How do page layouts and typesetting impact your readers? How a book looks and feels in your hands is part of why readers love a printed book. Though rising in popularity in recent years, eBooks don’t captivate readers like a hard copy of a book does. From the crisp pages to the solid binding to the way the words on the page are framed beautifully on the page, reading from a printed book is part of the literary experience that readers crave, along with an intriguing story and compelling characters.
The important elements that contribute to a book’s literary vibes are the typesetting style and the structure and the choices of page layouts.
Enhancing Reader Experience Through the Psychology of Smart Design
Just like the way paint color and furniture style and placement all contribute to the way someone feels when they walk into a room, a book’s typesetting and page layouts create the backdrop for your book’s contents. The way to captivate readers when they open a book is to craft a book that reads seamlessly, looks inviting, and allows the reader to dive right into the story without a hitch or misstep in the design process. Managing your design of a book’s page layouts and typesetting options will enhance the reader’s experience by creating a smooth flow to each page that allows your story to be the main attraction.
Choosing Appealing Page Layouts
One way to captivate readers with a well-designed book is to focus on the parts of the page layouts that make a book easy and enjoyable to look at. These three types of layout elements, when crafted carefully, help eyes run smoothly over the page and won’t stop the reader’s attention with an oddly placed text that can add up to a less-than-effortless reading experience.
1 Alignment and Justification for Page Layouts: Books that are printed rather than presented digitally are usually fully justified on the sides of the page, allowing the edges of the text to align, creating a block effect on the page. But using a fully justified text format requires a visual inspection to avoid undesirable large swaths of white space that can attract attention away from the text itself.
Some types of casual or informational books, however, only traditionally align on the left margin, so choose the justification strategy according to your book’s contents. This seemingly minor page layout choice is an important part of creating a positive reader experience because when you make the right one, your book will match a reader’s expectations and positively impact how they subconsciously view the book’s contents.
2 Headers, Footers, and Page Numbers for Page Layouts: The extra content that is included on a book page, like the header or the footer should be informative yet not draw the reader’s attention away from the story or book’s contents.
3 Order and Structure for Page Layouts: Regardless of the content of your book, both fiction and nonfiction books should be orderly, and the structure should be easily understandable by readers. Use larger or bolder fonts for chapter or section breaks, visual cues should be used to indicate scene changes and subtitles and other key phrasing should be distinguishable and consistent throughout the book’s layout.
Strategies for Attractive Typography
How the words appear on the page is called the typesetting, but it encompasses more than just font choice. The font size and style choices authors or book designers make can invite the reader into the story or make the words hard to read or just less appealing psychologically.
- Font Selection: The readability of the typeface is paramount in captivating readers, and a misstep with overly stylized, too small, or too large fonts or hard-to-read fonts can make a potential reader put down a book before they even give the story a chance. Font sizes between 10 and 12 are typically used with printed books, ensuring the font is easy to decipher. Fiction often uses the serif fonts Baskerville or Garamond, while technical or modern books may use sans serif fonts.
- Images and Graphic Elements: The interior pages of a book should feel balanced, so ensuring that images and other graphic elements don’t dominate a page but instead work together with the overall feel of blocks of text will create a comfortable, readable page.
- Line and Word Spacing: The spacing between lines, also called leading, is critical to helping a reader read smoothly by governing the visual space vertically between each line of the page. Similarly, word spacing, also called tracking, is the adjustment of the space between each word. Both of these elements of spacing contribute to a reader’s experience and how easily their eyes move from word to word and across and down the page.
- Margins: Too much white space on a page due to large margins can increase the page count while minimizing the content a reader can take in on each page, slowing down their reading experience. On the other hand, too small of margins create cramped pages that feel less readable with little white space or breathing room beside the text.
Bringing Careful Typesetting and Beautiful Page Layouts to Your Book
Making a book that invites readers to turn the page is the goal of every self-publishing author, whether it is the content of the book or how the book appears. Utilizing proven typesetting methods and developing beautiful page layouts will help you do that.
But not every author is an expert book designer or has the interest or time to tackle this critical aspect of bookmaking. Instead, most authors choose to either use a book design template or hire a professional designer to take care of these tasks so the author can stay focused on developing a fantastic manuscript.
Book designers are professionals who are well-versed in tuning into the small details that complete a book’s appearance, like typography tasks and the structuring of appealing book layouts. These pros know the differences between each genre’s particulars, and working with a professional book designer can help a self-publishing author’s book appear indistinguishable on the bookshelf from books published traditionally.
Design templates are an excellent choice for authors who are comfortable choosing page layouts and typesetting choices for their books but need help implementing them into the manuscript. Free and paid templates are available online and authors can begin writing using one or at any stage of the writing process. Templates are usually fairly foolproof, but authors can often make choices within the design template to further personalize their book’s appearance.
Crafting a Gorgeous Book That Appeals to Your Readers
Writing a fantastic story or coming up with book content that readers will be interested in takes plenty of time and thought. But making a book that is inviting and comfortable to read means paying attention to the details of typesetting and page layouts, whether a book template or an expert book designer is part of your plan.
When your book’s page layouts are well-designed and the typography has been carefully planned, the words on the page will flow smoothly for the reader, creating a seamless reading experience and allowing your book’s contents to take the spotlight. When your manuscript is complete, partnering with Dazzle Printing can help you transform it into a beautifully printed book that you will be thrilled to get into the hands of potential readers.
