matter (such as the title page, copyright page, acknowledgements and so on)

What’s the process?

Typesetting happens once all the editing has been completed and your manuscript is ready to be converted into a book.

Send me your final Word document, with all the relevant paragraph and character styles applied. (I can help with this if you need me to.)

I’ll use Adobe InDesign to create your book.

Because there are several decisions to take along the way, there can be a bit of back-and-forth between us! But at the end of the process, you’ll have a PDF file which you can send to the printer of your choice or upload to platforms such as Amazon KDP or Ingram Spark.

I highly recommend you have your book proofread carefully before sending it to print. You’d be surprised at the typos that have managed to remain hidden but which can jump out at you when you see your book in a new format!

What about cover design?

I don’t do cover design, but I can liaise with your chosen designer to give them the technical details they’ll need, such as your book’s dimensions and spine width.

If you’re using POD services like Amazon KDP or Ingram Spark, I can help with downloading the correct cover template.

Before your designer can finalise the cover, your interior will need to be finished and you’ll need to have made decisions about paper type, because the page count and the paper type affect the spine width.

Cost

The cost will depend upon the level of work required.

As a guide, for a manuscript of up to 80,000 words (no images), which has paragraph and character styles applied to the text, my basic charge for a print book is £200.

The cost will be higher for longer books, if your book includes images, or if you have other bespoke requirements.

My charge includes one round of (reasonable) amendments after your formatted book has been proofread. If there are substantial changes after formatting, this can be complicated and will probably lead to further charges. For this reason it’s important to make sure your book has been properly edited before it is designed (not necessarily by me!).

E-books

I can also create your book in EPUB3 format, ready for publishing as a reflowable Kindle e-book or uploading to other e-book platforms. This includes creating a clickable table of contents.

Again, the cost will depend upon the level of work required. As a guide, for a manuscript of around 80,000 words, with paragraph and character styles applied, and which has no images, my basic charge for an e-book is £125.

At this time, I only offer e-book design services for text-only books. I do not create e-books which include images, illustrations or figures.

To enquire

Send me an email! Please include word count of your book and tell me if it includes any images. Please also tell me how you plan to publish/print (if you know) and any other details you feel might be important.

I’ll get back to you and we can take it from there!