Why You Need To Care About The Interior of A Book

It is not easy to write a book, it’s your legacy to your readers, however small they may number.

In fact, it can be one of the hardest things to do in the life of a writer, planning not only what is written in the book, but how it looks to your potential reader.  It’s something most people will say is the worst thing they have to do.  The editing or the interior design of a book.  Writing in and of itself is not all that complex, but it’s the small things which make the difference between something a person will want to read and something that a person doesn’t want to read.  It’s the art of look, feel and sound, with your book in all aspects.

Take a book out of your bookshelf, anyone will do.  Now, spend sometime looking it over.  The first thing that comes to mind when looking at a book is all the lines are even on both side of the margins. (Most publishers use the term “justified”) Right now, the writing on this blog post is justified.  It has the feel of a book, it’s not a book, rather it’s just a post. The people who will read this blog might even get the impression it is a part of a book.  It certainly doesn’t feel much like a blog post.

The point is that readers do spend time reading and taking notes, they might not know that a book is ‘justified’ but they do understand when it doesn’t look correct.  They might not understand why a book with margins on the right looks okay, but they will feel a book that has justified margins looks better.  It does, it shows that the publisher, or self-publisher cares about the interior.

Another small details is the line spacing, there is some room for the words.  The is some room for flow.  People can site down and feel as if the book is “fast paced”  By how the interior is laid out.  Don’t believe this?  Here’s an example of pace, or how pace looks in the interior of a book:

These three sentences above seem to be read “quicker” then if they have been put together in one paragraph.  It looks fast, it reads fast.

It doesn’t matter to the reader if the pace is fast, but it matters to the writer that the pace should be good and look good to the reader.  It is ultimately up to the reader to decide what the writer has to offer, and make it valuable to them.  If the interior of the book matches more to how the reader envisions it, the more likely.  One can pick up a book and

In non-fiction, a smaller paragraph can make a reader feel as if they are learning something at a faster pace.  The reality is there is the same word count but the reader might not notice this fact for a while, if at all.  If it was long paragraphs it might be hard for them to  read it and they would feel as if the book went too slow for them.  This is a part of the magic of the interior of a book, the more “black” there is the more likely the reader will feel overwhelmed, or too much “white space” and the reader will feel the opposite, and then feel as if the writer’s book price was too much.

Your book is your legacy, and the details are important.