Designing Beautiful Books - The Preface

This book was written to help address something I see all too often these days. That being, poorly designed books.


Your primary goal as a writer must always be to deliver useful content to your readers. However, because you are now the publisher, you must also deliver a great looking product. Your book must have a consistent look, from page to page, and chapter to chapter.


You must pay attention to the smallest of details you would not need to consider if you are merely writing a book destined to be traditionally published.


These days, publishing a book requires very little planning or thought. If you have a web connection, publishing a book is almost effortless. If you are publishing through a traditional publisher, professional designers are paid to worry about formatting, page layout, gutters, mirrored margins, duplex printing issues, fonts, headers, footers, images, captions, footnotes, etc.


Without the professionals attending to the tiny details, poorly designed books are frequently released. When it comes time for you design your book, carefully review the overall look and flow of your book.


Does it make sense? Is your book something you would purchase from another writer?


In many cases, there are no designers involved. Just the author and his or her artistic sensibilities to help decide the direction the book will take. There are no checks and balances that help eliminate bad looking books, so the design is usually up to the writer.


Then again, who am I to say if a particular writers self-published book looks good or bad.
What I can comment on, however, are the problems I frequently encounter with the books I buy and read. The problems that tell me the designer gave very little thought to how their books look when printed. For example, font changes from chapter to chapter. Page numbering that skip from page 45 to page 56.


Sometimes, I will encounter text that is impossible to read. The writer decided to use 9-point fonts throughout their book because the writer thinks it looks good.


Blocks of light colored text could disappear because of how their book was converted and printed in black and white by the printer and publisher.


Sometimes, a writer will indeed design a great looking book. But, because the writer did not understand what can happen when their manuscript is (usually) converted to another format -in many cases the printer will print from a PDF file -and their careful and lovingly crafted formatting falls apart when the PDF file is printed.


This can happen for any number of reasons. For example, extra paragraph marks that force unwanted page breaks. Improperly formatted headings and subheadings will also cause a problem with the Table of Contents.


Unequal paragraph spacing often occurs because paragraph text was not properly formatted.


I wrote this book because I could never understand why people dislike Microsoft Word for page layout and book design. I wondered why my experiences are different. I wondered why so many otherwise good books look terrible.


Countless research hours spent combing the web resulted in piles of data and far too many contradictions. The deeper I dug, the more I came to understand that the web is filled with inaccurate information about how Word works and thinks. Perhaps more accurately stated, how the typical Word user works or what he or she thinks about Microsoft Word.


Having designed and written my fair share of technical books and long documents, I could never understand why Microsoft Word had such a bad reputation and according to some users, should never to be considered for page layout.


Everywhere I looked; or, to be more accurate, surfed, I would encounter the same old stories.
For instance, Word is unsuitable for designing good-looking books; buy Quark, PageMaker, or Microsoft Publisher, instead.


Word will not handle complicated layouts. Microsoft does not offer any templates for designing books. Word will crash if you try to work with long documents. Word is buggy. On and on.


Having worked with extremely long Word documents containing lots of tables and illustrations -often containing many hundreds of pages, complicated tables, and illustrations aplenty -what some users were saying about Word was incorrect because the user lacks Word experience and knowledge.


The more I educated myself about Word's finer points and inner workings, the more I came to understand that many of Word's detractors were incorrect about much of what they were telling the world on their web sites and in their web articles.


One recent article I read had to do with headers and footers. The writer reported that it is impossible to use different headers on every page of a Word document; that changing to different page margins within a document was equally impossible.


This writer suggested that the user use "Word Art" to create different "headers" and use multiple files if you want to change page layout; some pages set to landscape and some portrait, for example.


His silly suggestions were laughably wrong; it was obvious that this self-styled Word "expert" did not fully understand the program. Unfortunately, some other novice will take this inaccurate information and run with it, thereby confusing yet another beginner.


Word offers several features that many Word 'Power Users' reports will lead to potential crashes and document corruption. Yet, some users swear by features like "Master Documents" and "Allow Fast Saves."


Many of the features Word offers that drives many a user crazy, can be switched on, off, or modified by the user. The problems that drive some Word users nuts should never be a problem when the user makes a few simple options changes. Many have reported Word bugs are actually not bugs; they are features the user has the ability to absolutely control.


As it is, out of the box, Word is "useless" for page layout.


Is Microsoft Word a page layout program? Most certainly not. Word is, however, a most capable word processor that can easily double as a most capable page layout program. A very good one at that.


Am I suggesting that you use Word for everything you plan to publish and avoid dedicated page layout programs? Well, no, not exactly. What I am suggesting is this: do not discount Word until you have a chance to bend it to your will and see what it is capable of giving you.


The main goal of this book is to help you understand why Microsoft Word just might be the best 'page layout' program for the majority of users that want to design a good looking book, with a minimum of trouble, time, and expense.


Robert Maxey - RMWP

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