Interior book design formatting insights

In my How to Write and Self-Publish a travel guide book #3 I’ve written extensively about the different options open to indie authors to format the interior of their book. You can design it yourself or outsource to a freelancer. If you’re on the fence about which approach is right for you, I thought I’d share my formatting book diary to show you what’s involved when you start designing your own book interior.

I’m in the process of refreshing the 2016 content on my Bodrum Peninsula Travel Guide. I plan to bring an updated version out in time for the 2019 tourist season, which means I need to be able to hit the ground running when all the content has been reviewed and updated.

This will be the first time I’ve released this travel guide as a paperback, and so there is a lot of work to be done to finalize the internal layout and design, over and above the actual content.

Page layout design decisions can become all consuming. Tiny tweaks can dramatically change the look and feel of a book, and the right design choices can help your readers navigate your content. So it’s important to get them right.

I’ve designed other nonfiction book interiors, and I love the process of road-testing specific page elements to help balance the content.

Choosing a font for your paperback

A rookie mistake is to use too many fonts, that conflict with primary fonts used for your core content. With so many fonts available it’s too easy to get distracted by the beauty and novelty of a newly discovered font. But when it comes to internal and cover design – less is more.

There is so much you can do with just one font. When I started designing my paperback, I chose the Monserrat font because of the ten different variations available to choose from in iStudio Publisher, the software I use for internal and cover design. (You do have the option to download new fonts into this software, but they have a good supply already available).

About Montserrat:

The old posters and signs in the traditional Montserrat neighborhood of Buenos Aires inspired Julieta Ulanovsky to design this typeface and rescue the beauty of urban typography that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century.

I was drawn to the round easy feel to the font, and how easy it was to read. Sans zerif fonts are popular with nonfiction, so it was an easy choice to make. Sometimes it’s not instantly evident what draws you to a font choice, but the more you look at it, the more comfortable it feels, and you get a sense that a reader will be drawn to it to. The closest travel guide to hand when I started my design process was a Lonely Planet travel guide, and they use a simple serif font for their core text, but a sans serif font for the content in their feature/call-out boxes.

I like the modern, unconventional feel to a sans serif font, it seems more design oriented, and less distracting to read. So rather than opt for two complimentary fonts on my travel guide interior, I decided to stick with different weights of the same sans serif font, to create harmony and differentiation.

My design process is to paste each chapter from Scrivener in at a time, and check the H1, H2, and H3 headings, and the bullet lists and call-our boxes are all adhere to the Style Guide. It’s less overwhelming to do this at the chapter level, as it makes you focus on a small chunk of content at a time.

Missing Characters and Font Variant

As my travel guide is about Turkey, there are some different characters I needed to use in order to spell destinations correctly.

I’d chosen the Montserrat Light variation to use for my primary body text, and about 30 pages into pasting external content into the iStudio template, I noticed my Turkish G wasn’t recognized, and in it’s place was just a blank space. The other challenge is that there’s no italic variant, and although that wasn’t a deal-breaker, the missing G was.

I experimented with using the Ultra Light and the Medium variations of the Montserrat font which did have the Turkish G available, but I’d become committed to having a lighter body text, and pairing that with Black, Bold, and Regular variations of the font for the H1-H3 heading. So I had to go in search of a replacement font.

I looked through the available fonts in the iStudio set of available fonts, and after a few experiments, I settled on Avineer.

About Avinir:

The word avenir is French for “future”. This font family takes inspiration from the geometric style of sans-serif typeface developed in the 1920s that took the circle as a basis, such as Erbar and Futura. The city of Amsterdam uses Avenir as the principal typeface in its corporate identity.  Apple used Avenir for its Maps app and some Siri screens in iOS 6.

Avenir vs. Montserrat Font

Both Avenir and Montserrat have the same round look and feel to their letters, although Avenir comes out a little smaller using the same point size, and I liked the reduced body text size created by Avenir, and still found it readable. This meant that I’d reduced the size of my travel guide by choosing this smaller font. Less pages = lower printing costs, so this free font is going to save me money.

I was also able to same page space by reducing the overall line spacing. Due to the larger size of the of the Montserrat font, I’d chosen 1.3 as a standard line spacing, but when I switched to Avenir that setting created too much negative space, so I reduced the line spacing to 1.2. This still gives me enough white space to create a readable paragraph, and further reduces the length of my manuscript.

Originally I’d been drawn to the impact of the Montserrat Black variation I was using for my H1 headings, but when I replaced it with the Avenir Black variation, and realized how much easier it would be for my readers to scan and read my headings quickly. At the end of the day, it’s all about the reader experience, and it’s always best to put your own personal aesthetic preferences aside make font choices based on creating an effective reader experience.

My paperback font style guide

I changed my Montserrat text with the Avenir font, and experimented with the different variants and point sizes to create my style guide, and this is what I settled on:

Line spacing = 1.2

H1 Headings : Avenir Black 13pt

• Space before a heading 20pt
• Space after a heading 8pt

H2 Headings : Avenir Heavy 10pt

• Space before a heading 8pt
• Space after a heading 6pt

H3 Headings : Avenir Book 9pt

• Space before a heading 8pt
• Space after a heading 4pt

Main Text: Avenir Book 8pt

• Space before 0pt
• Space after 6pt

Main Text Bullet Point List: Avenir Book 8pt

• Space before 0pt
• Space after 6pt – use this if there is one bullet in the list, and for the last line of a multi-line bullet point list. But use 4pt between the first and all following lines in a multi-line bullet point (except the last line).

Space before and after a paragraph:

My standard spacing between headings and the following line is 6pt, but I’ve chosen 4pt to cluster my bullet point lists and a H3 heading and it’s companion paragraph, to create a closer relationship between the text elements.

I’ve used wider spacings for the larger headers to use the negative space around the boldness of the headers to make them stand out more.

My progress so far

I spent about 14 hours formatting 110 pages yesterday, which included the search for my initial font, and search for a replacement font, and have about 30 pages to reformat when I switched over. I also spent quite a bit of time assessing my design choices for the edge tabs to help readers navigate my content … but that’s another blog post.

Lessons I learnt from this first step

• Choose a font that can correctly display all the special letters and characters you need. Test out your new font BEFORE you start formatting to check all those characters are available.
• Make sure your font has all the font styles you may need to use (bold, Italic, etc.)

Read more articles in my How to Write a Travel Guide Series

I’m putting the finishing touches on my How to Write and Self-Publish a Travel Guide Series, which details a step by step approach for writing and producing your own travel guide. It’s part of a four-part series aimed at helping travel bloggers achieve passive income based on their passions and existing content.

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