Let’s face it: most self-published books aren’t laid out very well. The type looks terrible, the placement on the page is awkward, there’s no pzazz to the design, and the whole thing looks amateurish. That’s why I hired a designer to do the interior of my first Amanda Lester, Detective book. It came out great, and after that, I used what I’d learned from her to lay out the subsequent books.



Here are some sample chapters from Amanda Lester and the Orange Crystal Crisis. Looks pretty good, don’t you think? Here’s what I do to get such a nice appearance:



Do not indent the first paragraph of a section. This includes not only the first paragraph of a chapter, but also of each section within the chapter that’s separated by blank lines and/or a little doohickey. If you look at the books on your shelves, you’ll see that’s what the big guys do. I never noticed that until I started laying out my own books.

When you do indent, don’t do it too much. I use .3” Any more looks like too much.

Use a drop cap for the first letter of a chapter. It adds a little eye candy.

Buy nice-looking fonts and use them. Do not use Times New Roman! The font I use for my text is Garamond Premier Pro. I use Chauncy Decaf for the chapter numbers and titles and the headers. I use ITC Benguiat Std Medium for the book title and Agency FB for the author name. Don’t download these for free. Compensate the designers, for heaven’s sake. They’re unlikely to be wealthy.

Don’t use gigantic text. Twelve-point only looks good if the font runs small in the first place. I use eleven-point. Not only is it easier on the eye, but it also makes the book shorter, which means it’s less expensive to print.

Use the title of the book as the even page headers and each chapter title as the odd page header. Contrary to what I accidentally did in Amanda Lester and the Purple Rainbow Puzzle, do not put a header on the first page of a chapter.



Use an interesting-looking graphic to separate sections. Mine comes from a font called Flourishes and Ornaments.

Use little Roman numerals for the front matter and Arabic numbers for the text proper.

Of course use mirror margins or your pages will look lopsided. And remember that the larger the margins, the more pages in the book. The next time I do this one over, I will make the top and bottom margins smaller and save money.


Just try a couple of these hints on your current book and see if it doesn’t look better!