Book layout: what a typesetter does and what it costs

The manuscript is finished and the next step is publishing the book. Here most authors run into the same question: what does a typesetter actually do, could you do it yourself, and how much will it cost. The answer is rarely “one number”, but the orders of magnitude and the factors that drive the price are entirely explainable.

In this article we go through what a typesetter's work contains, explain the difference between book design and typesetting, run through the factors that affect the price and give a list for getting a manuscript in order before handing it over.

Typesetting and book design are not the same thing

The words are used interchangeably in everyday speech, but the work is different.

Typesetting is placing the content on the pages. The typesetter chooses the typeface and the type size, sets the line spacing and the margins, builds the hierarchy of headings, places the images and tables, makes the table of contents, the indexes and the references, and takes care that the page count fits the printer's signatures. Typesetting decides whether the book is pleasant to read.

Book design is a broader concept. In addition to the interior it covers the cover, the title page, the colour scheme, the choice of format and the overall visual character. Design decides whether the book catches the eye on a shelf.

Cover design is a separate job that is sometimes ordered on its own. The cover has to work in three places at once: full size on the shelf, as a thumbnail in an online store, and on the spine, where there is room only for the title.

Most authors in fact need all three, and it makes sense to order them from one maker — otherwise it often happens that the cover and the interior speak different languages.

What a typesetter actually does

From the outside, typesetting looks like a more complicated variant of word processing. In practice the time goes elsewhere.

Typography and reading comfort. The choice of typeface is not a matter of taste: a face suited to prose is different from one that carries tables or lists. Line spacing, column width and letter spacing determine how long a reader can keep going in one stretch. Too long a line tires; too short a one fragments.

Structure and consistency. Chapter openers, subheadings, quotations, footnotes, tables and captions have to behave the same way throughout the book. Over hundreds of pages that is a matter of discipline, and this is exactly where amateur typesetting usually breaks.

The rhythm of the pages. The typesetter watches that a chapter does not begin on the last line of a page, that a single line is not left at the top of the next page, and that an image sits on the same page as the text that refers to it. The reader only notices these small things when they have been left undone.

Indexes, table of contents and references. In substantial works — history books, name lists, memoirs — this is the most labour-intensive part. The index of names, the index of place names, the source references and the cross-references all have to keep pointing at the right pages after every correction.

Print preparation. Finally the files have to be produced in a form the printer will actually accept: the right colour model, bleed allowances, embedded fonts, the correct page order. A wrong setting here means the book comes out of the press different from how it looked on screen.

What the price of book typesetting depends on

The price of our book design and layout service starts at 690 euros, and at 990 euros together with the cover design. The final sum depends on four things.

The page count. The most obvious factor, but not a linear one — the first hundred pages take the most work, because that is where the whole system is established. After that it goes faster.

The complexity of the content. Continuous prose can be typeset smoothly. Tables, lists, footnotes, photographs with captions, text in several languages or parallel text multiply the workload. A data-rich history book can be three times as laborious as a novel of the same length.

The state of the manuscript. An edited and consistently formatted manuscript goes straight into work. A manuscript made of ten files where every chapter is in a different typeface and the headings were made by manually enlarging the text means a couple of days of extra work before typesetting even begins.

Rounds of corrections. One or two proof rounds are included in the price. If the author rewrites text during typesetting, the whole rhythm has to be reviewed — which is why it is worth locking the content down before typesetting.

We always give a fixed price before the work begins, not an hourly rate whose final sum nobody knows in advance. All the packages are listed on the pricing page.

How to prepare the manuscript

The tidier the manuscript, the cheaper and faster the typesetting. Before handing it over it is worth going through the following list:

1. One file, not twenty. All the text in one document, chapters in the right order.
2. Use styles, not manual formatting. A heading should be marked with a heading style, not ordinary text made bigger and bolder.
3. Remove double spaces and manual line breaks. They will have to be cleaned up anyway.
4. Images in a separate folder, at original size. An image placed into a Word document loses quality. Print needs at least 300 dpi.
5. Number the images and mark in the text where they belong. That way nobody has to guess later.
6. Have the text edited before typesetting. A typesetter is not a copy editor, and corrections after typesetting cost more.
7. Decide the format and the approximate print run. These affect both the design and the printing price.

Can you do the typesetting yourself?

Technically yes. For a short publication or a collection meant for internal use it can be an entirely sensible choice. But if the book is going on sale or is meant as a gift, the difference is visible even to a non-specialist — usually in the typography and the rhythm of the pages, even if the reader cannot put it into words.

A practical yardstick: if the book is printed in more than a couple of hundred copies, the typesetting cost per book is a couple of euros. For that you get a work that looks like a publisher's, not like a printed document.

Summary

A typesetter's work is for the most part invisible: it succeeds when the reader does not notice it at all and simply reads. The price is driven above all by length, the complexity of the content and the state of the manuscript — and the last of these is what the author can influence most.

We have typeset both fiction and substantial works of history and name lists, where structure and precision matter most. Send your manuscript or an extract from it and within a couple of working days we will tell you what the work will cost and how long it will take — take a closer look at the book design and layout page.