Sometimes I get an email from an author who has done her very best to format her book in Word and is just wondering if I can check her Word file and make a few small design tweaks.
For example, a month or two ago new author Elizabeth sent me her book file, which she had already formatted to a 6x9 inch page size (the final size of her book) and said,
I’m hoping I don’t need much layout help. Obviously I need help with the Table of Contents and Appendix, at least. Anyway, let me know how much needs to be done…
It doesn’t have to be perfect, but I would appreciate if it looked professional.
“Can I design my own book interior in Word?” The answer depends on how professional you want your book to look. If it’s a collection of family anecdotes for distribution to fifteen family members, Word will probably do (and will probably make sense budget-wise). But if you are wanting your book to reflect your professional abilities and perhaps build your platform as an author, speaker, or communicator, a book formatted in Word will usually not look professional enough.
For this particular project, Elizabeth allowed me to take the whole book from Word into my professional book interior layout software, Adobe InDesign, and format it with the more powerful tools that InDesign provides. I created this post to show you some of the clear visual differences between an author-designed book layout from Word and a professionally-designed book layout created in InDesign.
(By the way, I never, ever format books in Word. Therefore I also don’t go into Word to tweak files my clients have designed in there. You might find a freelancer online who is a Word expert who will offer to do this for you, but a professional book designer will work with Adobe InDesign.)
Book interior layout has a lot of small details to it that seem unimportant (after all, we all have access to Word!) but that in the end make a book somehow look clunkier and less relaxing to read. Overall, I took Elizabeth’s book font size down, changed the font, and added more leading (space between the lines).
(Click on any image in this post to see a larger version.)
One of the main things that makes it hard to make a book look professionally formatted in Word is the lack of control over things like where the text starts on the page. You can hit “return” or “enter” a few times to try to make a new chapter open lower on the page, but it’s hard to be sure that all your new chapters are opening in the same position. In professionally typeset books, new chapters often open lower on the page. One of the big differences between the Word layout and the InDesign layout of this book was the position of the chapter titles on each opening page.
When formatting Elizabeth’s books I also added footers with the page number and the book title or chapter name. This is easy to do in InDesign.
Indents, which are used to indicate that a new paragraph is starting, are not needed on the first paragraph of a chapter because it is obvious that a new paragraph is beginning. A book designer recognizes small details like this and cleans up the look of your book when importing it from Word.
InDesign has more powerful controls for making the Table of Contents look just the way it should. As you can see, Elizabeth was having trouble with formatting some of the longer chapter titles and knowing how to include the page numbers. The results from InDesign look cleaner.
Word also does weird (and sometimes ugly) things like automatically make your hyperlinks blue and underlined. This is unnecessary and is a sure sign the book was formatted in Word.
A book designer’s expertise can especially work to your advantage for complex formatting like in Elizabeth’s appendix. Word can get a bit hard to control when you have multiple levels of bullet points, tabs, indents, etc.
Even while cleaning up the formatting of the Appendix, I realized that the way the content was organized was not completely clear, and after my suggestions, Elizabeth went back and reworked her Appendix so that it was more understandable. This is another benefit of working with a book designer, is having another set of eyes go over your formatting / content and checking if it is organized as clearly as possible.
I think it is clear from the images in this post, that there is a dramatic visual difference between an author-designed book layout from Word and a professionally-designed book layout in InDesign. When looking for a book designer, be assured that a professional book designer does not work in Word; look for someone who will work in the industry standard book layout software, Adobe InDesign, if you want a professional final product!
If you’ve gotten this far in this article, you’re probably self-publishing! Check out my articles page to learn more about self-publishing and what it’s like to work with a book designer.