From Manuscript to Bound Volume

A manuscript becomes a book through dozens of decisions most readers never consciously notice and every publisher has to make on purpose. We want to walk through some of them here, partly because writers considering the press ask about this stage more than any other, and partly because the decisions themselves say something about what a press believes a book is for.

Trim size comes first, before a single page is set. A 5.5 by 8.5 inch trim reads differently in the hand than a 6 by 9 — the smaller size feels literary, intimate, closer to the paperback shelf of a used bookstore; the larger reads as more contemporary, more suited to a book with illustrations or a nonfiction argument that needs room to breathe. We choose trim by genre and by feel, holding physical proofs before committing, because a decision that looks identical on a screen can feel entirely different in the hand.

Type is the next decision, and the one readers notice least while being most affected by it. A serif built for long reading — generous x-height, moderate contrast, enough leading that the eye does not fatigue by page sixty — disappears into the reading experience when chosen well. A typeface chosen for its personality rather than its legibility announces itself on every page, which is occasionally the point and far more often a mistake. We choose type the way we choose sentence length: for what it lets the reader forget about the page and remember about the story.

Front matter is where a book announces what kind of object it intends to be. A half title, a full title page, a copyright page with the rights language actually correct for the edition, a dedication, sometimes an epigraph — each one is a small ritual of arrival before the reader reaches page one. We have seen manuscripts skip straight from the cover to Chapter One, and while nothing about that is wrong exactly, it reads like walking into a house through the kitchen. The front matter is the front hall. It sets the pace before the pace has to do any work.

Proofing happens more times than seems reasonable, and we have made peace with that. A pass for continuity, a pass for typography, a pass read aloud specifically to catch what the eye skims past, and then, always, one more pass after we were certain we were finished — because the pass we almost skip is reliably the one that finds something.

We mention all this now partly because Amazon's current KDP Content Guidelines draw an increasingly explicit line between human-authored and AI-generated work, and that distinction has made us more deliberate, not less, about the decisions above. A press that stands behind the human authorship of its books should be able to describe, plainly, the human decisions that shaped them — the trim chosen by hand, the type chosen by eye, the proof read one more time than seemed necessary by an actual, tired, careful person. That description is this essay. The decisions themselves are the book.

— The Editors