Preparing Your Manuscript for Book Printing

You ‘re excited that you have finally finished writing your manuscript! It could be a family history, a memoir, a novel, or one of many other types of books. You have probably imagined what your book will look like when finished. The type of book most people are familiar with is the paperback. Paperback  binding is known in the printing trade as perfect binding. In perfect binding, the cover is usually a thicker, stiffer paper than the inside pages. The cover is wrapped around the inside pages, which are glued to the spine. This is a much more economical method for binding books than hardcover books, especially when you are printing a small number of books. Paperback books are very popular with writers who have a limited audience (such as family) or who want to get a feeling for how their book is received by their audience before they invest in a long run of books.

Paperback books are a prime candidate for on-demand printing. Quite often a writer is pleasantly surprised at the positive reception and finds that there is a demand for an additional printing run. This is where on-demand printing comes to the forefront. At Samco, all short-run books are printed digitally. This allows us to keep your digital file ready to be printed again when your need arises. At this stage, you save money because you do not have to pay again for the machine set-up when the book is initially printed. That is unless you need to make changes, when additional set-up is required.

The most common question we get when a customer is finished with their manuscript and wants to go to print is, “How do I prepare my manuscript for printing?” I address this question in the explanations below. The steps I describe are for preparing your manuscript for perfect bound printing by Samco.

Choose an economical size:

While you might see a number of different size paperbacks in a bookstore, their size is usually related to the method in which they were produced, and also, the quantity printed. One of the assets of on-demand digital printing is that the equipment is designed to print on paper that is pre-cut to specific sizes stocked by the paper companies and are the most economical for on-demand printing. The three most economical book sizes for printing on Samco’s equipment are 8.5” x 11”, 5.5” x 8.5” and 6” x 9” (most printing companies in Vancouver still work in imperial measurements). If you feel none of these sizes will work for your book, I would suggest that you discuss what you need with us before designing the layout of your book. It could save you money!

Design the layout of the inside pages:

The fundamental structure of the inside, or text, pages of a book is known as “facing pages”. This means the design is based on what you see when you open a book; basically two pages. Traditionally,the page on the left is termed the “verso” page and the page on the right is the “recto” page. To make it easier, I will refer to them as the left page and the right page.

Margins are very important in the layout of your book. In a facing pages layout there are the top and bottom margins, the “fore edge” margins and the “gutter”. The fore edge margins are the margins on the far left and far right of the open book. When the book is closed, these margins are on the unbound or fore edge of the book. Again, when we look at the book opened, the shared margin in the centre is called the gutter. Aside from the visual appeal of margins, they play an important part in successful production of a book. If the type is too close to the fore edge of the book, it risks making the text look off centre once the book is trimmed to size. If the gutter is too small there is a risk the text will disappear into the spine unless the book is forced to open too far and the spine is broken when the reader tries to read that text.

If the book has chapter headings, then it is important to consider the size of the top margins so the chapter headings don’t look crowded up to the top edge, or, head of the book. Sometimes page numbers also occupy the top margin, but in most cases, the page numbers appear at the bottom of the page. Again, page numbers should not crowd the bottom edges of the book.

Design the look and layout of the cover:

While the look of the cover is up to you or your designer, there are practical issues to be discussed here, as well. It is common for images or the background of the cover to “bleed”.This sounds a bit gorey, but it simply means that any image (including backgrounds) extends to the trim edge of the book cover. No machine can cut so accurately that it can consistently cut exactly where an image ends without the risk of leaving a sliver of the bare paper showing. To solve the issue, it is industry standard to extend these images 1/8th of an inch beyond where the book will be trimmed.

As mentioned above, the cover of a perfect bound book is wrapped around the inside pages and which are glued at the back, or spine edge of the book. To make the spine edge look crisp and sharp, the cover is creased (or scored)  where it folds around the back of the book. To aid in the cover opening without putting pressure on the glued spine, there are additional scores near the back of the book, known as “hinge scores”.

Depending on the width of the spine of the cover there may, or may not, be room for the title and author. Extremely thin books do not allow space for printing on the spine. Allowances need to be made for perfect binding machine tolerances, so there needs to be at least an 1/8th” above and below the type on the spine. Consider extending any solid colours that appear on the front cover onto the spine and partially on to the back cover where possible. This will also optimise the design to compensate for possible machine tolerances.

Adding images:

Consider your budget when adding images. Since the text pages are being printed in black, there are no additional charges for printing black line or halftone images. A line image is an image printed in black with no grey shades. A halftone image (like a photograph) appears as shades of black and grey. In reality the grey areas are still printed black, but are broken up into tiny dots of various sizes to produce various shades of grey.

Colour images can add cost to the printing budget. Although the colour images are printed at the same time as the line and halftone images, it costs the printer more to print them. Any colour image on a page is treated by the digital equipment as a colour page. Colour images are usually halftone as well (they are broken up into various size dots). All colour images are created by using four colours of liquid toner. You have probably heard the term CMYK. C stands for cyan, M for magenta, Y for yellow and K for black. If you want to have more control of how your colour images look, then it is best to provide them as CMYK to prevent any unexpected results. The digital printer can convert RGB (Red, Green, Blue) images to CMYK on the fly, using algorithms programmed into its software. The results are usually excellent, but if a colour is critical, it might not be exactly what you intended.

Proofreading:

Once you have reformatted all your rough text into the final layout, it is very important to proofread the finished pages to make sure that nothing got changed or lost in the process. If you miss errors at this stage, you will incur additional costs when you have to supply a new, corrected file to be set up for printing. Double check your Table of Contents, if you have one, to make certain that the page numbers are still correct. Likewise check your index.