A Beautiful Book Inside (Pages) and Out
Instead of hiring someone to design the interior pages of my book, I did it myself. I used a program called Vellum (www.Vellum.pub). There are several page-design programs on the market today, but a friend recommended this one, giving it high marks for its wide range of design choices and ease of use. (Vellum requires that you have an Apple computer. If you want to use it on your PC, something called MacinCloud will allow you to do so, for a fee.) Other options include using Amazon or Barnes & Noble’s built-in book designer. For the purpose of this blog post, I’ll talk about my experience with Vellum.
One good reason to take this role into your own hands is that if you have to make corrections or updates to any pages in your book down the road, you’ll be able to handle them yourself. If someone designs the interior for you, you’ll have to contact them every time you need a change made.
Vellum offers easy-to-follow tutorials, and you won’t pay for anything until you generate files. So you can upload your manuscript, and tinker and experiment with the different functions as long as you like for free.
This new experience was fun for me, though not stress-free because it’s important to get it right. Like the cover of the book, the look of the interior makes a sizable impression on the reader. It’s not that you want the pages to be unique or overly artistic in any way (though some flourishes may be desirable), but you do want the interior to appear clean and professional. Vellum allows you to select a style for the book as a whole, and then further style options for page breaks, chapter starts, subheads (if you have them), quotations, captions, and other elements.
What You Need to Know
Before you venture into page design, you must prepare the various components of the book: your dedication, epigraph (if you have one), acknowledgments page, about the author page, and copyrights (including your ISBN number, if you’re going to buy your own). Make sure all of these are written and edited beforehand.
The ebook version and the print version will differ slightly. The table of contents automatically appears in the ebook, but if you want a TOC for your paperback, you’ll have to add it. Similarly, in your ebook, you may have digital links and buttons for clicking to social media pages, but they aren’t helpful in the print version, so you’ll remove them.
One thing I had to work around with Vellum is that it wouldn’t let me break my six-word title into an even two lines on the title page—it broke the title in such a way that “They Will Be Coming” was on top and “For Us” was on the bottom, an unbalanced sight. So, for the paperback version, I asked my cover designer to make a custom title page and half title page (title only). Vellum allowed me to delete its automatic title page and insert a “full page image” in its place.
The Vellum software allows you to see what the book will look like on various e-readers, an iPhone, and an iPad, which is a nice feature. Once your interior pages are designed, you can proof your Vellum file. Even if you have already proofread in manuscript form, it’s pretty important to proof the book again in layout form. Mistakes can occur in the page design—and it’s likely that you’ll catch a lingering typo or awkward phrase, too.
When the corrections have been made and the pages are all set to go, you’ll click “Generate Files.” The program creates print-ready proofs for both ebook and paperback. At this point, you can open your ebook file on a Kindle or Kindle app, Apple Reader app, or other reader apps. Then you can see exactly what the e-reader experience will look like. You can also proof again and take note of any fixes that need to be made. To make changes, you’ll go back to your Vellum file, edit, save, and generate new files. It’s quick to do.
In order to see a paperback proof, you’ll have to order it from KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), Nook, or IngramSpark, but we’ll talk about that next week.
In the end, you can hire someone to design the book’s interior, or you can take a shot at it yourself. If you’re not comfortable once you get into it, don’t stress. You can always hire a pro.
My next blog post will discuss Advanced Reader Copies.
Kim Catanzarite is a writer, editor, and instructor for Writer’s Digest University. She has worked as a developmental and copy editor since 1994. Her book They Will Be Coming for Us will be published June 2021.
