Susan Friedmann [00:00:00]:
Welcome to Book Marketing Mentors, the weekly podcast where you learn proven strategies, tools, ideas, and tips from the masters. Every week, I introduce you to a marketing master who will share their expertise to help you market and sell more books. Today, my special guest is Katherine Williams. Katherine is the owner of chapter one book design based in The UK. She works globally with publishers, book coaches, and independent authors to make their books beautifully easy to read and ready for publication. She's unflappable, has a superb eye for detail, and a wealth of experience from her 30 career so far in the world of publishing. Catherine, all the way from The UK, welcome. It's such a pleasure to welcome you to the show, and thank you for being this week's guest expert and mentor.
Catherine Williams [00:00:55]:
Oh, thank you for having me, Susan.
Susan Friedmann [00:00:57]:
I always love it, interviewing Brits. I mean, why not? We've got one British accent and another British accent, so at least we understand each other. Maybe some of the listeners might not. I don't know. Whatever. Catherine, you are brilliant, I know, at book design, the interior, which is something that I don't know how often authors really think about that. They sort of are focused so heavily on content, but often, let's say, overlook the design. Let's talk about why book design is so crucial for a book's success.
Catherine Williams [00:01:39]:
Oh, thank you for that question. Yeah. I think it is absolutely vital because if it's difficult to read the book, for instance, if the margins are too narrow, if there's a lot of hyphenation in the text, that makes it hard to read, and then the content doesn't get absorbed as easily by the reader. Some of the content kinda gets lost along the way because they're being distracted by it being difficult to read and the hyphens you know, if you've got what I call a ugly hyphenation, so you've got three or four hyphens on consecutive rows. Personally, I find that very distracting, and I think it makes it difficult to read, so I'm not taking in what the author is saying.
Susan Friedmann [00:02:24]:
Yeah. Large chunks of text for me are really bothersome. I know how important white space is, and I know before we went on the air, we were looking at a book that it's a beautiful book. However, the interior layout is so sort of text heavy, and there was something that you were mentioning about the margins. Talk to us about that, the importance of margin space.
Catherine Williams [00:02:50]:
Yeah. Absolutely vital. The outside margins, so if it's obviously in a printed book, the reader needs to be able to hold the book, without having to move their hands around too much to read the text. Those outside margins need to be enough for the reader to at least have their thumbs on the page, as it were. And the inside margins, near where the spine is, if those are too narrow, especially if you've got a lot of pages on a paperback book, somebody's gonna end up breaking the spine of the book in order to open it up so that they can actually read the words that are closest to the spine. Those inside margins need to be adequate as well.
Susan Friedmann [00:03:30]:
Yeah. I think that's something that we just don't think about. I wouldn't have thought about that aspect. I look at it from the fact how reader friendly is it. For me, I know that large chunks of text, and I'm like, oh, I'm already feeling an overwhelmed before I even start to read even though I want to read the book.
Catherine Williams [00:03:53]:
Yeah. And certainly with nonfiction books, there are various elements that can be introduced, different levels of headings or pull quotes or little graphic devices just to break the text up a little bit and make it more reader friendly.
Susan Friedmann [00:04:07]:
Yeah. You talk about key elements on the make a book beautifully easy to read. I love that. Yeah. Talk to us more about that. What are those key elements?
Catherine Williams [00:04:20]:
Okay. So white space, which we've just been talking about, is crucial. What used to be called leading, which comes from the old days of printing technology where there were literally strips of lead between the characters on each line to space them apart. So line spacing now, that needs to be adequate as well because if it's put in too compactly, that makes it hard to read. The choice of typeface is obviously very important as well. In printed books, if you've got big, long chunks of text in a sans serif, that can be hard to read. You don't want to have spaced apart too much because then it looks like, well, you're just spacing it out for the sake of making the book bigger than it needs to be. And the size of the typeface as well.
Catherine Williams [00:05:06]:
I just picked up got a book the other day. I opened it up and I thought, oh, that's a bit small. Even with my glasses on, I'm, you know, struggling to read it. So it's I think some authors make the mistake of trying to pack as many words on the page as possible to try and reduce the cost of printing, but I think that can be a forced economy because it just makes the book harder for the reader to get through.
Susan Friedmann [00:05:30]:
There were some things that you mentioned just now that I want to pick up on. One of them is the typeface. You were talking about sans serif and serif fonts. Those might not be terms that our listeners know about. Talk to us a little bit more about those and what works and what doesn't work.
Catherine Williams [00:05:51]:
A serif font is one that has the little curly bits on most letters. I think that's the the technical way to describe them is little curly bits. Whereas, obviously, sans serif, that's without serifs so that they are tend to be straight lines and circles and curves to make up the letters of of that particular font. Typefaces that people might be familiar with, so some serifs, you've got ones like Ariel and Helvetica, which are fairly ubiquitous. Times New Roman would be an example of a a serif typeface.
Susan Friedmann [00:06:24]:
Oh, one easier to read than another?
Catherine Williams [00:06:28]:
The perceived wisdom is that serif typefaces are easier to read in print, and some serifs are easier to read on screen. I'm not sure how accurate that is. And also for people with dyslexia, some serifs are easier to read than serifs. But that is also affected by the color of the paper and all sorts of other things that we try and cater for to make sure that the book is accessible to as many people as possible.
Susan Friedmann [00:06:58]:
Talk to us about the color of the paper, how important that is.
Catherine Williams [00:07:02]:
Oh, it can be. If people are printing their book with, Kindle Direct Publishing, for example, which is basically Amazon, the main choice is between white paper or cream paper. The cream is kind of softer on the eye, I think, and makes it easier to read. But if you've got a predominantly white cover, then having cream paper might make it look a bit strange. So it's a personal choice, really, as to whether you have white or cream paper. I wouldn't ordinarily, unless there's a specific reason not to go for the cream paper.
Susan Friedmann [00:07:38]:
What about a matte versus a paper with a a gloss, a slight gloss on it?
Catherine Williams [00:07:43]:
Again, I would tend to go for matte unless there's a lot of photographs that particularly need that glossy finish. And then you'll be looking at a specialist printer rather than something like, Kindle Direct Publishing because they don't have that many choices on the paper stock. I mean, they do have a a premium paper for the, photographic books. But if you are doing a photographic book, you'd want to be looking at a different kind of printer, something like, Lulu, if you're self publishing, which are better for those high color books.
Susan Friedmann [00:08:16]:
Now when we talk about a book designer, and that's looking at the cover and then the interior layout and design, at what stage would an author bring a designer into the picture?
Catherine Williams [00:08:30]:
As soon as possible, really. That said, some people do contact me when they're right at the beginning of their writing journey. They kind of just got the idea, and then it ends up being it can be two, three years before they're actually ready for what I do because it can take that long to get the book finished and edited. So, generally, I say when you're getting towards the end of your first draft, that's probably a good time to get in touch because at least then you know that there's a self editing stage to go through and, obviously, having it looked at by a professional editor. But that can be kind of closer quantified and then scheduled further on, you know, three or four months down the line for the design work to be done. As for the cover, again, really as soon as possible because the cover is obviously a major part of marketing the book.
Susan Friedmann [00:09:23]:
I'm pleased you said that because that's one of the things when I talk to authors is wherever they are in the process, get the cover designed. Just the front cover because then you can start promoting it. You can even get a pre order sales, just using it wherever and it it looks so real.
Catherine Williams [00:09:43]:
It definitely makes it seem more real, for the author, I think. You know? Oh, you know, this is my book. This is going to be published rather than it's, several files on your computer. It actually starts to look like a book, and, that's the really exciting phase.
Susan Friedmann [00:09:57]:
It really is. Because you can talk about, oh, I'm writing a book. I'm writing a book. And that's like, oh, great. There are many people writing books, but then when you see the cover and other people see the cover, it's just so real.
Catherine Williams [00:10:10]:
I think it help if you've got the cover done, even if it gets changed a bit when it's actually published. It makes it real and then that gives the author the impetus to actually get it finished rather than it sitting on the computer for ages.
Susan Friedmann [00:10:24]:
Yes. I would agree with you. In fact, I had a a coach once, and he put the cover out maybe two years before the book actually came out.
Catherine Williams [00:10:36]:
Wow. So
Susan Friedmann [00:10:36]:
I was like, wow. Yes. It made you feel, oh, I want that book. I want that book. And the anticipation of it coming out, I just didn't think it would take two years before he actually brought it out.
Catherine Williams [00:10:50]:
Yeah. Two years is quite a long time, but I would certainly say definitely six months to a year. Before you want to publish, you need to have that front cover out there to say, yes, this is coming.
Susan Friedmann [00:11:02]:
Are there trends in book designs that authors need to be aware of?
Catherine Williams [00:11:08]:
Probably. Yes. I know back in the day when I was working for a trade publisher, there used to be a website that had a a section on copycat designs. There are definitely trends. The one that has really stuck in my mind, they were fiction titles, but they all seem to feature headless women. They tended to be fiction, of course. A woman beautifully dressed in either period costume or all the way up to something fairly modern, but it would be just from the shoulders down rather than including their head. And it was quite strange, but it was obviously a trend at the time.
Catherine Williams [00:11:44]:
Yeah. I think there are trends. It's worth looking at other books that are currently available in the same genre as you are publishing in so you can have a look and see what you think works and what doesn't and, obviously, not copying per se, but you can get some inspiration from the designs that are already out there.
Susan Friedmann [00:12:04]:
I know my listeners know that I'm not a great fan of Amazon. However, for looking for book designs, I think it's a great place to go. And as you said, look for other books in the same genre of what kind of styles seem to be repeated.
Catherine Williams [00:12:22]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Susan Friedmann [00:12:22]:
Not that I like to be copycat. You still want it to look as if it's modern.
Catherine Williams [00:12:29]:
Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. And certainly for business books or any book that's being published as part of a marketing strategy for a business, make sure those brand colors are incorporated in some way because it just makes it all the more cohesive.
Susan Friedmann [00:12:43]:
Yes. And as you and I were talking again before we came on the air, the fact that, yes, I've got a friend colleague who's putting a book out, and we looked at the idea of using colors that she's already using, so that, again, it all fits together. It's all part of that brand and it looks cohesive. Let's focus on mistakes. I know our listeners love listening to mistakes. What are some of the biggest mistakes you see authors make when it comes to the layout and design?
Catherine Williams [00:13:18]:
It's not so much on the layout and design, but it's about proofreading. The tried and trusted way that I still work in is the book gets written, the book gets edited, the book gets its interior layout done, and then it gets proofread. Because in thirty years of working on books, I have never yet done a book that had zero corrections after the first proof had been done. Yeah. Don't skimp on the proofreading because people do notice, and they will pick up on things. They might be fairly minor, but a spelling error or a other typographical mistake. But they do get noticed, and, you know, that can make people give a review that's three stars rather than four, for example.
Susan Friedmann [00:14:02]:
It's fascinating. Yeah. Because and I say there's often one little error in the book. I've never known a book to be perfect. Maybe there's a comma that's missing somewhere, or Yeah. A period, or yes. Just something that even when it's proof read, that it doesn't mean that it's guaranteed to be absolutely perfect.
Catherine Williams [00:14:25]:
Absolutely. Yeah. We're human. We make mistakes. It's uncanny because it's been read by the author umpteen times, it's been read by their friends and neighbors, it might have been to beta readers who could pick things up, it's been through a professional editor as well, and yet there will still be things that get picked up by a proofreader.
Susan Friedmann [00:14:47]:
Yes, it's amazing. It's absolutely amazing. Many years ago, I was into quilting and there was something about quilting that they, even the best of the best would make a slight error because there's nothing perfect. Indeed. Yeah. I always feel that about books. There's always something, however many times, as you said, however many people read it and look at it, it's like, yeah. And especially if you're looking at it over and over again, you just Yeah.
Susan Friedmann [00:15:15]:
Well don't see stuff. Yes.
Catherine Williams [00:15:16]:
No. Indeed. You you see what you expect to see if you've written it. Definitely. Even trained proofreaders are not gonna necessarily get everything. So like you say, there's bound to be one or two in a book. And And sometimes it's not until it's actually printed and then gets noticed. So, thankfully, in these days of print on demand, if something is fairly significant or even if it's, not that significant, it can be corrected and new file uploaded, and then the next one that gets printed will be sorted.
Susan Friedmann [00:15:46]:
Yes. And that's obviously one of the the pros of having that print on demand, which is quite incredible because you just don't have to order a 200, five hundred books at a time, which take up a lot of space. Very short. From experience. Yes.
Catherine Williams [00:16:05]:
Yeah. They definitely do.
Susan Friedmann [00:16:07]:
Yes. I always say to people, I say, if you're gonna order 500 books, just make sure you've got a place for them because that's a lot of books, you know, especially when they put, I don't know, 30 or 40 books in a carton to make it, you know.
Catherine Williams [00:16:22]:
Yep. Yep. Yep. And end up having a pallet delivered to you with, you know, a dozen boxes of books.
Susan Friedmann [00:16:29]:
Yes. And she had that.
Catherine Williams [00:16:30]:
Yeah. Thanks.
Susan Friedmann [00:16:31]:
Been there. Done that. What other mistakes, Catherine?
Catherine Williams [00:16:37]:
Last year, I got a book which is called A Grammar of Typography. So as you can imagine, it's a book entirely about typography, and yet whoever designed it obviously didn't adjust the hyphenation settings in the software they used to set the book because the hyphenation was absolutely terrible. Hyphens after two letters in a six letter word, for example. That's one thing I absolutely I really dislike having too many hyphens in a block of text, so that's one thing that does get ironed out very quickly in the books that I work on.
Susan Friedmann [00:17:15]:
Yeah. And interestingly enough, anybody who's using AI to help write, AI loves hyphens. They're just things that it absolutely loves, and one of them's hyphens. And, you know, when I see texts, I was like, I don't remember using hyphens that often.
Catherine Williams [00:17:35]:
No, indeed. Indeed.
Susan Friedmann [00:17:37]:
Oh, yeah. I mean, it's just quite amazing. And things that you don't really think about, as you said, the typefaces. I was taught that no more than two different type styles. What's your thinking on that?
Catherine Williams [00:17:55]:
Yes. I would agree, generally. Most of the time, I will be using a serif typeface for the main text, but a sans serif for headings that gives that distinction. But within those headings, there could be four or five different levels. So I may have a bold weight and a italic one and in different sizes as well, just to make sure that those headings get differentiated and that the reader can follow the structure of the book.
Susan Friedmann [00:18:24]:
And it's amazing when you do use, you know, something in bold or italics or maybe a thinner version of the font, how different it looks. Yeah. And you think, oh my goodness. It's a whole different font.
Catherine Williams [00:18:40]:
Yeah. Sometimes it does look very different, especially, there are some typefaces where they have a condensed version. There's one that I use quite often called Myriad Pro, and it goes from a an extended version to a condensed version. And you literally wouldn't think it was the same typeface, but it is.
Susan Friedmann [00:18:58]:
What are your recommendations with that? I mean, how many different kinds of levels of that font would you use or the types of that font?
Catherine Williams [00:19:09]:
Probably no more than four or five. I mean, they might be in different sizes, but they're different weights. So they might be a bold, a semi bold, a medium, an italic, and a regular, for example, just off the top of my head. Yes. I wouldn't say more than that. And if the structure of the book requires even more headings, then that's probably something for an editor to actually look at and decide, well, maybe that just needs to be a whole new section rather than a subsection of a subsection of a subsection.
Susan Friedmann [00:19:38]:
You've been in the business many years, like you mentioned thirty years. Indeed. What are some of the biggest changes that you've seen in the time?
Catherine Williams [00:19:49]:
Oh, massive.
Susan Friedmann [00:19:50]:
Publisher. Yeah.
Catherine Williams [00:19:52]:
What's happening? Massive changes. My very first job in publishing was a tiny little outfit called Able Publishing, ironically, serving authors who were self publishing. And we had these tiny little Apple Macs to work on using a program called PageMaker, which was a predecessor to InDesign, which is the most widely used software now. And at Able Publishing, we literally if photos were to be included in the book, we had to leave a space on the page for the photograph to be physically pasted on, and then it would go to the printer and the printer would take a photograph of the page, and then it would somehow get printed. So, we were supplying what was then known as camera ready artwork. Yeah. Literally cutting and pasting photographs into books, which was quite amazing. So, obviously, now we don't have to do any of that, and the technology has just changed unbelievably.
Catherine Williams [00:20:50]:
I probably even that old Apple Mac would maybe store a couple of books files that I have now. So, yes, you know, it was measured in megabytes rather than terabytes. So
Susan Friedmann [00:21:03]:
Yeah. The big changes. I remember PageMaker. Yeah. And then now InDesign is like that's like the PhD of design. I mean, you've really got to know what you're doing if you work with that.
Catherine Williams [00:21:18]:
Yeah. Yeah. I would say so. I mean, I've been using it since it very first came out, which I think was in the back end of nineteen ninety nine. So it's it's been out for a while. So yeah.
Susan Friedmann [00:21:28]:
What about the typefaces? What else has changed over the years?
Catherine Williams [00:21:34]:
There are literally, I couldn't tell you how many typefaces are available now. There are thousands and thousands and thousands. Whereas thirty years ago, we probably used the same three or four typefaces on almost everything just because that was the fonts have to be licensed for use. But, you know, you have to buy the fonts. You can't just, you know, grab them from you know, you can get some free ones, but they won't necessarily have all the characters that you want, and they might not have all the weights that you want. So it's better if you can to get the license fonts. Thank you
Susan Friedmann [00:22:08]:
for the that.
Catherine Williams [00:22:09]:
The Adobe subscription. You know, you can get fonts for particular jobs, and you can just activate them, and they're all part of the Creative Cloud package, as they call it.
Susan Friedmann [00:22:22]:
Yeah. I'm blown away with the number of fonts that there are. I didn't realize that and you said, I mean, there are thousands, and they vary so minutely one from the other, but yet there's some characteristic. And I often look at the g's or the y's. I think sometimes those, you see that differentiation.
Catherine Williams [00:22:46]:
Yes. Definitely. It's with the lowercase g, the way the tail of the g is formed can be very different. Yes.
Susan Friedmann [00:22:54]:
You said there's curly q's and Yes. Capital q's can be quite different as well. Well, Catherine, how can our listeners find out more about your your services?
Catherine Williams [00:23:06]:
You can visit my website, which is a bit of a mouthful because I didn't choose a sensible domain name. It's Chapter-One-Book-Production.co.uk. That's my website, and you can find me on LinkedIn as well. That's where most of my social media activity goes on.
Susan Friedmann [00:23:25]:
Perfect. And I'll put that in the show notes because, as you said, it's difficult to know what goes where. I'll put that in the show notes, make it easier for our listeners. As you know, we always have our guests leave our listeners with a golden nugget. What's your golden nugget, Catherine?
Catherine Williams [00:23:46]:
My golden nugget is don't skimp on the proofreading.
Susan Friedmann [00:23:51]:
Yeah. I didn't realize how important that was, you know, at the end of the day. But yes, that really is important. Don't skimp on the proofreading. Love it. Thank
Catherine Williams [00:24:02]:
you.
Susan Friedmann [00:24:03]:
I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom listeners.
There's a lot of wisdom here. Some real golden nuggets throughout the interviews. So go back and listen to it because there were some real gems that Catherine shared with us.
By the way, if your book isn't selling the way you wanted or expected to, let's you and I jump on a quick call together to brainstorm ways to ramp up those sales because you've invested a whole lot of time, money, and energy, and it's time you got the return you were hoping for. Go to Book Marketing Mentors to schedule your free call. And in the meantime, I hope this powerful interview sparks some ideas you can use to sell more books. Until next week, here's wishing you much book and author marketing success.
