Book Formatting - Typographic Alignment

Hello dear readers!

Today thought I would take some time to discuss book formatting. In the process of getting my book ready for print, I learned a lot of things about how books are designed.

Here’s the thing about good design. It’s invisible. I had never really paid much attention to how books were formatted before. I just picked them up and read them. I thought I knew. But boy was I wrong. Luckily I did hire a consultant to help me through to process to help me make sure that my book was formatted to industry standard, and now I know. And now I can pass that information on to you!

The first thing we’ll talk about is typographical alignment. Typographical alignment comes in a few flavors:
Left Justified-Right Ragged (this is what you are all probably most familiar with), Centered, Right Justified-Left Ragged, and Justified. Here are some examples:

You’ve probably seen where you can change this in Word up at the top in the tool bar, like below.

I assumed books were written in Left Justified - Ragged Right format. Because to me, that looks normal and nice. But alas. Most books are written in full justified. I was shocked and horrified. Frankly, I hate Justified text, mainly because it has a tendency to create rivers in your text, which are a distraction when you’re reading. Let me show you:

See all those weird little gaps? They annoy me. You see this a lot in newspapers. The more narrow your column of text the more likely you are to get these very noticeable gaps. The wider your column or paragraph, the less noticeable these tend to be.

I thought to myself, “There is NO way that I have been reading books and not noticed that the type is justified.” But, sure enough. Pretty much every book I have has Justified type. So I threw up my hands and went for it. You can always format your book the way you like, but I’ve been told this is industry standard. *Insert obnoxious eye roll here

But when I got my proof copies, it really didn’t look bad. So I can’t complain…. much.

Don’t worry, no spoilers here.

As an aside, I offer this service as a freelancer outside my day job. So if you don’t want to mess with things like justified type and kerning and letting, I’ll happily take care of that for you. :) I did the layout on my book and I will be doing the layout on Dustin and Phil’s books as well, in addition to having done layout and pre-press on a few children’s books back when I was a graphic designer.

What did you think, dear reader? Would you like more information on how to format your books? Let me know what you want to know more about in the comments!

Till next time dear reader, happy formatting! <3 Tiff