Build it yourself

If you have decided that you simply must do the design yourself then you need some of the books on the recommended list. The learning curve can be steep but it's worth it for those so inclined.

Ready for ISBN-13?

The book industry has begun using 13 digits to identify books in global trade.

The Book Industry Study Group's Web site provides all the information you will need about ISBN-13.

More than you wanted to know
about book design

was driving my daughter and her friend one day when they announced they were going to play the 'punch buggy' game. They were talking about looking for Volkswagen Beetles — the old variety. The first to see one got to give the other a punch on the arm. I thought this should be good fun. It would keep them quiet and I could enjoy the drive since there can't be that many Beetles still on the road.
It is outrageous just how many of those things are still moving! It seemed that not a block went by that they weren't screaming and punching one another. They had a wonderful time, probably got bruised, and drove me nuts. I couldn't remember seeing a Beetle in years, yet there they were everywhere. Just like Volkswagen Beetles you probably haven't noticed the design of any books lately but once you finish this little treatise you should see design (or lack of) in every book you pick up.
The title says this is more than you ever wanted to know about book design, but don't think for a moment this is all there is. Should you have a masochistic bent, take a look at the books listed in the recommended books page. For new authors reading this, take it as an example of why you need your work edited. I'm a designer not a writer so please bear with me.
Should you have a question not answered here please contact me and I will do my best to answer it for you.

Why do some book designers charge
more than others?

Prices for everything built today vary widely. To a great extent the market influences the price of an item but less so it's value. If a company decides that people will pay $20 for a widget then they go about building that widget so they can sell it at $20 and make a profit. It might be well built and well designed or it might not. But it sells for $20.
Book design is no different in this respect. If a design firm decides that people will pay $250 to design their book, the design firm offers a product that costs $250. The only difference between designing a book and manufacturing a widget is that there is really only time to consider and no building materials. So the design firm must be careful that their designers only spend a limited amount of time on the product.
Book designers individually are a little different. Like other artists and artisans we tend to be more attuned to the work rather than the business. So the price we charge is more about how long it takes us to do the work right rather than the price people will pay. This may not be a good business decision but I would have it no other way.
I know how long it takes for me to do the job right and I price accordingly. My hourly rate is a little less than most design firms because I have less overhead but it is the amount of time the job takes that is most important.
The one other aspect that can affect a designer's pricing is how busy they are. If they are booked for the next year and a half, and working a 50 hour week to keep up, then they deserve to charge more for their services.

Bindings

Books are divided into two very general categories — hard cover and soft cover. Hard covers usually use a Smyth sewn binding and soft covers are typically perfect bound. There are two commonly used hard cover methods, casewrap and dust jacket. Novels usually use a dust jacket for an attractive colourful imprint on the bookstore shelf and the fabric covered cover underneath will usually use gilt lettering on the spine. Casewrap covers are full colour, glossy and don't usually come with jackets. This cover type is commonly used on text or coffee table books but lately is becoming more common on novels.
Here are the standard binding options (and there are additional variations).

Side stitched The pages are trimmed on all sides and held together with staples on the left side. This is a common binding for low circulation reports. It is inexpensive and often used by law firms and medium to large companies. This type of binding cannot be opened flat and doesn't work on books thicker than 1/2 inch. Sometimes the book will be drilled on the left side and held together with twine or other decorative stitching. This is an early binding method and is still used today for very small run decorative or art books.

Saddle stitched For very small books (less than 64 pages) this is the binding of choice. For books of this size it is difficult to glue the pages together. The book is printed in a two-up format (4 pages on one sheet of paper — 2 front and 2 back) and stitched or more commonly stapled in the centre.

Perfect bound The most common type of binding used today. The pages are trimmed on all sides and then glued onto the cover, either hard or soft. This is an economical binding and many books today use it, even some high quality coffee table books.

Notch bound This is essentially a modified perfect binding. The paper is trimmed on only three sides. On the untrimmed inside margin several notches are cut. Sometimes twine is glued into the notches. When the cover is glued onto the pages it forms a very good bond eliminating the problem of pages starting to fall out as can happen with regular perfect bindings.

Spiral Bound If your book needs to lie flat like a recipe book, or be folded back to back to be useful then this is the binding for you. The pages are cut on all four sides with holes punched in the margin so a metal or plastic spiral holds the pages together. With this binding the thickness of the book is limited.

Comb bound This is very similar to spiral binding except the book can not be folded back to back but can lie flat. Some of you will recognise this as a Cerlox binding. The advantage of the comb bound book is a cleaner look where the title can be printed on the comb and pages can be added at a later date (not as easy as it sounds as anyone who has tried to do this without the proper equipment can attest). This binding will also limit the thickness of the book.

Smyth sewn (rhymes with blithe) This is the traditional binding. The book is divided into several smaller booklets which are saddle stitched together (always with thread not staples) and then glued to the cover. This method is generally reserved for hard cover books and is available in several grades. But don't confuse this type of binding with a hand sewn binding.

Hand sewn You may be able to find someone in your area that hand binds books. Smyth sewn books are done by machine and the process is based on the system used to hand bind a book but there are distinct differences. The main difference is, of course, that hand binding is done by hand. The pages are folded in signatures the same as Smyth sewn but are hand sewn to heavy cords or ribbons. The cords and ribbons are used to attach the cover boards and using cords result in the ridges that you see on the book spine. Leather is the material of choice for the cover but there are many variations. The resulting book is costly but lovely and a pleasure to own, particularly if you are the author. You might want to have a couple of copies of your book hand bound so have your printer reserve several pre-bound book copies that you can use for special binding.

I have listed the bindings in their order of cost. The Smyth sewn binding will be on the order of five times more costly than the least expensive bindings (a hand binding can be five times more costly again). It should all come down to use and price. The price that you will be marketing your book will probably limit you to two or three of the binding choices. The nature of your work, how long the information will be useful and who will buy it, should give you the final clue.

Print-on-demand

This method of printing offers a number of advantages to the self-publish author. It is more costly per book than traditional printing but you need only print a very small number. For example offset printing 2000 books may give you a cost per book half that of print-on-demand. This sounds great but will you sell all the books? If three quarters of them end up in your garage collecting dust (sorry to be so negative) then the economy offered by offset printing isn't worth it. Print-on-demand allows you to print 500 or 200 or 100 books and hopefully sell them all. You've made less money per book but you don't have any in your garage. Your car will thank you.
As a general rule if you want to print less than 20 books, any of the better POD publishers should be fine. As with any purchase try to get the best value and do some research, these companies are not all the same and some have a decidedly unsavoury reputation. If you want to print in larger quantities and perhaps make a little money POD is still the way to go but with a printer rather than a publisher. It's beyond my purview to make a recommendation here but I do list a couple of alternatives on my links page. If you are considering printing 500 copies or more then you should definitely get some quotes from offset printers, you might be surprised at how competitive they are.
Although not really new technology POD is relatively new to the print industry. POD uses photocopy or laser printing then some form of perfect binding. Some companies also offer a hard cover variant of a perfect binding. If analogue photocopy is used it creates a second generation print that is poor at best. Laser printing is much better but still not up to the quality of offset printing. Photocopy and laser printing are essentially the same technology, both using heat-set toner. Text from a high quality laser printer looks quite good but greyscale photographs are only slightly better than newspaper quality. The improved quality is mainly due to the colour of the paper (laser printing paper being much whiter than newsprint) rather than the actual print quality. If your printer is using a colour printer for your book photos the quality can be startlingly good but still not quite the same as high quality offset, the cost however will skyrocket. The reasons why laser printing isn't as good as offset are a little complex. A short explanation can be seen below.
Another problem with print-on-demand is getting archival paper. It seems to be difficult to find archival paper suitable for photocopying or laser printing. Perhaps largely due to cost, very few print-on-demand printers offer archival paper. As a result your book will have a limited life span (see paper below). Ironically the toner itself is very stable and as long as it properly adheres to the paper it's life span may be as long or longer than archival ink. There have been some reports that the binding glue used for print-on-demand is more brittle and pages falling out of the book are more common. I haven't noticed this to be the case but it stands to reason that if overall quality is poor it is likely that the glue quality could suffer. With some of the equipment I've seen it is difficult to set the amount of glue applied to the spine so the printer may err on the side of caution and the result is too little glue.
In the future as the technology improves print-on-demand may rival offset printing but at the moment, from a quality standpoint, offset is the method of choice. You will have to decide what is more important, quality and longevity or small print run economics. If you want your book to be hardcover and last for generations then you want offset on archival paper with Smyth sewn bindings. If your book is timely but not long lived (a computer manual for instance) print-on-demand may be the perfect choice.

Paper

The paper that you use has a big impact on the price of the book. In fact the single greatest cost in printing a book is the paper. There are a great many types of paper. Some are acid free archival quality. Some are made in part of recycled paper. Some reproduce photographs better than others due to the coatings applied. Here is where you might save a little money. If you are publishing a novel or other book with few illustrations consider an uncoated archival paper. It might also be a little heavier which will add thickness to your book and reduce show-through. (If the paper is not opaque enough the text on the other side can show through.) Unless you've written a modern War and Peace, a little extra thickness can be a good thing.
Your paper decision will depend to a great extent on the printer and his presses since some presses work best with specific types of papers. Graphic designers will talk endlessly about lovely paper that they have seen and used. As a group we like to think of ourselves as paper experts, but the truth is, very few of us are. For novels I like paper that has an interesting texture. Paper for colour printing needs to be smoother to take the ink properly. I usually ask the printer for several samples that meet the project requirements and that they are familiar with. This way I'm not married to any particular paper and the printer will know what to expect from the paper on their press. Make your concerns known to the printer when they do the quote and listen to their recommendations.
It will make life much simpler to go with whatever the printer recommends but it's also nice to know what your printer is talking about. So lets take a quick tour of common terms in the paper industry.
Paper comes in unending, confusing variety. Not only is the paper coated, uncoated, sized on one or both sides — it is matt, cover, offset, text or newsprint and comes in a cacophony of weights and measures. Let's try to make things a little simpler.
Paper in North America is usually divided into four broad types, newsprint, offset, matt and gloss. Newsprint is the paper used in newspapers — cheap, thin and short-lived. It does come in a variety of grades depending on how white it is and how heavy (thick). Offset is an average quality paper commonly used for printing of all sorts. Matt is a higher quality paper, usually smoother so it will take the ink more consistently. Gloss is exactly what it says. The very smooth surface takes ink very accurately and produces more vibrant colours. Each type is subdivided into grades normally referred to as book, coated and cover, depending on quality and thickness. There is quite a bit of overlap in these terms and you could easily find an offset-gloss that is better for your project than a matt coated. The industry isn't consistent in using the terms and often dispense with them entirely in order to market the paper with a more or less descriptive brand name. You won't find all grades in each type, for example there is no point in a cover stock for newsprint.
OK, so you should now be thoroughly confused, but at least you have heard some of the terms used in the industry even if they don't have the meaning you might expect. Here are some examples of paper that might be used for various projects.
Letterhead: 50 lb offset (approximately the same as 20 LB bond, commonly referred to as book weight)
Flyer printed on one side in 4 colour: 45 LB gloss
Flyer printed on both sides in 4 colour: 60 LB gloss
Book jacket printed one side in 4 colour: 60 - 70 LB gloss
These examples also show weight in pounds; unfortunately in North America each type of paper is weighed differently. For example, a manufacturer might have an 80 LB text and an 80 LB cover stock. The cover stock is much thicker than the text because the standard quantity that is being weighed is different. Some manufacturers now show European measurements in addition to North American, so the 80 LB text has a weight of 118 grams per square meter and the 80 LB cover weighs 216 g/m2. It's obvious from the European weights that the cover stock must be almost double the thickness of the text stock.
Don't get stuck on a particular brand of paper. A printer might quote a particular brand of paper for a job because they know it will work and has the stock or knows it's available. It's quite possible that another printer would have to special order the same paper and be unable to get it in a reasonable time. Printers are the paper experts and unless you have something very special in mind, go with your printers recommendation.
I've said earlier that gloss paper takes ink more accurately and gives more vibrant colours, but don't discount using a non-glossy paper for your book cover. I've seen some wonderful colour work done on uncoated and matt paper and it might give you the perfect feel for your book.
I strongly recommend that you use archival acid free paper. There is a greater variety of this type of paper available today than at any time in the last 50 years. Books made in the late 19th century and onward are generally poor in paper quality. This is one area where technology has failed us. While supplying enormous quantities of inexpensive paper to feed the information age, we limited the information's life span to a few years. Books made two and three hundred years ago can be in wonderful shape where books made just 50 to 80 years ago are almost universally yellowing and growing brittle with age. Many books printed from 1850 — 1900 are beyond repair.

Software

Many people have asked and argued with me about what software to use for book design. I'll give my recommendations here but instructions on how to use the applications are way beyond this article. There is no shortage of manuals for these applications, however if you have a specific problem e-mail me and I will give you my thoughts.
I use InDesign for page layout, Photoshop for pictures and Illustrator for vector art. Although I'm no longer a fan of Quark, it will do the page layout job OK. Quark definitely does not handle long documents as well as InDesign. For long text heavy documents it's hard to beat FrameMaker particularly if you're working with XML text mark-up. This is also an Adobe product and they seem to be continuing to support it as separate from InDesign. If you're building a thousand page computer manual FrameMaker might be the best tool. However if your project is a full colour text book with lots of graphics then InDesign is the way to go.
In the past I've used Corel extensively for vector art. It's a good application and always worked fine for me. I switched to Illustrator because of its integration with the other Adobe applications.
Photoshop is simply the top of the heap of photo applications by a wide margin.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of applications and I can hear TeX users fuming. TeX will produce excellent text and excels at mathematical equations. It's also true that InDesign uses the same or similar text formatting kernel. TeX however does not have a good graphic user model so you don't see the actual result until the page is printed. I haven't used it extensively but I've seen it used to good effect. It's not for me but the final result can be very nice with an operator who knows what he/she is doing. The big thing going for this software is that it is free!
Don't use Microsoft Word to layout your book! This includes any other word processor that you happen to be using. I know there is lots of information about how to use these applications for books but the results just don't measure up. I'm writing this in Word because it is the best tool I have for putting my ideas into words. But Word's ability to handle text for print just doesn't measure up to any of the page layout applications and it shows in the final product. Given two pages, one laid out in Word and the other in InDesign, the type structure will be different. Text lines will not be as even and word spacing will not compare. If you want your book to look professional you need to use professional tools.

Interior book design layout
Illustration 1

Interior book design layout
Illustration 2

Interior book design layout
Illustration 3

Interior book layout

The size of your book will depend on what type of book it is and what you want to say. Most printers consider 5.5" x 8.5", 6" x 9", 7" x 10" and 8.5" x 11" to be standard book sizes and there may be some price benefit to choosing a standard size. Many gardening books are square or landscape format (sometimes called oblong).
Illustration 1 on the left shows a method of determining the text areas on a book spread. Pages are designed as the book is viewed, with both verso and recto (left and right) pages as a set or spread. The two red rectangles are the live text area. The blue circle graphically shows how the text height is the same as the page width. Jan Tschichold gives a much lengthier description in The Form of the Book and ascribes the technique to Raúl Rosarivo (Gutenberg's time) and J. A. van de Graaf. Early hand scribed books may have been done more by eye, eventually evolving into the geometric technique shown here. Illustration 2 shows a different way of determining the same text area. The page is divided into a nine space grid, 81 spaces in total. The resulting ratio between the margins is 1 : 1-1/2 : 2 : 3 starting from the inside margin. This ratio can be altered to suit any book. If your book is 6" x 9" and the centre margin is 5/8" then the top margin is 15/16", the outside margin is 1-1/4" and the bottom margin is 1-7/8". Illustration 3 shows the page divided into a twelve space grid with the resulting text area. Notice that the margins still have the same ratio.
Using this method gives the same space between the text frames as the outside margin. If the margins are left identical as you see in many books the text has a rather unsightly gap between pages that weakens the connection with the text on the opposite page and sometimes looks like the printer made a cutting error and took too much off the outside edge. If the top and bottom margins are equal the text seems to be settling to the bottom as if it were too heavy for the page. Not all books are designed with these specifications. Some are poor designs and some are good. I believe the good ones started with this format and the designer made changes he or she felt would benefit the books message.
Once the page design is established and the text flowed into the pages they must be checked carefully for problems like widows and orphans. These are beginnings and ends of paragraphs left at the top and bottom of a page and cause confusion for the reader. Getting rid of them requires looking at each page and pulling text back or moving it forward to balance the text. Many books are set in word processing applications that don't handle this kind of adjustment well. This is best handled with a page layout application like Quark or InDesign
Chapter title pages can fall anywhere, or always on a new page, or always on the right page. There is a lot of variation here and anything goes so long as it is consistent and not distracting. I like chapter titles to fall on a right (recto) page. Chapter titles on left (verso) pages seem jarring and somehow out of place.
With page numbering there is also plenty of variation but some locations don't work well. Page numbers close to the spine just aren't very visible. I find that page numbers centred at the top of the page are not where I expect to find them. On a recto page upper right, bottom right, or bottom centred is fine. On a verso page it's upper left, bottom left or bottom centred. I've seen page numbers large and vertically centred in the outside margin and it worked with that particular design.

Components of a book

There are a number components found in any book. Some are relicts of an earlier era and some are necessary. Some are in every book and some are only found in specific types of books. A reference or scholarly work will have different requirements than a novel. The copyrights page, for example, is found in virtually every book. But you may not find it in some specialty books sold on-line or perhaps your family's history distributed only to family members. An index is usually only found in reference works. Let's look at the common components in the order in which they usually appear.
The endpaper is the first thing you see when you open a hardcover book. This is part of the binding rather than the printed part of the book. I include it in this list of components because sometimes it has a photo or map that is important to the text. The endpaper attaches to the signatures and to the inside of the cover helping to hold both together. Using a coloured paper or specialty paper can add a touch of elegance to your book. A plain coloured endpaper works well and also leaves a good place for you to sign your books during your world wide book tour (it always pays to think positive).
The half title or bastard title consists of the title only without author or secondary title information. Originally books were sold unbound so the owner could have them bound to match other books in his or her library. The half title was the top page and made it easy to locate the book amongst the stacks of other unbound material. Being just the title and nothing else hence half title. This page was commonly lost during the binding process and really doesn't have a purpose today but you still see many books with the half title diligently inserted. This is also a good place for a signature which is perhaps the only good reason today for the half title page.
Often the publisher inserts a page after the half title page listing other books by the same author. This is sometimes on the back of the half title but more often on its own.
Since the title page always falls on the right, the left page is sometimes adorned with an illustration. This page is referred to as the frontispiece. Originally that was the name for the illustration but we now refer to the page itself rather than what is on it. The frontispiece can be an illustration of some kind or the title can cover the entire spread. I recommend this page be left blank unless you have a particularly meaningful illustration that doesn't overpower the title.
The title page includes the title, expanded title or secondary title, author, publisher and the city where published. Originally this was supposed to be the first page you saw after the end paper.
The copyright page includes the publisher and address, any disclaimers, year of copyright, trademark information, where manufactured and designed, library of congress information, and ISBN. This is really a catchall page for anything that you don't have a place for but should include. This is almost always a single page and usually placed on the back of the title page. Commonly the information is centred but contrary to some opinions there is no prescribed way to format the information. Some designers insist on formatting the Library of Congress information exactly as sent but it truly doesn't matter.
The copyright itself is usually in the form:

©2006 John Doe. All rights reserved.

Copyright laws have changed in recent years and it is no longer essential to put this on your book. Copyright is granted by default regardless of the notice. However I see no reason not to include the notice, if for no other reason than to avoid confusion. Many publishers add another statement expressly forbidding photocopying or using any part of the book in an electronic format. I believe it is also still worth registering your copyright. In Canada through the Canadian Intellectual Properties Office and in the USA through the United States Copyright Office.
A number of things can go on the dedication page such as a quote, dedication or thank-you's. This is entirely up to you, and it's worth thinking carefully about.
The table of contents is usually only found in non-fiction works. It can also be one of the most difficult pages to design. Large spaces between the listings and the pages numbers make it next to impossible to tell which goes with what. Leaders in-between are often not much better as your eye helplessly jumps from one line to the next making it necessary to use your finger to follow them. At the other extreme some contents pages are so jam-packed that finding any one listing takes longer than thumbing through the text. This is a page where communication is paramount and there is little room for extraneous design that does not facilitate use.
If your book requires an index it can be done as notations in the manuscript or on a book proof copy. Either way the index entries are copied into the layout application which builds the index. This way any last minute changes made to the text after the indexing is complete will be reflected when the index is built or rebuilt. The index is created by the layout program using codes inserted in the text so page numbers are being included by the application rather than done by hand. This is a much more effective method than trying to do an index manually. The index may be the most used part of your book so it needs to be at the very back so it is immediately available. For indexing as well as editing, it pays to have a professional do the work.
The authors note page is often placed at the back of the book but sometimes in the front. It depends on how much importance the author gives it. The same can be said for the acknowledgments page.
Often the last page in the book talks about the author. This is where you can give yourself a little credit and advertise your Web site and other books you've written. If you feel a little reticent you might have someone else write it for you.

Spelling

Get it right! Heaven knows I'm a terrible speller so I own many dictionaries (I'm told it doesn't help much). Most of the world's dictionaries are also available online which I find enormously convenient. Unfortunately your spell check won't catch improperly used words, i.e., you for your, there for their, etc. A grammar check will catch some of these but don't count on it. Every time I look at this text I catch an error. Here again is where a good editor can be invaluable.
Decide if you will use American or British spelling. There may be such a thing as Canadian spelling but I choose British because as Canadians we can't seem to make up our minds about it. Use the spelling that suits your market. If you believe that your book will sell well in England then don't use American spelling. Regardless choose a single dictionary and use the first spelling option offered if there is more than one.

How many pages or castoff (shudder)

Your book can have as many pages as you like but there are some constraints, not all of which are monetary. Books are usually printed on medium sized presses on sheets of paper large enough to hold 8, 12 or 16 pages on one side of the sheet. Some presses will hold more. The act of arranging the pages on this sheet, so that when it folds the page numbers are in sequence, is called imposition and the printed sheet itself, both before and after folding, is called a signature. When the sheet is folded it contains 16, 24 or 32 pages. So your book is being printed in chunks of pages. When you look at the top or bottom of a Smyth Sewn hard cover book right at the binding you can usually see these signatures. If you divide the final page count by the number of pages in the signature and you come out with one extra page, the printer would have to print an additional signature and you'd have a number of extra blank pages. This is where typesetting and castoff comes in.
Having a few blank pages in a book isn't necessarily bad. It can leave room for notes, personal dedications and autographs, however too many is wasteful and give your book an unprofessional look. The number of pages in your manuscript isn't a good indication of how many pages your book will have. It needs to be typeset with the correct font and design before you know for sure and then some adjustments can be made to increase or decrease the size by a page or two.
Deciding the page count is often hotly contested. This process is known as castoff and large publishers often decide the page count before the book ever gets to a designer. The result is based on manufacturing costs that require the text to be shoehorned in without regard to font, text size, line length or leading requirements. Before computer typesetting it was necessary to have an accurate character count and then calculate the number of pages based on page size and font. Now it is usually simpler to reflow the text with different font parameters and choices until it fits. This doesn't work as well with complex layouts but here the page count is also less dependent on the font chosen. Remember also that the page count includes the other book components like the title and copyright pages, not just the main text.
When I reflow the text using various fonts and sizes I'm looking for several things. Does the text read easily? Is there a good number of characters per line? (About 70 +- is considered about right.) Does the text have enough leading so your eye can easily follow the lines? And of course is the text dense enough to get the book in the required number of pages? Sometimes I just fiddle with the font size and leading and sometimes I have to abandon the font entirely.
The page count is always a balancing act for the designer and within reason they will try to fit your book within a signature page count.
Print on demand printers don't have the same constraints as offset printers. Their presses can be much smaller and are basically large laser printers. If your book is to be photocopied and perfect bound with a print on demand printer the signature may only be 2 or 4 pages. Lightning press has switched to a 6 page signature in North America.

Children's books, a special case
The number of pages in a children's book is critical. The typical method uses a 12 or 16 page signature on press producing 24 or 36 pages. If the first and last pages are used as end papers to attach the cover the result is 22 or 34 pages. If separate end papers are used it's possible to add a page or two by printing on the end papers.
I have also seen books constructed with 20 page signatures and soft covers with a variety of pages. This all depends on the size of the book and the type of equipment that it is printed on.
It is critical that you decide on a printer before the design process begins, and be very clear as to the books construction and final number of printable pages.

Measurements

Like any industry the print industry has its own technical foibles, measurement being one. Page and book size are given in inches and sometimes centimetres. Design measurements like margin and gutter size are usually the same. Text is measured in points and picas. Column width is sometimes also in points and picas. There are 12 points in a pica and 72 points in an inch.
This is the traditional type measurement, so when we talk about type being 12 points it is the distance from the top of an ascender to the bottom of the descender. Type is usually referred to as 10/12 (10 on 12) or 12/14 (12 on 14) this means the type size is 12 points and the leading (space between lines) is 2 points so the distance from baseline to baseline is 14 points.

Fonts

A font is simply a set of characters that have the same design. If we want to get picky a font set only includes characters of the same size, a set of multiple sizes of the same design is a typeface. When moveable type was still being set by hand a printer would buy a typeface that included several sizes of metal type. You needed at least enough letters to set one page of whatever you were printing including body text and headlines. Typefaces were expensive so small printers would rarely own many of them. Computers have blurred these terms so that typeface and font are now used interchangeably. Any of the fonts on your computer can be set at any size you want.
I have several hundred fonts available for proofing but only a few are suitable for extensive text. Don't get stuck on a particular font because the books castoff can severely limit your font choice.
Much can be said (and a great deal has) about various fonts and where they should be used. Typographers sometimes go to great lengths to specify rules that they feel should be rigorously adhered to. Many of these rules make perfect sense but I have seen just about every one broken and the result used to good effect in a design. So don't consider the rules to be sacrosanct but only break them with good reason. Here are a few that I try to live by:
Don't use all caps. It is difficult to read all caps because we recognise words using outlines or shapes more than letter combinations. This is an easy one to test. Look at the following lines with the top or bottom of the letters removed. Which is easier to read?

Notice how difficult 'nutshell' is to read with the top of the word removed but with the bottom removed it's pretty obvious. Using all caps effectively does the same thing by eliminating the shape of the word and slowing the reader down. I might amend the rule to; don't use all caps in body text. I don't like their use in subheads either but I don't see a problem in titles. If you feel you must use them make sure to try it both with all caps and standard case. Take a good look and see which one you prefer.
With a book be careful of compressed fonts like Times. This font was designed specifically for the London Times newspaper so they could get more words on a page and use thinner columns of text. It works well for what it was designed for but can be tiring in a novel format. Fonts with very small x-height can also be tiring.
Many designers feel that the body text font needs to be a serif font and the subheads sans-serif. I don't agree but I do feel that a sans-serif font looks and reads better in a non fiction setting and I like novels in a serif font. This may have more to do with convention than anything else. Look at a few pages in two or three font choices and decide which you like.
Computers are amazing. Tell a computer to bold a word and voila it's bold. But wait, you don't actually have that bold font in your machine so how did it happen. Early computers simply double struck the letters to get bolding. The letter was duplicated and overlapped slightly offset. This is the same method that advanced typewriters use, hence the term 'double struck'. Modern computer applications will do the same thing if the bold version of the font isn't available. It seems OK unless the letter is large enough to see the problems. Correct bold, italic and small cap typefaces are different than the roman version. If you view the created versions to the real bold, italic and small caps the difference is obvious. So don't use bold in large titles unless you have the correct font on your machine. If the bold font is installed on your machine the application should use the correct font whenever you ask for bold lettering.

Text alignment

This simply refers to where the text lines up. Left aligned text lines up on the left side, right aligned text to the right side. Justified text lines up on both sides creating a solid block of text. When text is left aligned it creates a ragged edge on the right hence 'ragged right' or 'rag'. Text with a ragged right edge feels less formal than justified text. This doesn't mean that you won't see justified text in every type of book. It's a personal preference.
One thing to remember is hyphenation. With ragged right text you can get away without hyphenation. I don't recommend this because the look of the text is greatly improved by hyphenation. Notice that the text on this page is left aligned, ragged right and no hyphenation. The Web hasn't come to grips with hyphenation and some of the other intricacies of typography that we now take for granted. Justified text on the other hand must use hyphenation. Depending on the design there will be between 3 and 7 hyphens per page. If no hyphenation is used some lines will end up with few words and large spaces between that are obvious and very unsightly.

Multiple spaces

I've always felt that double spacing chops up the text and causes unnecessary pauses while reading. The use of a double space in modern typographic applications is definitely unsightly.
Even today when many young people don't know what a typewriter is, the habit of double spacing between sentences is widespread. This has been linked to the development of the typewriter Its use of monospaced fonts made the period seem to float between sentences and required the double space. This link isn't entirely deserved because the print industry has always used variable fonts and spacing. Printers in the early 18th century often used a larger space between sentences, often an em space which has been erroneously equated to a double space. The em was originally the width of an 'M' character but some printers and font designers have made it much larger. Now we define an em space as the same as the font size so a 16pt font uses a 16pt em.
The double space was almost always a decision based on expediency, the proliferation of poorly trained staff and a desire to have the print look like the typed manuscript. They were also mistaken in thinking the larger space sometimes used by fine printers between sentences was just a double space. High quality printers used no fewer than 5 different width spaces and sometimes more. So a space between sentences may have been 1.2 em. Although there are several language type styles in use that advocate various methods of spacing, in English printing, double spacing between sentences has always been associated with economical or low quality printing.
There is no evidence in studies that the extra space between sentences enhances readability. Typewriter companies made reference to studies that indicated this but so far as I am aware no such study was ever produced. The studies that have been done give mixed results and definitely do not show any correlation between double spacing and enhanced readability.
If you have used multiple spaces to format any tables in your text you might give your designer a heads up. That way he/she will format the tables with tabs before stripping out the multiple spaces.

Paragraph indents

Paragraph indentations are supposed to separate paragraphs and make the text easier to understand. Separating the paragraphs with a line space has the same function. It is completely unnecessary to have both a paragraph indent and a line separation. Paragraphs that start a chapter or fall after a headline should not be indented. The reader knows that this is the start of a paragraph because it is the beginning of the text and a headline is a bigger break in the text than the indent.
Should your work be scholarly and you want to defer to the MLA Style Manual (which says that all paragraphs must be indented, without alluding to any exceptions), remember that the MLA Style Manual is for submitting manuscripts. The publications themselves don't indent first paragraphs and the MLA Style Manual book does not indent them either.

Unnecessary punctuation

Punctuation in headlines is usually unnecessary. If you take out the punctuation and it doesn't affect the meaning then it is unnecessary and should be left out. In footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies sometimes the punctuation can seem unnecessary but there are likely some instances where it is needed for clarity. So if your work is scholarly, and for the sake of consistency, it is best to defer to the MLA or Chicago Style Manuals exactly. There is also a legitimacy issue here. It would be sad if an otherwise relevant work was compromised by the removal of colons in the bibliography. You may think this a silly example, and so did I when I heard it from a very legitimate source.

Images and resolution

As far as publishing goes this is perhaps the least understood aspect. At one time what you needed was a photograph which you sent to the printer or publisher who did their magic and voilà the picture appeared in your book. Now in the computer era the picture can be in a variety of digital formats.
So you've taken some lovely pictures with your digital camera and there is one area of an image that you would like cropped out and used for your book cover. Sadly the designer has said that it is too small so can't be used. What happened?
An original photograph is referred to as a continuous tone image. The tones move seamlessly from white through grey to black and through the colour spectrum. A photograph does have a grain structure but it is microscopic and contains orders of magnitude more information than a digital image. Digital images also have a grain structure called pixels. Each pixel can have many values (in the millions for a colour image) but the entire pixel has the same value. When we take a picture with a digital camera (or scan a photograph) we do it at a particular resolution. This refers to the number of pixels in the image and is usually given as number of pixels width and pixels height. This is referred to as a raster image due to the way it is imaged on screen — from left to right and top to bottom. This is also the order in which the pixels values are given in the image file.
To get the illusion of continuous tone when a photograph is printed we use ink dots. Don't confuse ink dots with pixels, they are not the same. These dots are usually printed in a rectangular grid called a screen, measured in ink dots per inch and the dots themselves vary in size. (Screens are often described as lines, of ink dots, per inch.) So as the tone in an image gets darker the ink dots get larger but the screen, dots (lines) per inch, remains the same. You would think that the higher the number of dots per inch the better the resulting picture and you would be mostly correct, but this is dependent on the printing press, the type of paper and the chemistry of the ink. It turns out that we need about 300 pixels per inch to get a good quality image at 130 line screen (130 ink dots per inch).
We talked earlier about laser printers not being able to deliver as good an image as offset. Printing houses today also use laser technology but they call them image setters not laser printers and they produce much higher resolution images. To produce the 130 line screen, the image setter needs to be capable of over 2000 pixels per inch where your laser printer is only capable of 600. A very thorough explanation of this can be found in the book Real World Scanning and Halftones.
So the digital image you sent was perhaps 3,456 pixels x 2,304 pixels. This is the top resolution you might get from an 8 megapixel camera. This could print a cover image about 12 inches across. The salesman may have told you that you could print a poster with these images but he is talking about printing on an ink jet printer not a printing press — different technologies with different requirements. The 12 inches sounds good as far as printing your cover but you only want a small crop of the image. It turns out that the crop you want is only 1,000 pixels wide and 1,600 pixels high. The minimum you need for your cover is 1,800 pixels wide by 2700 high (6 inches multiplied by 300 pixels per inch, and 9 inches multiplied by 300 pixels per inch). So the designer tells you the image is too small or more correctly, isn't high enough resolution.
If you provide original photographs or negatives the designer or printer will scan them at the required resolution (providing of course that the pictures are of reasonable size, don't have to be cropped too much and are in focus). If you provide digital images they must be of a high enough resolution.
Just a quick word about original photographs: They do need to be reasonably good quality. I have tried to scan 8" x 10" portraits that were so poorly done that it was almost impossible to get a good image. I have also scanned an 1880 era carte-de-visite photo that is only about 2.5" x 3.5" that has fabulous detail.
At the risk of confusing you, lets discus a different technology: stochastic screening. Stochastic is simply a fancy word meaning random. (If you are a mathematician you are now jumping up and down, incensed that I would use such a simplistic definition. It's a little like a fashion designer telling you that aubergine isn't purple.) Conventional printing uses lines of varying sizes of ink dots, stochastic printing uses random patterns of small ink dots that don't change in size but vary in number or density. This is roughly the technology your ink jet printer uses. The benefit is that you might be able to get away with a smaller (lower resolution) image using stochastic printing. Don't take this as a licence to crop your digital images to death, there is still a great benefit to using high resolution images and stochastic printing will benefit more from very high resolution than conventional printing will.
Although this technology isn't really new its adoption has been slow in the print industry. If your printer happens to use this type of screening it can be a plus and your designer will make any necessary adjustments to take advantage of it.

Colour

Colour is a very complex subject. Ask any three graphic designers about colour theory and you will likely get four explanations, ask three colour technologists and you will get five explanations. I'll do my best to make this as simple as possible.
When printers talk about colour they are referring to ink. The inks used in full colour printing are usually 4 — cyan, magenta, yellow and black (CMYK). These 4 colours make up all the colours you see on the printed page and all images that you send for printing must be in CMYK format. The colours you see on your monitor are created differently using red green and blue (RGB) luminous colour dots and they can display a more varied range (a larger gamut) of colour than the printed page.
Why is it that a monitor only uses three colours and ink printing uses four? Well in theory they should both only use three but neither system is 100% efficient and ink is by far the least efficient. Let's talk about RGB first.
Black on a monitor is actually a dark grey. The monitor can only be as black as the screen when turned off, but we see it as black in comparison to white with all RGB dots turned on. The RGB colour method is called additive because the more red, green or blue you add the more saturated the final colour with the end result being white.
Ink printing uses reflected light. Cyan ink absorbs all frequencies of visible light except cyan, thus the cyan colour. So it is subtracting the other frequencies of visible light and reflecting cyan. Any system that creates colour by reflected light is called subtractive.
White is no ink at all so you get whatever colour the paper is. Paper is never completely white but good paper comes reasonably close. Compare different papers and you will see a pretty wide disparity in the paper colour, some are much whiter than others. The less white the paper, the less efficient the printing will be, at least as far as printing accurate colours. In order to create colours we mix the three main ink colours (cyan, magenta and yellow). The more colour you add, the darker the result, and the final result should be black. Ink however is very inefficient, particularly cyan, so when all three colours are mixed together at 100% coverage the result is a dark reddish brown. Printers add black ink in order to get a good black and often use a mix of black plus some of cyan, magenta and yellow to get a better black or 'rich black'.
Printers go farther than just adding black ink. They also substitute black ink for equal quantities of the other three colours. Equal amounts of cyan, magenta and yellow should make some shade of grey so black ink can take its place. This process is called grey component replacement and the chief benefit is less ink on paper thus lower cost. Luckily we don't have to worry too much about this process because modern publishing software handles most of the work.
You can get along without knowing much at all about colour theory. But it's useful to know why your printer charged you extra for converting your RGB images to CMYK and it's nice to know how to keep that black border from looking grey on press.
It's also useful to know that the colours you see on your monitor are not the colours you will get on final printing. Oh they will be close but not exact. Your monitor is capable of producing colours that your printer can't. You can also see colours that your monitor can't reproduce. That's why you can't get the colour right on that picture of your hot pink jump suit, even though you tried scanning the material itself. At best you will get a fair approximation but side by side the difference will be obvious.
If you have a very specific colour of red that you must get on final printing, the only way is to use spot colours. This is another ink of the specified colour used only for that colour on paper. This means you are now using five colours for the print job (CMYK and a special colour ink). More colours mean more money.
Printing presses are set up to use different numbers of inks. Each ink requires its own set of rollers and ink fountain. When you look at a picture of a press you can see that the fountains are divided on the press so they can be worked on separately. When you add a spot colour the job will have to be printed on a press that has at least five fountains. Presses are commonly set up with four, six and eight fountains depending on the type of jobs that the printer does most often. It is fairly common to run print jobs that require six inks and sometimes a spot colour (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, gloss varnish, matt varnish and a spot colour).

Bleeds

Images going right to the very edge of the page are said to bleed. Images can bleed off any or all edges but there are some limitations. In order to get an image to bleed off an edge it must be printed overlapping the edge and then when the page is trimmed you have a bleed. If you have chosen a standard book size there may not be anything to trim. The pages are printed onto large sheets or signatures, folded then trimmed. If your book is a standard size the trim area is very small and may not be enough to reliably do a bleed. If you only have one or two pages that you feel need a bleed the printer may be able to adjust the pages to compensate, otherwise you may need to alter the page size of your book to make the bleeds work. Usually a printer needs 1/16 to 1/8 of an inch overlap to do a bleed properly.

Covers and jackets

I've left this to last not because it is the least important but rather it has the least design restrictions. The cover is not the same as the dust jacket. The cover can be highly embellished or supremely simple. Usually the title, often in gold leaf, on the front with perhaps a small embossed graphic. The spine has the authors name, book title and the publisher. The spine text is oriented so it reads correctly when the book is standing upright or when on it's side with the title page uppermost. Text on the spine should be readable from 6 to 10 feet away. If your book is very thin the spine may only be wide enough for the title and authors name. If the spine is so thin that it can't hold text large enough to be easily read, a graphic that is recognisable even on the thin spine can sometimes be used to try to make up for the lack of readability.
For the dust jacket anything goes. This is your sales tool. You have the two inside flaps and the back to say what you need to interest people in the book. I always look at the front inside flap first after picking up the book but many people turn first to the back page. The back inside flap is the least important and is most often used to continue what is said on the front flap.
If your book is soft cover then it won't have a dust jacket. But everything you'd put on the jacket goes on the cover. You can even have flaps on the cover to simulate the front and back flaps on a dust jacket. Some hard cover books have a full colour paper overlay bonded to the cover boards, thus eliminating the dust jacket. This is called case wrap and is common on text books. If your book is a high quality coffee table book you might want to do both a jacket and a full colour bonded cover. This way your book looks the same after the jacket is removed, any shelf wear should be limited to the jacket, and you can limit all the sales stuff to the jacket leaving the book cover pristine.
Take your time picking an image for the cover. If you have just the right photograph you are in luck. Often front covers use several pictures in a montage that can be quite effective. If you can't find an image use the title and colour to attract your reader. This is where a designer can be a big help. Regardless of how you decide to do your cover it must communicate the nature of your book.

OK there you are; a very quick introduction to book design. Hopefully it will help you in choosing designers and printers and it should give a little more insight into how your book goes together. Please check out the bibliography page and take a look at some of the books. They do a much more complete job of this than I have.