How to make a professional book
You can learn how to make a professional book by hiring the right book design company, who in turn, can help you avoid certain design mistakes that make your book look amateurish and ill-designed. Once you have the book design draft in hand, you need to make sure that these commonly found errors are not found in your book.
Miscalculating the margins
When you are looking at your manuscript, you should think of what it should be like in the final print version. However, if you don't leave enough space in the centre, part of the margin will go into the spine of the book. If the book is bound tightly or you have left very little margin, part of the text may actually go into the binding of the book, making it very difficult to read. In addition, if you've got text too close to the margin, the text might get cut when the printer trims the book. The solution is to always allow a few extra millimeters for the margins that will go next to the binding. Provide enough room on the top and bottom so that excess cutting won't affect the text.
Too many split words
By having hyphenations you could save space as well as avoid gaps where long words have to go on to the next line. However, if you use hyphens, you may then have line after line ending in hyphenation, with one half of the word on the top line and the other on the second line. A good solution is to turn off hyphenation while typesetting and then turn it on for paragraphs where you notice large gaps on account of a big word having moved on to the next line.
Justification problems
While justification is a must in a professional looking book, it does create its own problems. When a piece of text has long words close together, there appear big gaps or rivers in the text. Justified text is created by changing the gaps between words. When a line contains four big words, there are only three gaps that have to be stretched to complete the line. The result being huge, ugly gaps. You have to be careful to suitably alter such lines.
Paragraph indent at the start of the chapter
It is standard convention that the first paragraph of every chapter is aligned flush with the left-hand margin. If there is text next to a picture, it looks more professional if the paragraph has no indent.
Double quotation marks
This is a holdover from when teachers taught us to always put speech in double quotation marks! That might work for an essay, but not for a published book. Now, the only time double quotation marks are used is when a character quotes somebody else's words. For example: ‘You should have heard what she said,' said Mariah. 'She said, "She did not care".'
Huge paragraph indents
Make sure that your paragraph indents are limited to 0.25 inches. If you are careless about these, your book will certainly look amateurish.
Gaps between each paragraph
It's a stylistic decision that could save you money if you design your book with an indented paragraph. If you choose to put gaps between the paragraphs, it will increase the number of pages in the book and cost you more to print.
Using badly scanned photos or images
If you plan on using illustrations for your book, you need to consider their relevance to your text and pay attention to their quality. Use photo-editing software to improve the quality by cropping images, changing brightness or contrast, or perhaps getting rid of the background entirely. Make the images sharper by scanning at the proper dpi and resolution.
Orphans and Widows
Leaving the final line of a paragraph to the next page creates a widow. A line starting at the end of the page but continuing on the next page is an orphan. If you leave these in, it gives your book an amateurish look.
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