self-publishing : expert advice: typesetting for self-publishers

Advice on creating title pages
Justification, hyphenation and line-spacing
Including a copyright page

To start with, a little history; traditionally a book is a set of pages gathered together in a ‘block’ secured with endpapers onto the case that serves as protector. The block can be sewn together or it can be glued. Over time the half title and the title page have materialised to help the bookbinder in the gathering process and also in the identification and storage of blocks, separate from their cases or covers. In modern times the half title and title page still have their uses and are often combined with copyright information and identification of the author and the publisher.

When typesetting your book, I would advise you to always have a half title page, with merely the title and possibly the authors name on it, followed by a title page with the title, authors name, a space for the publishers name and perhaps a small illustration. The title should be consistent in style on both pages and if possible it should follow the style of the title on the cover design.

Do you justify the text or not? Well, convention would have the text justified. This allows for maximum use of space and it makes reading large amounts of set text easier on the reader’s eye. Two things you must try and avoid when setting justified text are rivers of white and ugly, unnecessary hyphenation. Rivers of white can appear in all sorts of text but are more common in justified text. They are visually unattractive gaps of white that run through a paragraph of text.
You might want to consider separating your text into slightly different paragraph arrangements if this happens.

Unnecessary hyphenation is caused by bad settings in Word. Make sure that you set the maximum number of lines that can end in hyphenation one after the other to be two. If a word is hyphenated and you think it need not be then you can force the whole word over onto the next line using a soft return; you do this by placing the cursor in front of the word you want to move on and you press shift and return at the same time.

Perhaps one other thing to bear in mind when setting the macro typography is the line spacing. It is ideal to have plenty of space between each line so that the descenders of the top line don’t bash into the ascenders of the bottom line. In general a good rule is to add at least 2 points of line space onto the point size of the text so set 12pt text onto 14pt line space. If you are not strapped for space then be even more generous. But be warned, don’t get carried away, or the reader’s eye will get lost going from the end of one line to the start of the new line.

A copyright page won’t be generated automatically, so you may want to create one and add it in at the front of your manuscript. As you probably have done already, it is a good idea to look at the copyright page in a published book of a similar type to yours and see what they include. Usually it’s along the lines of the following:

• (If fiction) include a statement saying that the novel is entirely a work of fiction Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
• The year when first published
• The publisher (you may have your own publisher name that you want to include there, or you can put CompletelyNovel.com)
• Who the copyright owner is (this should be you) i.e. ‘Copyright © John Smith 2011’
• The ISBN
• Where the book is printed
• A statement reminding the reader that the book can’t be copied without your consent (unless you are happy for people to do this) e.g. ‘All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.’