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You’ll need to be able to measure the elements of your page accurately in order to implement these suggestions.

So in the rest of the article, I’m going to talk about small measurements. When you’re dealing with typography, you get used to the effect of these small changes.Īnd that’s true for the decisions you make about margins, too. Some of these changes-ones that seem to make a significant difference to me-may involve differences of a hundredth of an inch one way or the other. Who else would want the job? There are so many tiny details and decisions that go into formatting a book that you pretty much have to be someone who enjoys working on that scale to appreciate book design. I’m not going to deny that book designers are detail freaks. This has to do with page margins-how to do them right and how not to do them wrong. Today, I want to look at one of the most common of these mistakes, and show you easy ways to avoid it. For instance, last year I was judging the annual book competition for a local publishing group, and I found formatting and book construction mistakes in many of the books produced by amateur publishers. I talk to a lot of authors and look at hundreds of self-published books, and the ones that are problematic jump out at me. Longstanding habits of readers and accepted trade practices have come to dictate that we follow these formatting guides unless we have a pretty good reason not to. It’s important to stay within formatting conventions because printed books have existed for a long while.

When authors decide to format their own books, they don’t always make the best choices.