Your book's appearance can greatly affect its appeal to your targeted reading audience. When determining what you want your book to look like and what your book should look like, here are four great rules to follow:
Rule #1: Get a book model.
Visit a bookstore. Check your book's section, and then look into other shelves. Find a book you like - it can be on any subject. Consider the binding, layout, feel, margins, typestyle, everything. If you still like it - buy it, and use this book as your book model. Tell your typesetter (you may be typsetting it yourself) and printer you want your manuscript to look like this book. Remember that there is no need to create a new book design when you can follow an existing one.
Rule #2: If you want your book to sell like a book, it has to look like a book.
Sounds obvious, doesn't it? But when you are in the bookstore, notice that each genre or book classification has its own special look. For example, books on business often have a hard cover and a dust jacket. Book for professionals such as doctors, lawyers and accountants are usually a hardcover without a dust jacket. Children's books are larger, four-color and have 32 pages. Cookbooks are wider than they are tall so they will open and lie flat. And travel books are lightweight and easy to carry.
Rule #3: Respect your book's category.
Your book must look like the rest on its shelf or it will stand out as being "strange," and strange does not achieve a sufficient confidence level to sell. Do not break out of the mold on your first attempt. If your book is different, it will lose credibility. Potential buyers will think you are an amateur and not ready to be a serious author/publisher. In book design, different doesn't sell. Book printers will produce an acceptable book, but you run the risk of your book appearing to be boring unless you provide some design direction.
Rule #4: Get all the specialized books you can that's on your subject.
If you are writing a travel book, cookbook, life story, humor book, directory, computer book, or a book about something in another common book catergory, see the specialized books. These books will tell you how to write them, how to produce them and, most importantly, how to promote them. It is often less expensive to buy several books on writing, producing and promoting your book genre than it is to make one mistake.
Following these four rules will help keep your book and you heading in the right direction.
[This post was created using excerpts from Writing Nonfiction by Dan Poynter.]
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