What is book formatting?

Book formatting is the process of turning a finished manuscript into the designed interior of a book. It takes the words, images and structure from your working files and turns them into the pages a reader will actually see, with the typography, margins, headings, images, page numbers and spacing all working together.

You may also hear it called typesetting, book layout or interior book design. The terms overlap, but they describe much the same stage: taking the manuscript and working out how that particular book should function on the page.

That can be quite simple for a novel or enormously involved for a book full of photographs, tables, exercises, diagrams or several levels of headings. Formatting is not simply applying a template after the writing is finished. It involves decisions about readability, structure, images, page count, printing and the visual language of the book, including plenty the author may never have known needed deciding.

Formatting starts with understanding what is actually in the manuscript

A manuscript is a working document, not a perfect set of instructions for the finished book.

We may receive one tidy Word file or several documents containing text, images, tables and notes. Headings can be styled in half a dozen different ways. Repeated spaces may have been used to position text. Images may be embedded at wildly different qualities. We have even found text accidentally set in white so nobody knew it was there.

The first job is therefore to understand what is there, what the author intended and how all the pieces are meant to relate to one another.

Formatting is different from editing

Editing deals with the writing itself. Formatting deals with how that writing becomes a book.

We may spot a heading that looks inconsistent, a section sitting somewhere unexpected or something that appears to be missing, and we will raise it with the author. What we are not doing is quietly rewriting the book.

Ideally, the main editing should be finished before formatting begins. Small corrections later are normal, but substantial changes can ripple through hundreds of pages. Add material near the beginning and everything after it may move, including running heads, images, references and indexes. Enough additional pages can even change the spine width and therefore the cover.

The right page can solve problems you would not know to look for

We once received an extremely dense technical manuscript intended for a wide US Letter page. Running the text straight across that width would have created very long lines that were difficult to read. Making the type larger would have solved the line length but pushed the book well beyond the page count the author needed.

A two column layout solved both problems. The lines became comfortable to read, the material fitted efficiently, diagrams could span both columns where needed, and notes could use the space around them.

Nothing was wrong with the manuscript. The problem only appeared when we considered how that material would actually behave as a page.

The visual style has to match what the book is saying

We have also worked on business material that grew out of an academic context and arrived looking very much like it. Dense pages, traditional serif typography and the feel of a thesis all made sense in its original setting.

But the book itself was about modern, forward looking business ideas. Once the layout became more open and the typography cleaner and more contemporary, the material suddenly looked like the ideas it contained.

Both versions could have been technically correct. Only one was really right for the book.

Sometimes the design becomes part of the information

One bilingual project arrived with two languages placed side by side. Because they used similar character sets, it was not immediately obvious which language was which. Using different typefaces made the pages look unnecessarily messy.

Color solved it.

We kept the typography consistent and gave each language its own color. The distinction became immediate without extra labels, and those colors could then be used throughout the cover, illustrations and other elements as a visual key. When more books were added to the series, additional languages could simply be given their own colors.

The author had originally planned to print in grayscale. In this case, color stopped being decorative and became part of how the book communicated.

Typography is much more than choosing a font

A typeface is only the beginning.

Line length, line spacing, margins, paragraph spacing, hyphenation and heading positions all affect how comfortably a book reads. The inner margin has to allow for the binding. A heading should not be stranded at the bottom of a page. Images have to sit naturally with the text around them.

These choices also affect the physical book. Set the text too tightly and it becomes tiring to read. Set it too loosely and the book can grow by dozens of pages, increasing its spine width, weight and printing cost.

Good formatting balances readability, appearance and production at the same time.

Images, tables and structure all have to work together

Images placed into Word are useful because they show us where the author expects them to appear, but the embedded version may not be suitable for print. We may need the original file, then crop, size and position it properly.

Tables may need rebuilding so they remain legible at the final page size. Captions have to stay with the correct image. Diagrams, quotations and side material all need to feel like part of the same design.

The structure around the main text matters too. Contents pages, chapter openings, running heads, page numbers, references, appendices and indexes all involve decisions. A contents page, for example, can help enormously or become intimidating if every possible level of heading is included.

The aim is not to reproduce whatever happened to exist in Word. It is to make the finished book easier to understand and use.

A book is one connected document

Professional layout software treats the book as a flowing whole rather than hundreds of separate pages.

Change something on page 30 and the text after it may move. That can shift an image on page 31, a heading on page 32 and everything that follows.

That is why formatting is not simply a matter of designing one attractive page and repeating it. The rules have to remain consistent across the whole book while still allowing for all the exceptions that naturally appear.

The finished layout still has to work when it is printed

Once the design is right, the interior still has to be prepared for the printer that will make it.

Page size, margins, fonts, image quality and the final PDF all need to meet the relevant technical requirements. What looks right on a screen also has to survive binding, trimming, ink and paper.

Book formatting therefore sits between design and production. The formatter needs to understand both.

So, what does a book formatter actually do?

A book formatter takes the author's manuscript and works out how to turn it into the strongest version of the finished book. That includes the obvious things, such as typography, page numbers and images, but also the decisions an author may never have known were there to make.

That is where experience earns its place. If you have never formatted books, you can only judge the options you already know exist. An experienced formatter has seen the problems before, understands what different solutions can achieve and can often spot possibilities in the material that would otherwise never be explored.

Good formatting should not shout about itself when the book is finished. The reader should simply find the pages clear, comfortable and right for the material.

We have been formatting books for authors and publishers for more than twenty years, from straightforward novels to complex illustrated, technical and nonfiction titles. If your manuscript is reaching that stage, you can see how we work and what is included in our book formatting services.