Your Book’s Interior Matters as Much as the Cover: What You Should Know

We write a lot on the topic of book covers, from professional standards and genre conventions to the cover design process, but we haven’t written much about what your book’s interior should look like. And the interior of your book is just as important as the cover! 

So we thought it was time to go into this topic so indie authors will know what needs to be included in their book interiors, and what they should look like to fit professional standards. 

The Margins, Text Size, Spacing and More Choices for Your Book’s Interior

Because much of what your book’s interior will look like is up to a matter of taste and your genre, for many of the below items we’ll speak generally and simply fill you in on what NOT to do. But everything included below are still important aspects of the overall look and feel of your book because they can affect the reading quality and reader’s perception of your book. 

So, before you even begin making these design choices, you may want to check out several other print books in your genre to see what their interiors look like, and consider the choices they’ve made. These are referred to as your comparable titles, and you can learn a lot from being familiar with them. For instance, a YA novel’s interior will look much different than that of a nonfiction book on the history of WWII.

Let’s Talk Font Choices!

As you probably know, you will need to choose a font style for the text of your book’s interior. This will include chapter titles, headers, subheadings and even for any special text that may be used. But don’t get too excited! This font, as much as you may be tempted to make it creative, needs to be clear and legible and pretty much up to the professional standards you see in professionally published books. Don’t worry, there are plenty of options available.

We should also note that font size is important. If it’s too large( large print editions excluded) it could affect the whole layout of the interior. If it’s too small, it may be difficult to read. Spacing matters for this reason too. Speaking of spacing…

You’ll Also Have to Consider Spacing for Your Book’s Interior

Spacing of your text is important to the readability and overall look of your book’s interior. There is no hard and fast rule with spacing but it should be carefully considered for those reasons. For instance, your margins are an aesthetic choice, but they also affect readability.

Sometimes, a book interior designer will choose to tweak spacing simply to reach a more standard page length for a book, but these are subtle changes that go hand and hand with your margin spaces, and font size, etc. and these changes will still be within general standards. 

We also need to note that the look of your manuscript itself has nothing to do with what your finished and printed interior will look like. This means, you don’t have to consider these things in your manuscript. All this is done in the interior design process and after editing. If you want to know more about what a manuscript should look like before handing it off to an editor, you can read about that here. 

When We Talk About Spacing, This is What We Mean

• The space between paragraphs. This is called leading or line spacing.
• Also, the space between letters themselves. This is called tracking or letter spacing.
• The margins on all sides of the page: Including the top, bottom, gutter, and outer edge.

Choosing Chapter and Section Headers is Part of the Process Too

You’ll also need to choose font styles and sizes for your section and chapter headings in your book’s interior. This seems like a lot of choosing, we know. But there is help available if you get overwhelmed with these choices.

Along with these choices for chapter and section headers, you’ll need to consider how you want your running heads and titling to look. This is the text that appears in the margins of your book’s layout, at the top, or bottom of every page – like your author name for example. You’ll also need to make choices about your page numbers and where you’d like them placed and their font sizes. 

NOTE: As is standard, these running heads and page numbers will not appear on chapter openers or blank pages.

You’ll also need to choose the font, text size and placement of:

• Section Headers
• Subtitles 
• Section breaks

These will not be obtrusive or overly embellished, though they can be unique. You want the focus to be on the story!

Other Stuff That You May Need to Consider for Your Book

Depending on your personal preference and the genre, your book’s interior may also have additional elements like the ones below that will require style and design choices to be made. Don’t worry, this all will make sense on the page and you won’t be using a crazy variety of fonts. 

• Ornaments chosen to indicate a break in time or a new scene
• Image treatment and placements
• Captions

These all come together to create a cohesive and polished look for the entirety of your book’s interior. You may not need to use all of these, of course. It will depend on your needs and how you want your interior to look. 

What Your Book’s Interior Needs to Fit Professional Standards: These are the Must Haves

Stylistic choices aside, your book’s interior needs to include certain elements to fit professional standards and these should be done in a specific manner. These are mostly the things you will need to include on those first few, yet impactful pages. 

Your Title Page: A Reminder of Your Book Cover

Though it may seem like an odd use of your available interior space, your book’s interior should have a title page to fit professional publishing standards. This title page should essentially reflect your book’s cover, minus the graphics. So, you can even use the same font and design as your book cover on this page but won’t add graphics or match color. It will be text only, in other words. This will include:

• Your author name
• The title
• Any subtitles
• You can also add your publisher here(see below)

Your Book’s Interior Needs a Copyright Page!

Following your title page will be your copyright page. This is important. The copyright page of your book’s interior should include the following:

1. The publisher name and address( for indie authors, you are the publisher but will create a press name)
2. The words copyright and the publishing year. Your name and the words All rights reserved. Eg. Copyright 2026 Bob Jones All rights reserved.
3. IF you use any copyrighted material in your book you must first get permission, then list the title of the work followed by all copyright info and the entity that granted the permission. 
4. If fiction, the whole disclaimer about it being so, and not meant to represent anyone living or dead…
5. The name of your cover (and interior if desired) designer or the company that designed it.
6. Your ISBN and Library of Congress Control numbers.
7. Where it was printed. Eg. Printed in the United States of America. 
8. Notation that it is the first edition. 

NOTE: These do not necessarily have to appear in this exact order, they just need to be included. 

Other Interior Pages and Their Standards

The title page and the copyright page are the most crucial to include in your book’s interior but there may be other pages before the first chapter, such as a page for review excerpts and an author bio page. This will depend on your back cover design and if there is adequate space there. It can also come down to a matter of style choices. We should note here that some of these pages can be double sided. You do not need a separate one-sided page for each portion.  

You may also include:

• A dedication page
• A blank page before the first chapter
• The aforementioned author bio page
• A page or pages dedicated to blurbs, praise, reviews

Again, we highly recommend you study the interiors of books in your genre so you will have a clear idea of the professional standards we’re discussing here. Or to simply get some inspiration for how you want your book to look. 

Your Book’s Interior Matters Just as Much as Everything Else!

Although much of how your book’s interior appears will be up to your design choices, it WILL still need to fit professional standards and conventions. In other words, it’s probably a bad idea to have an entire book printed in a script font. Or so little margin that words bleed into the edge of the page. Of course, genre matters somewhat and your book’s trim size will need to be factored in. Not every book in your genre will look exactly alike but the interior of your book reflects the care and quality of work that went into it as a whole. The interior will affect reader’s perceptions and readability as well. 

There are also things that need to be included, such as your title page, and the ever important copyright page. 

The point is, if you’ve gone through the hard work of writing a solid book, taken the care to edit it well, and worked closely with a professional cover designer, neglecting your book’s interior would be a mistake. 

So, we hope this has given you some idea of what to expect during this part of the publishing process and that you feel informed about the important stuff to consider. Because your whole book, not just the cover and the story itself, needs to be polished and up to professional standards. When it is, you’ll have a book you can be proud of, and more importantly, your readers will be expecting it to be up to those standards.