Making Dummies So You’ll Be Smarter
Part 13 mocking up your book to help make your decisons.
Last week someone asked me how you decide on what kinds of materials to use in a book. Sometimes the best way is to get crafty!
There are a couple of ways. One way is to make a dummy of your proposed book.
Sometimes your vendor can do this for you but if not you can take an existing book with the same specifications and make a dummy.
Let’s get one thing out of the way. Trade books, as in paperbacks and HardCovers with Jackets have fairly uniform specs. If you are the Publisher’s biggest selling author or the lowest selling author all trade books are made with the same ingredients.
The interior paper, the thickness of the cover board, the corners cut, the binding style, the black ink, the trim size, all of it is cookie cutter uniform so they can maximize efficiency and save on buying materials in bulk. Remember they have to pay marketing, editorial, the sales team, and shipping on and on. Because of this, you own books already that are similar to what you might be making.
Print out your proposed book cover and find a book in your library that is the same size. Tape or fold over the cover on the font of this book. Stand it up somewhere and stand back. You're going to see the cover very clearly by doing this. You can look at a cover 100 times on your screen but as soon as you print out the cover and mock it up on a physical book and stand it on a shelf, it tells you things you never noticed.
Sometimes you need to make some decisions about paper weight. For example, with a journal there are many things to consider. Paper that is too nice will be too thick and make the book heavy and unwieldy. But not nice enough and your reviewers will eviscerate you that the pages allow bleed-through and look cheap. For this you will need to get your vendor to make you a dummy or supply one from a previous job they did.
Also, it’s a good idea to print your book content on a sample sheet of the paper to see how it looks. If your book will be written in, take a few different kinds of pens and test the paper out. Keep in mind, you might have a feathery touch and your reviewers might hold their pen like The Hulk. You can’t plan for everyone but you can plan for most people.
Non traditional book cover materials, like Poly materials, Fabric, Linen, and impregnated papers all have different end uses. It's good to request a sample so you can see the material in person and even better if you can get a sample made using the material you are curious about. Non-traditional books like a Giftbook, Cookbook, or Kids Book, have sizes that vary more than trade books but not excessively. Getting a sample of these specifications will probably require the help of your vendor.
You can tell a lot from a mock up about how a book will function. How does it feel? How does it fit in a bag, how does it work in your hands. This is even useful to know for kids books and how they function. Little Board Books should fit nicely in little hands.
You don’t want a book too big either. I bought my wife an annotated Sherlock Holmes book but she loves to read in bed. This book was so heavy it was uncomfortable to read like that. Now, for what it was made for, it was perfect but it was more like a reference book. Me as the buyer, I should have thought through the end use more.
When you work with your typesetter keep an eye on your page count and get books that are the same page count so you visually stay informed about what your book feels like. A bigger trim can equal a lower page count and vice versa so it’s worth knowing what you are doing.
Have you ever tried to read a 4” x 7” 700 page book? Yes it’s kind of charming and yes, it’s kind of a pain. But conversely you don’t want an 8” x 10” 300 page book either. There is always a sweet spot. Your typesetter can advise you on what that is for your title with the help of some dummy books. If nothing else, your gut will help you. For my gut, anything 6” x 9” and over feels wrong for a fiction book. It feels clunky. Maybe your gut disagrees? Let me know in the comments.
I hope this episode of the Why and How Book Project was useful. Making a book is a journey of decisions. Making decisions gets easier the closer you can get to showing your end result in a dummy book. If you take nothing from this please hold tight to the following.
Always print your cover out and put it on a book and stand it up.
If you are working with a non traditional material, get a sample of it.
Find as many, comparably made books to yours as you can to visualize your end product