Book Design: What It Is and Its Importance for Your Professional Development

Learning How to Design Your Own Books

6^th March 2023

In this article, we will be looking at what book design is and its types and formatting, your place in it as an indie author, its relationship to personality types, and its importance in the modern books business. Do you want to know what it means when people talk about book design? This article then is your guide. Let’s get started!

What Is Book Design?

Book design in my understanding refers to interior design and cover design artworks. Some people refer to the interior design as book layout; that’s the same thing. Formatting is simply part of book interior design because it deals with how those elements such as font faces, font sizes, text alignment, and text formatting work together to make a book what it should be.

For me, book design happens as I write. It’s part of my planning. It’s part of editing. This is because for me, I already have an idea how my book will look like from the time of conception. That means from the moment I thought about creating a book, I always think about how it will look like: size, fonts, formatting, and much more.

Related: Self-Publishing Ultimate Guide

I always imagine how the cover will look like from the very time I began to think about a book. This is part of the product design and planning. Your book is your product. It must have identity. Think about the genre as well. The genre affects how the interior and the cover looks like. However, the book has to be somehow unique.

Book Design Types

As mentioned above, the genre and other elements affect how a book looks from the inside out. This also affects the book design types you are likely to choose from based on those factors. Think about poetry for the moment. A poetry book has to be designed in a certain way.

Design types refer to the layout, the themes, colors, and other important factors. As mentioned earlier, there are colors well known for each genre or writing types. For example, there are colors, layout, and themes known to work well with either nonfiction or fiction books.

However, there are many genres under the fiction umbrella, just as there are in the nonfiction writing. For each genre and book category, there are also design expectations. These are parts of design types. These are factors involved in making books look different based on the genre, and on the individual book. Even if your book is a poetry work, it has to look different and special. It has to be designed in a unique way because that’s natural. You and I are human, but unique humans, aren’t we?

Book Interior Design

This is about the designs inside the book. Interior design refer to things such as font faces, font sizes, text alignment, font colors, paragraph styles, and other formatting elements suited for that genre. You can now see how these relate to each other.

Book genre affects book interior design. This is because things such as text alignment differ a lot from genre to genre. The text can align left, right, center, or justified. All these are very important.

For example, most poetry works are aligned to the center of the page. This makes the reader know that the lines must be read in a certain tone of voice. This is true with the prophetic oracles in the Bible. The way those messages are formatted differs from the way normal narratives are formatted.

However, not all Bible versions recognize the same rule. The New International Version is one of the versions that follow this interior design and book formatting rule very well, and this might be one of the many reasons why modern readers like it.

You can read more about Essential Book Interior Design Elements in this article.

Book Cover Design

People still judge a book by its cover. No matter how we resist this temptation, there will always be someone somewhere judging a book by how it looks from the outside. This is true for any products, and books are the best of the best products people judge by their looks. Only God judges from the inside out.

For that reason, a book cover is a sale agent. And as we have already known, book genre is very important. Ask those who love books and they will tell you their opinions about book cover designs. I am saying this because books are foreign tools unknown to our ancestors in Africa. It might also be my own personality and belief.

It seems I don’t care much how a book looks from the outside. This is because the cover is just what it is; a cover. It only covers the actual thing, the content. It’s the skin. There are many things under our skin. For that reason, I rather open the book to either judge it as good or bad.

However, that’s not the case for the majority of readers. The opposite is actually true. This is why most people don’t enjoy reading PDF books or Kindle books. They don’t have the same experience as when they read a printed material. This is because people experience things in their own unique ways. For us to see things from the face value, we don’t make it an issue how a book looks or feels. It matters what is written on it.

You must follow the market if you want to sell books. As I write this, I am about to return one of my covers because from the time I replaced it, sales stops. There we no page reading reports each and every other month afterwards. This means the first cover attracted readers.

The opposite is true with my other covers. For example, the Self-Help Series covers were redesigned from scratch and that brought many readers onboard. This is why you need a professional book cover designer. But if you can’t afford her for now, just make sure, like me, you learn what makes a cover stand out. I am still learning. It’s not easy to design a really good cover your readers will love because of many factors involved.

Book Formatting

Book formatting is part of the book interior design. It’s based on the book genre. For example, the font choice, alignment choices, and other formatting choices are important based on what genre you are working in. does that mean you can’t choose a design you personally like?

If the design and the formatting you like don’t match the traditional design, don’t risk it. But how do you know the traditional designs for that book type? That’s why you are here. That’s why you are reading this article and maybe a few others after this. You want to know about book formatting. You want to master it so that your book can make enough sales to help you quit your day job.

Again, I do my book interior formatting as I write it. This means I set my book trim sizes, font faces, font sizes, and other important elements before I begin the actual writing process. This is true for both nonfiction and literary nonfiction genres I write.

I encourage reading more about book formatting and doing the best job for your book.

Book Design and You

What’s your take when it comes to book design? It takes you to do it. It takes you to outsource it. All these two major decisions are yours. You have that freedom of choice. It’s your book. It’s your product.

Your beliefs are very important in any endeavor you are working on. This is because if you don’t believe you can design the best book cover, don’t force it. Anything forced is harmful. You have to know that most authors don’t know how they want their books to look like, both cover and interior.

That means you are not alone in this dilemma. You don’t have to beat yourself up because you are not a designer. However, some of us believe strongly that if anyone else can do it, we can do it, too. I believe there is no perfect book designer just as there is no perfect book writer.

Book Design and Personality Types

Your personality types matters even in book design. Even if you know all you need to know about book design, interior and exterior, you will still make a decision based on who you are.

That suggests that there are people who can try their best to design their books inside out. I am one of those people. It all goes back to a personality type. It’s not about how much we know. Rather, it’s about who we are, naturally.

Remember, we don’t become; we are.

However, personality is a spectrum, just as everything else is. This means you can’t be 100% introverted or extroverted. You are not hundred percent empathetic. No one is a hundred percent psychopath. It depends on the situation you find them in.

Even us who are naturally shy and quiet, we speak when we need to. However, your personality type is crucial when it comes to making a choice either to design your book or give the task to someone else.

As you have already known, it pays when you pay a professional cover designer. However, you can easily fall victim especially when outsourcing online. People need money and they make use of technology to cheat those who are desperate for something.

The Importance of Book Design

What can we say here? How important is book design? We have already answered this important question several times in the article. However, let’s look a little bit deeper into the rabbit hole to see where it leads.

Since most people still judge a book by its skin, it’s very important to work on that skin professionally. If people work on their covers, we need to work on our book covers, too. This is business. This is what sells you or your products because people believe that what you see is what you get, but is it?

In the same way, your inside parts of the book are important just as the cover is important. If you are reading this, you know how important font faces and font sizes are, even if you are reading it online.

That’s the power of book interior design. It helps you enjoy the text you are reading. Long unrelated paragraphs are a distraction to any serious readers. That’s how important it is to design the interior well. If you can’t do it yourself, hire a professional. But if you can’t afford one, learn how to play with it.

Summary

You have learned a lot about book design, both interior and exterior. But was there anything new for you in this article? Did you know you can design your own book covers before reading this article? What do you think about the article in general?

Your feedback on this article is crucial. It helps me know how bad I have tried to help you and any other reader, all in vain. It also helps me know how much helpful it is to write articles such as this one.

But before you share your thoughts, simply reflect on what you have just read, or skim thought it once more. Doing that will refresh your memories and you will be able to recall what you have already forgotten.

But if you have nothing to share, thanks for reading. Please share the article with family and friends, especially if they are, or if they want to become writers and authors in the future. Encourage them to share the article with others in their world. Let’s spread the word!

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