What is book design?

Book design is the process of preparing a book for the printer, including:

• typesetting the interior
• designing the cover
• preparing the interior and cover files for upload to a digital printer

Interior

The content of a book usually takes form first as a word processing file.
(If you have written your book in longhand, you will need to have it scanned into a digital file. We don’t do that.)

The word processing file must now be formatted as a book. This involves setting a size, adding page headers and/or footers (book title, chapter title, author, page numbers), formatting the first page of each chapter, adding a drop cap if desired to the first paragraph of each chapter, adding a glyph to section breaks, designing a title page, adding front matter, creating a Table of Contents, eliminating widows and orphans, and kerning the text (adjusting line and letter spacing so the text doesn’t look crowded or stretched out).

Cover

Cover design includes front cover, back cover, and spine. We specialize in the economy end of cover design, which means you will need to provide any artwork or photographs, all the copy for the back of the book, and the ISBN.

raqoon design works with graphic designers who do original artwork, so if you’re looking for something a bit more special, we’d be glad to refer you to someone. The graphic designers we work with do the artwork only, and we provide the technical know-how to get it into the proper format for the printer.

Which brings us to....

File preparation

Once a book has been typeset, it must be exported as a print-ready pdf according to whatever specifications the printer provides. If you have no idea what any of that means, that’s why we’re here!

The cover of the book must also be prepared according to the printer’s specifications, which includes adding the ISBN bar code and calculating the proper spine width.

So far we have worked only with Lightning Source, but we can also prepare files for CreateSpace or any other POD printer that provides file upload specifications.