I always encourage my clients to print their formatted books after they receive them from me. I tell them that they’ll catch more errors if they look at their books in print. But what I don’t mention to my clients is that I often print copies of their manuscripts at various stages in the design and layout process, too.
In fact, I often print a copy of their unformatted manuscripts for myself. This is a step many book interior layout designers might skip, but I’ll tell you why I think it’s important. It’s for the same reason that I ask my clients to print their formatted manuscripts: I catch more formatting errors if I look at the unformatted manuscript next to the formatted book. Printing the book manuscript improves the quality of my final product.
Most of the books that I format are non-fiction, and they have a lot of different formatting details to watch for: not just italics or bold but also images, tables, captions, superscript, footnotes or endnotes. I find that printing out the manuscript helps me to double-check my formatting and be sure I haven’t missed anything important.
Here’s a recent memoir manuscript that I printed out to compare to the formatted book on screen. (I printed it on the back of some papers I had which had been printed on only one side.)
When I am setting up the first few sample page designs, I print those out as well, to test the typeface style, weight, size and to check the line spacing and margins. Sometimes I also print out the formatted book in full, to check it over again.
Of course, I’m a print designer, I like printing things out. But there’s more to it than that — I believe that when I review your book on paper at various stages in the interior layout and design process, it gives you a better book! This extra attention to quality is, I hope, one of the things that sets me apart from other book interior layout designers.
In case you’re wondering, whenever possible I print on both sides of the paper. I always recycle the printed manuscripts when the project is complete and another happy client is sending his or her book off for production!
As an aside, here’s a peek at how this memoir looked before formatting:
And here’s how it looked after:
My client told me that he caught problems that he had not noticed before when he read his manuscript once more in the final format. Together, we made a memoir that will be treasured by his family and friends!
A bit of attention to detail goes a long way in creating a book you can be proud of! If you’d like my help with your book project, or just want to ask me some questions, fill out this book project questionnaire or book a live consultation. The process page on my website lays out what it looks like to work with me.