- Two broad categories:
- Trade book – Include most other books, fiction as well as non-fiction. They do not serve a captive audience, sales must be made on an individual basis and often depends on an impulse buying
- Text book - Those volumes, mostly non-fiction, published to meet the specific needs of students at all levels.
NMore disorganized, more financially hazardous than more business, book publishing is unique in that its product constantly changes. Each book published – some houses publish six or seven hundred titles a year – must be separately designed, produced, and promoted.
The first typical first printing of a book comes to five to ten thousand copies. If the book sells well, the book goes back into a second, a third and others are needed.
New edition involves updating and rewriting all chapters and probably rearranging them. Textbooks go to new editions more frequently than trade books. Publishers decided to bring out new editions to update material and to fight market in used books.
Under the standard contract between writer and publisher, the writer gets 10 % of all the retail price of every book sold, a little more if the book goes into high sales figure. The other 90% is used to pay for editing, design, production, printing, promotion, and distribution of the book and other business expenses and to provide some profit to the publisher.
Self- publishing is becoming popular with the availability of word processors and laser printer.
Abe Lerner of Dodd, “Book designing is more than selecting typefaces and arranging them; book designing is book making. “Our design and bookmaking task is to make order out of an author’s manuscript, not to overpower it with distractions, no matter how well meant.”
What design does for books.
A publisher’s attitude toward a design can affect an author’s decision to go with that publisher.
Does design spur the sale of the book? Probably not, admits Marshall Lee, a book design and production specialist. But poor book design can hurt sales.
“The general public’s reaction to a book design is, in most cases, subconscious”. He writes. “Except where the visual aspect is spectacular, the nonprofessional browser is only aware of only a general sense of pleasure or satisfaction in a presence of a well design book and a vague feeling of irritation when confronted with badly designed one.”
Only the large houses, those publishing more than one hundred books a year, seem to employ full-time art directors and designers. Some houses do not even have production departments, turning that job over instead to independent shops and studios.
A typical book designer is a freelancer who works for a number of houses.
The book designer’s approach.
The typical book come in a 6 x 9 size, centers its display-type lines, uses Times Roman for body type and maybe Helvetica for titles, runs chapter numbers up large, starts opening paragraphs of chapters flush left, and puts most margin space at the bottoms of the pages.
Involve two basic approaches:
Textbooks present a special problem to a designer because they must satisfy two different audience: the teachers and the student readers.
As a book designer you should be particularly concerned about unity. You achieve unity by keeping the same typeface throughout, preferably for both titles and text; using the same “sink” for the beginning of each chapter; placing the page numbers and running heads at the same spot on each page; and establishing a standard copy area and staying with it throughout the book.
Production and the book designer.
The production editor, along with the editor, imposes on a designer a number of limitations: a proposed number of pages for the printed book, some art that will have to be included in a budget.
A designer would read the manuscript carefully before starting their design.
At the early stages you could forget the budget and come up with the ideal solution even though it might be beyond what the budget could support. You could modify the design to fit the budget.
The lineup of book pages.
Laying out the book.
The first order of business is to “cast off” – count the number of words or, better, the numbers of characters in the manuscript and, and using standard copyfitting techniques, determine how many pages of print the characters will occupy.
Whenever possible, you arrange the book so that the final number of pages, come to a multiple of thirty-two.
You may find it necessary to add or subtract a signature.
Establishing the margin.
It may not seem that way, but the nontype area of a book – the white space- accounts for close to 50% of the total area. For art books and highly designed books, white space may account as much as 75% of the total area.
For all your type pages you concentrate white space on the outside edges of your spread, but not in equal-width bands. (Avoid same size of margins)
Book margins are like magazine margins. The narrowest margin on each page is at the gutter. The margin increase at the top, increase more at the outside edge, and increase more at the bottom.
Book Typography.
The heading are seldom are larger than 18 or 24 points.
Text type in the books ranges from 8 points to 12 points, depending on the width of the column, the length of the book, the face used the amount of the leading between lines, and the age level of the reader.
Body copy is leaded from 1 to 3 points. Space between words is usually 1/4 em or at most, 1/3 em.
“Windows” – last lines of paragraph – should not be narrower than two-thirds of the columns when they begin a column or a page. Some publishers do not want windows of any width at the tops of pages or columns.
You also need to make decision about how to handle long quotations.
Subheads are best when kept close to the size of the body type. Sometimes they are in boldface, sometimes in all caps, sometimes in italics. They should be accompanied by some extra white space.
You should also have to decide how to handle running titles – small lines at the tops or bottoms of inside pages – along with page number.
Book Paper.
As much as the 25% of the retail price of the books goes to pay for the production and printing.
According to an estimate by Marshall Lee, one-fifth of that 25% goes for paper.
The book designer must know the special qualities of the papers.
- Four basic kinds of papers used for book printing:
- Antique stock. They are many textures, finishes, and weights, but essentially these papers are soft, rough and absorbent.
- Plate or English-finish stock. Essentially these are antique papers that have been smoothed out, making possible sharper reproduction, especially for pictures. Paper used for the big magazines falls into this categories.
- Coated stock. Simple polishing (calendaring) may not suffice to give the paper a finish that is smooth and slick enough.
- Offset stock. The offset printing process needs a special paper that will resist moisture. Untreated paper would stretch, shrink and curl. Offset paper comes in a variety of textures and finishes, but the most common is rather smooth, severely white stock used for so many company magazines and for books that carry numerous halftones.
- Books these days come in greater variety of sizes than ever, but the most common trim sizes still are 5 3/8 x 8, 5 1/2 x 8 1/4, and 6 1/8 x 9 1/4.
Books bindings.
- Four bindings:
- Sewn binding.
- a) Smythe sewing, in which the sewing is done through the gutter of each signature and then across the back.
- b) Side sewing (less common), in which the thread goes through the entire book about 1/8 inch from the gutter edge.
- Stapled binding. The staples can go through the spine, if signatures are nested; or they can go in through the side. Such binding is reserved for a low- budget books.
- Adhesive bindings. Sometimes called “perfect binding,” this system brings together loose pages rather than signatures. The binding is accomplished by applying glue across the back (Paperbacks use this kind of binding).
- Mechanical binding. The most common mechanical binding is spiral binding, in which loose pages are held together by a wire that spirals along a series of punched holes. New pages can be inserted.
The book cover.
A hardbound book.
With the kind of binding decide, now need to decide on the cover.
Need to decide whether the boards of the cover to be wrapped fully in cloth, partially in cloth and partially in paper, or fully in paper.
Many hardbound books require design on the cover as well as on the jacket. Textbooks generally get by with cover design only. There are no jackets.
For their cover material publishers once used animal skins – vellum or leather. Cloth gained popularity as book cover material in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The cloth used today is often a cotton impregnated or coated plastic. Paper became popular during the World War II, when cloth was scarce.
The cover for paperback books represents a special challenge to the designer in that it is both a jacket and a cover. Because paperback sales are so dependent on impulse buying, the cover art must be interesting.
Like the jacket for a hardbound book, the cover for a paperback is as much an exercise in advertising design as in book design.
Science fiction offers some of the best possibilities for high-level illustration.
Sometimes a publisher puts a book out with different covers to appeal to different buyers.
The book jacket.
The modern distribution methods required that books be protected, and the idea of “dust” jacket was born.
Jacket design probably is less important to hardcover books than cover design is to paperbacks.
Ideally, you should know a great deal about a book before attempting to design its jacket.
The typical jacket features the name of the book and the name of the author on the front; a picture of the author on the back; and a description of the book and the biographical information about the author on the inside flaps. The name of the book, author (often last name only), and publisher run from left to right across the top of the spine if the book is thick enough; if the book is too thin, the names run in a single sideways line, from top to bottom.
