@johnlowe5424

3 months ago

This is the kind of thing I love to talk about when discussing the technical aspects of self-publishing. I've seen so many self-published books that, like you stated, really look amateurish and, well, look like "self-published books." I self-published an anthology through KDP (Amazon) in 2019, in which I put together the interior layout, chose the fonts, edited the stories — everything but the final cover. My goal was to have a finished book that, if you were to pick it up off the shelf at a bookstore, you wouldn't think twice about why it was in the store — you wouldn't wonder how in the world did THIS thing get in here? I've seen a lot of self-published books, some of which look just fine. But I've seen many more that have, like you said, terrible design mistakes. I did a ton of research about layout and basic novel page design when I was putting together my anthology. One of the first things I thought about was line spacing, or leading (pronounced as "ledding"), as it used to be called in traditional typesetting. I didn't realize how much there was to consider with just a page full of text: font, leading, type size, line length (you don't want the text to go too far to the outside edges of the page or too close into the gutter), where do you put page numbers, what should the headers look like, etc. Then, once I got the stories in layout, I had to do a lot of finessing to fix widows, short lines at the beginnings of pages, spacing concerns, etc.. I've since found ways to do this that streamlined the process.  My background is as an editor (started out as a proofreader way back when), so that was also important for putting the book together. The anthology began as a project for our writers group, and when I started soliciting stories, I told everyone that the stories would be vetted and edited, that it wasn't just a group project that would be published using any and everything that was submitted. As I mentioned, I wanted the book to look and be the best it could be. I'm not a designer, but the research I did resulted in a nice final product. If I was doing a book that required lots of interior graphics and photos, I'd probably want to utilize a professional designer. I saw one self-published nonfiction book where the type size was so large that it looked like a children's book. This same book included black and white photos, but because the paper was not the better, slicker paper, many of the photos looked muddy. That, plus, none of the photos looked like they had been adjusted to look good — they looked like they were simply imported to the page without any adjustment for lighting, contrast, etc. I saw another self-published book that on the foreword page, it was spelled "Forward." I saw one book that had a photo on the cover that was only maybe two inches tall and the photo was the full width of the cover — the image had been "stretched" to the width of the cover only horizontally, but not proportionately, using both width and height. Also, far too many of the self-published books I've seen have a buttload of typos in them. I don't mean maybe four or five in an entire book — I've counted fifteen errors just in the foreword of one book. They weren't all spelling errors, some were bad punctuation, extra word spaces, things that the general reader wouldn't catch. But that's the thing — if you're reading a book and you notice multiple errors on just one page, that can put you off from reading the rest of the book. Bad amateur book covers are a whole other topic.

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