Henrik Refsnes

Let’s talk about how to format the interior of your book, and how to make it look professional. I wrote this after reading one too many replies to this question in social media where all the advice is just bad (and sadly, thumbed up by a frustratingly large number of people).

I assume the reason is lack of knowledge, and this is my attempt to arm you with the dangerous notion that it’s not all that difficult. The tools you need—the tool, really—is free and reasonably easy to grasp, so the only thing standing in your way would be your own stubborn excuses not to learn the craft. Joking aside, I’m also serious.

That said, this won’t be a step-by-step guide with detailed laminated instructions. I’m only going to scratch the surface here, but by the end of this long read you should have a basic understanding, and some starting configuration to go with it.

Let’s first address the elephant in the room. What tool to even use. If you think AI can do it, no it can’t (and good luck with that). If you’re thinking Word can do it, hold right there and we’ll take it again for all the bots in the back. Don’t listen to advice in Facebook author groups, or your final product will look like you did. Using Microsoft Word to format the interior of your book for print is like driving down to the bicycle shop and demand they change tires on your car. Maybe they can do it, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re dancing at the wrong disco.

Let’s also stay away from Adobe, because their pricing is unreasonable and their terms are asinine. So, for the remainder of this post I’m going to assume you have picked the professional publishing software Affinity, which works on all platforms, is equivalent to Adobe, and unlike both Adobe InDesign (and Microsoft Word), it’s completely FREE. Yes free, your data is local, and nothing will be used to train AI. I don’t get anything for saying this, but let’s not stare a gift horse in the mouth.

I should mention Vellum and Atticus, both solid software for the very purpose of book formatting—at a price. Vellum (Mac only) will set you back $250 and Atticus $150. These two are also different in a fundamental way to Affinity (and InDesign). Vellum and Atticus are automated formatting appliances, where Affinity is a professional desktop publishing program (that also gives you the equivalent to Photoshop and Illustrator). Vellum and Atticus both use a template-only approach, hiding the machinery of typography to have you up and running in an hour. Affinity will give you full control of every visual, but it may take you 10 hours or more to learn the basics. Me, personally, I don’t think that two days of learning a new program warrants the “steep learning curve” argument against it, but you do you. Affinity is free and can do so much more.

Before you start messing around with the interior of your book, though, you need to decide what format it should be. Do you want it to be 6×9 inches, 5.5×8.5 inches, 140×220 mm, or something else? What units are you even designing it in? Look at other books your genre, and consider things like Amazon’s format requirements to participate in extended distribution if that’s your game. Printing costs may also vary substantially depending on the format you choose. While you’re at it, research what margins you want to use too, because changing either of these later on means you have to redo all the work that comes after. The key takeaway here is not to put the cart before the horse (sorry about all the horse metaphors, I’ll do better).

When we talk about margins and book interiors, we separate top, bottom, outside (edge), and inside (gutter) margins. Don’t confuse the latter two with left and right, and make sure you set up facing pages. What margins to use depends on the format you chose and the number of pages (thicker books tend to need a larger gutter). For the trade paperback example up above, a good baseline would be 0.5 to 0.75 inches (15-20 mm) top, bottom, and outside margins, and an inside gutter around 0.75 to 0.875 inches (20-25 mm). Beyond that it’s whatever feels right to you.

The next thing you’ll want to do is decide font (and font size). Keep in mind that not all fonts are free to use commercially, and that your favorite books are likely using licensed fonts. The Baskerville font family, as an example, is popular with big publishers, but it’ll cost you an unnecessary penny to license. There is, however, an open font named Baskervville (pay attention to the extra v). It’s not the same, but it is similar, and you can use it commercially for free. Remember to ALWAYS check a font’s license before using it in your book.

Let’s also briefly mention color. I could write another long post on this topic alone, but for now, make sure you pick CMYK when creating your print files. For the sake of brevity, you also need to pick a color profile, and if you’re anywhere near a European printshop, I suggest FOGRA39. If you’re using a US based printer, your best bet is probably US Web Coated SWOP v2. There are countless other color profiles, and your printer may have specific requirements, but FOGRA39 is a good place to start.

If that sounds like Greek to you, I’ll be honest, right here is where the wheat is separated from the chaff (phew, I made it without mentioning horses). This is also where the “you can use Microsoft Word” advice falls apart. Word operates in RGB colors and mutilates images and colors to conform to sRGB standard. It can’t handle CMYK, let alone color profiles—and we have barely got started (I told you this would be a long read). Yes, your interior may be black and white only, but you either decide to attempt this like a professional, or you keep on hobby-doodling in Word (and pay the professionals later).

Before we go further, though, this is a good time to take a coffee break and sum up where you’re at so far. You have decided to use a free professional tool like Affinity, you know your book’s format, and you’ve picked a font that is free to use commercially. You have also decided what margins to use, and created a new document in Affinity with the CMYK color space and selected a color profile like FOGRA39.

As a point of housekeeping, I recommend creating the following master pages to work from in Affinity.

• Body text on the left page; body text on the right page. Both pages have headers with page numbers. Right header has book title; left header has author name.
• Blank left page; new chapter on the right page. No headers on either page. Put the chapter title about 1/3 down from the top.
• Body text on the left page; new chapter on the right page. Left page has header with page number and author name. Right page has no header.
• Chapter start on the left page; body text on the right page. Left page has no header. Right page has header with page number and book title.

This will give you a useful set of master pages that you can assign to your book’s individual spreads. If you prefer footers instead of headers, by all means go for it (and in that case you can have footers also on the new chapter pages). The above master pages are by no means the end all be all, but it will give you a clean, professional interior.

I also recommend you set your interior text color to C=0, M=0, Y=0, K=100, and not some blackish combination of non-zero C, M and Y. Do this in your text frames in the master pages before you start applying them to your actual spreads, and you’ll save yourself a headache later on (he said from experience). When it comes to small, thin text, and you put non-zero values in all the CMYK letters, the physical printer needs to print ink in exactly the same dot 4 times, and if it misses even by a fraction of a millimeter, you get text with a halo outline. By keeping the K value at 100, and the others at 0, you negate this potential problem and ensure your text is crisp and clear in the printed book.

Now pat yourself on the back, because you’re finally ready to dive into the typography settings that will make all the difference (that this post was supposed to be mainly about). I will be using the font Baskervville (size 11pt) in the examples below.

The first two concepts you need to consider are kerning and tracking. Kerning adjusts the space between two specific characters, while tracking adjusts the space uniformly across a whole word, line or block of text. I strongly advise you stay away from kerning, and use the default that’s built into the font. You do this by selecting Metrics Kerning (in Affinity you can simply leave kerning at default). If you mess up kerning “rn” might look like “m” as an example.

Tracking is more useful, and for our 11pt Baskervville font, a +5 value (in Affinity’s scale) will give you a calm, easily readable text flow.

The next concept to look at is Leading Override. Where kerning is horizontal space, leading is vertical, and for 11pt Baskervville, a Leading Override at 16pt will give you a neat balance between readability and overly bloating your page count. Getting a good feel for this setting is critical, as it can easily mean plus or minus a hundred pages in your book. So give it some experimentation, and pick a balance that feels right to you.

Next up is Justification settings. First of all your text should be fully justified. All the professionally published books in your bookshelf has fully justified text. But beyond this, let’s look at the actual settings you want to tweak.

In Affinity you can set Word Spacing, and for this I recommend:

• Minimum: 85%
• Desired: 100%
• Maximum: 115%

This represents how much Affinity will vary the space between words to fit the justified text on a line. The 85-115 is a proven range that does a good job at preventing rivers and cramped lines. “Rivers” are when the blank space between words look like they form rivers down your paragraph (ie the text is too loose).

Affinity also lets us tweak Letter Spacing, where I suggest:

• Minimum: -2%
• Desired: 0%
• Maximum: +2%

This represents how much Affinity will vary the space between characters to fit the justified text on a line. The values above give that all important flexibility without visible distortion, and it works well with the +5 tracking.

Then you have the Hyphenation settings, where Affinity offers a whole slew of properties. For auto-hyphenation I recommend the following baseline:

• Minimum score: 7
• Minimum word length: 6
• Minimum prefix: 3
• Minimum suffix: 3
• Max consecutive hyphens: 2
• Hyphenation zone: 3 mm
• Capital zone: 2 mm
• Paragraph end zone: 4 mm
• Column end zone: 8 mm

This will give you reasonably clean edges with even spacing and minimal distractions. It’s a bit beyond the scope of this already long post to explain each of the properties, but suffice to say auto-hyphenation is where the good tools stand out from the bad ones. One thing worth mentioning is that you may need to install a hyphenation dictionary appropriate to the language you are writing in, or your mileage will vary.

Paragraph Spacing and Indentation is where you want to turn next. First, make sure to keep your space between paragraphs at 0 pts. Then set your First-line indent to around 4-5 mm. This is one of those publishing standards that I suggest you simply adopt and move on. A pro tip here is to create two paragraph styles for body text. One that has the first-line indent, and one that does not. This way you can quickly toggle any new paragraph that happens to start at the top of a page to the style without indent.

There are plenty more settings you can fiddle with in Affinity, but I think if you got this far, you have a solid baseline and something that looks really good already. The truth is there are no perfect settings. You will need to manually fix some paragraphs no matter what. Soft line-breaks (shift+enter) works well to push a word from a tighter line down to a looser line, and occasionally increasing tracking by an additional +5 in specific paragraphs can also help. And sometimes you just have to rewrite the damn sentence.

Of course, once you start manually tweaking individual paragraphs, you better be really, REALLY, sure you’re not still thinking about changing font, font-size, margins or book format … or you have to start all over. Once you get into the typesetting weeds, like making sure pages never start with an indented paragraph at the top, even adding a single word five pages earlier could mess up the entire interior layout of your book. Work methodically, and in order, is all I’m saying.

With that, I think it’s time to wrap this up, and let’s do it by talking about exporting. Because no, the printer does not want you to send them your Word doc. They want you to send them something they can actually work with. I’ve heard that printers cry a lot, on the inside, when they are sent files, because there’s such a baffling amount of authors out there who have listened to advice in Facebook groups. I digress. Affinity allows you to export a vast number of formats, but for this exercise, let’s stick the landing with PDF.

You’ll want to export using 300 dpi. If you have graphics that reach the edges of your pages, make sure you include bleed in the export (and you should configure your document bleed settings to 3mm). Also, make sure you export pages and not spreads (ie. “All Pages” option in Affinity, not all spreads, which is probably selected by default).

Beyond the basic export settings, click the “more” button. Select “convert colors”, which will make sure all colors are converted into the document’s color space (ie CMYK) in case you messed up or missed something. It will not touch colors already in the correct color space. Also verify that “include fonts” is checked. Uncheck “honor spot colors” and “include layers.” You want neither of those two and they are likely checked by default. Hyperlinks and bookmarks are irrelevant to printing so don’t include them, and your printer likely does not want “printer marks” either. I would also avoid “overprint black,” although for a text-only interior it might be what the printer actually prefers, but you need to check with whatever printshop you’re using. If, for example, you have defined a large background area in a rich black color like 40/30/30/100, you do not want to overprint black.

It should also be said that the available options are controlled by what you select in the Compatibility, Color Space, and Profile dropdown menus. If you’re exporting a book cover, you probably want to use PDF/X-4 or PDF/X-1a:2003, but when it comes to the interior you may want to consider PDF 1.7 (Acrobat 8) and picking a Gray color space with a Generic Gray profile—but that confuses everything I’ve said so far and opens a Pandora’s Box that this post never set out to answer. Point is, if your document is set up correctly to begin with, you have all the options during export.

On that bombshell, it’s definitely time to end this post, and I can only hope this has been helpful. Now that the coffee has gone properly cold, it really is time for me to get back to writing my next book, because the one thing you absolutely must have to format the interior of a book—is the finished book.