Text based books

Text-based books are just like what the phrase says: nearly all text with few if any images. Genres include most fiction from middle grade on up and nonfiction with few charts, images, etc. If you have a text-based book, skip to the next chapter for research. If you have some images in your book, the information in the image-based section will apply to you.

Image-based books include children’s picture books, cookbooks, and art books. I would also include nonfiction that relies heavily on charts, graphs, screenshots, or other image-based content.

In the next section, you’ll do some research on specifics for your categories and hopefully decide which trim size is best for what you want to do. Right now, I want you to understand a bit why that decision is especially important if you are including images in your books.

I’ll review some terms and their meanings. Bleed is an extra amount outside of the trim size of the book. It is used when you want the image to go to the edge of the page. It is typically 0.125" on all sides except the interior edge or margin where the book is bound, otherwise known as the gutter. This allows for any slight errors in printing so you don’t have a white line on the edge of your page.

In order for an image to print well, it needs to be 300 ppi or pixels per inch. This means that the image must be 300 pixels for every inch that the image will be in the book. You will need to include the bleed in that amount. For example, my children’s books are 8x10, so the size of the image needs to be 8.125 x 10.25. (8 + bleed) x (10 + bleed twice). You can then multiply those numbers by 300 to get 2438 x 3075 pixels. This is a minimum number. As you can see, the trim size plays a critical role here.

If you are commissioning artwork, I recommend giving the illustrator a slightly larger format to work from, such as 9x11 for an 8x10 book, but let them know they should not put anything important on the outside one inch or so. They will have more flexibility when formatting your book so that you have a sufficiently large image.

If the illustrator is working analog and plans to scan in the work or if you are using scans or images of your artwork or of other photographs, including screenshots, you will want to ensure that the resulting jpg images are at least 300 ppi at the size you want to use them. I prefer starting from larger and going to smaller, and then I compress the images when exporting the final files.

Also note, that for POD, any color means that your book will be in full color for printing purposes. This increases the cost of production, which is passed on to you. There is no such thing as spot color in POD—it’s all or nothing. So full-spread images will cost the same as small color changes in text. In my opinion, go big or go home with the color as long as you do it tastefully.

Text vs Image

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