The Book Design Process

Featuring “The Count of Monte Cristo”

The book design Process
Turning plain text and an idea into a beautiful, printed book! Here is how I did it…

The Count of Monte Cristo is probably my all time favorite book, so when I started getting into publishing, specifically public domain books, it was at the top of my list for books I wanted to publish.

(A public domain book is a text that is over 95 years old, and is available for public access.)

1 Text Formatting

This specific text included nearly 500 drawn images as well, which made the design process very fun!

The biggest difficulty with a book like The Count of Monte Cristo, is managing the size. The Penguin Classics version of the book includes over 1200 pages, and that is without images. Since I really wanted to maek my book a hardcover, and specifically printed with Barnes and Noble, I needed to get the book under 800 pages. I tried many different versions, including cramming text, shrinking the letter size, and tightening the margins, but I didn’t want to just ‘make it fit.’ I wanted this book to be beautiful.

I considered splitting it up, making it a series of books, but that didn’t feel right either, finally taking inspiration from one of the classic books on my shelf, I split the pages into two columns.

Success!

And after adding border lines and headers, it was finally turning into the beautiful spread I had been imagining. I formatted the chapter headers and titles, and tweaked the letter size and leading.

(In typography, leading is the space between adjacent lines of type. Pronounced LED-ing.)

2 Illustrations

Once that was done, all that was left were the images!

This turned out to be much more of a chore than I anticipated…

First I had to edit all 450ish images, they were scans on top of cream paper, and not really the look I was going for. So I took the images and converted them all to black and white, adjusting the settings until the edges were pure white, and cleaned up some of the blurry gray parts.

The text I used had the images lined up already, but ever the perfectionist, they weren’t quite good enough.

A definite pet peeve of mine is when the illustrations in a book don’t quite line up with the text, though I will one hundred percent be more gracious now that I know exactly how difficult that can be.

I decided it would be worthwhile to the quality of the book to place the images as precisely as possible in relation to the action they depict. Which meant that I had to got to read my favorite book, in order to find exactly where the images go! I would now consider myself a professional skimmer. All those school books over the years really did have a purpose.

I did eventually finish placing the images.

Now all that was left was the cover.

3 Cover Design

This part definitely felt the most daunting; it is a very important part of the book.

And as much as everyone says not to judge a book by its cover, I have to disagree, the cover is often the sole reason people pick up the book in the first place.

No pressure.

There are three main factors that make a good cover,

It needs to be legible.
It needs to accurately depict the contents.
IT NEEDS TO LOOK GOOD.

And I will admit, my first attempt was none of these things… but that’s okay. It’s just like the first draft of a book, all you’re doing is creating something. And once you create something, then all you have to do is keep making it better.