Getting the most out of your typesetting professional
If you hire someone to typeset your work, the easier you make the job, the happier your typesetter will be. If you take a few extra minutes to be sure you’ve given the typesetter all the information he or she will need, you’ll find that many typesetters will welcome more work from you, and may give you a discount (I certainly would), on the work you request.*
This is the basic progression of events: You send the typesetter your manuscript, describe your trim size, and let the typesetter know if your printer accepts spreads or single pages. If your printer will print spreads, that means the interior margin can be wider than the exterior margin, making it easier to read the book when it’s open without sacrificing too much space on the outside margin. If your printer only accepts singles, the margins must be the same size on both the left and the right.
Your typesetter sets up the master(s) in InDesign (or some other layout software. Layout can be done in Word or Open Office, but the fine-grained controls aren’t there and it’s much harder to get a truly professional look.) The master is the design template. Depending on the type of manuscript, there may be two or many more masters. For an anthology where the authors’ names and titles have to appear on each page of each individual story, there are often twice as many masters as there are authors/stories.
Once the master(s) is/are set up, then the typesetter imports your manuscript into the program and makes sure that it flows from beginning to end without any weirdness. Sometimes the fonts change in size or style, or broad swathes of nothing pop up, so he–or in this case she–normalizes everything, getting rid of extra white space, setting the font face and size, and defining the line height.
Then, starting at the beginning and going through to the end, she will format the titles, make the page breaks where they should occur, place the images with the text to which they apply, and apply the appropriate master to each page. Then (or immediately before or after), she will also make sure that names aren’t hyphenated, that the lines and pages break cleanly, and that there’s good balance on each page, hand-kerning where necessary. If she runs into any oddness in the manuscript (misplaced word, strangly garbled line, some obvious mistake), this is where it will happen, and she’ll likely drop you a note and tell you so that you can tell her to either leave it alone or fix it like this, whatever your preferred this may be.
Professional typesetting is a painstaking process. It’s not particularly hard, but it’s fiddly, and there’s a lot to remember. Since, I just finished a typesetting project, you’re getting the benefit of my recent mistakes experience.
Font size, margins, and line height can dramatically affect the length of your final product. Look at a lot of books. do you like a lot of whitespace? A little? About what font size seems attractive to you, what style? How long do you want your book to be? How long can you afford it to be before you have to raise the price and/or lose money on it? Do you like plain chapter headings or unusual ones? Do you like graphical elements or straightforward text? Do you like drop caps? Raised caps? Lines, graphical elements, asterisks, pound signs, or nothing to mark your scene breaks? Left-aligned titles? Right-aligned titles? Centered? A title font different from the regular text? It’s okay to not know exactly what you want. If you like watermarks or graphical bits and bobs, even if you don’t know exactly what, let the typesetter know. Hopefully he or she will be happy to share his or her expertise with you as well, and together the two of you can come up with something amazing.
Do you have interior images? Make sure they’re at least 600 dpi (dots per inch), CMYK or grayscale TIFFs, and that you have the copyright or permission to use them. Be sure to give credit for their use in the text, in footnotes, or on your copyright page. Determine what text they should appear near. Most books are “poured” into the design software (InDesign is the current favorite, though there are others) and then massaged to fit the space and look good on the page. That’s when the graphics are placed. Some typesetters will charge per image, some will charge more after a certain number of images. Make sure you find that out first.
Speaking of copyright, if you use quotes to enhance your text, make sure you have permission to use those, as well, and include that information on your copyright page.
To make this job easy for everyone, consider the following:
1. What are your printer’s requirements and what are the things you know you want? Be sure to state those clearly so the typesetter is aware there’s no wiggle room. (For example, your printer may say ‘minimum of .5″ margins on all sizes.’ you may find that you prefer .75″ margins instead.) Find out if your printer wants the manuscript laid out on a full 8.5 x 11 page size or if trim size is appropriate, and what their file preference is. Find out if they need the fonts embedded or turned into graphics. Pass on any tips or tricks the printer gives you to the typesetter, as well as the elements you want to see in the manuscript.
2. What do you want your typesetter to watch for? A typesetter is not a copy editor, but if a mistake is noticed, the typesetter should inform you so that you can determine the best way to fix it. Ask your typesetter about his or her policy on that.
3. Ask for a sample page if you’re not sure about title style, margins, line height, font face, or font size. Deciding that the font is too big, too small, just plain wrong, or that you need more or less space on the page after the entire thing is done means that you have to ask your typesetter to do the whole thing all over again. You don’t want to have to pay twice.
4. Determine how much room the typesetter has to implement her own creative bent. In the recent project I mentioned above, I was really excited to do it; absolutely bursting with ideas. I contrived clever little sketches that evoked the theme of the story or the anthology as a whole at the top of each story. I was very proud of myself. I didn’t ask first… The publisher didn’t like them. I took them out. He asked some other people. They did like them. He thought about it and realized there was really only one he hated; it just happened to be the first one. I put them back (with something else for the first one). I also didn’t ask him how he felt about line height, font face, or font size. Thankfully he liked the font face I chose. The rest? …yeah. Then I realized that the margins were too narrow. They were according to the printer’s minimum specs, but killed too much white space.
After three layouts (give or take) and some tweaking, we both ended up very happy with the final product. In fact, it’s a beautiful book with amazing stories and I’m proud to have had a little hand in it, but it would have been ready for the printer a lot faster if I’d asked the questions I should have asked at the very beginning.
5. After the typesetter is finished, set the manuscript aside for a couple of days and then look at it again with fresh eyes. Does it work? Does it need something else? Are the cool graphical bits and bobs interesting or distracting?
Anything you remove from the master should take no time at all and shouldn’t affect the final product. That means, if you decide that the little smiley face you had put at the bottom of every page is silly, it can be removed without making the typesetter start over. Replacing one image with a different one of the exact same size is also a quick fix. Neither of those should cost you anything extra. Changing the font, the line-height, or the margins, however, will dramatically affect the final product and may cost you a bit to fix.
*I can only speak to my experience. Other typesetters may have their own ideas, but considering these issues should help you find a good typesetter and ensure that your final product looks the best possible.
6 comments
i just had my book done by a typesetter. i wanted to cry. it was not a book i recognized. the book was or is about 200 pages and she or he smashed it into 148. is there any reason besides what i read up top that it can’t keep the same look i typed it in?
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Hi Cynthia. I’m sorry to hear that. There’s very little reason for it not to look close to what you typed in. To be printed, the final number of pages has to equal a number divisible by 4. The font should be readable (11 to 11.5 pt usually seems pretty good to me, though I know some go smaller). The margins should be at least 1/5 of an inch on all sides, and the wider the margin the more attractive the book. I also like to make my line height about 1.25 or 1.5 lines instead of single spaced. So, unless you told your typesetter that you wanted to save money on printing costs, there’s no reason other than his or her personal aesthetic for the change.
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The information you’ve provided has been very helpful. Are you available for projects? I have a manuscript that needs to be typeset
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Yes, I am. I’ve sent you an email.
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Hi, I would like to know if you could take a look at a layout that I have. And could you possibly work on it.
Thank you
Clary
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Hi Cynthia.
There was obviously a mis-communication and I am sorry to hear that happened to you. I deign and typesett books everyday and I always present Sample Pages of the first few pages and front matter for the client to review AND approve before I typeset the entire book. Please let me know if you have any other questions.
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