Definition
Book formatting (also called typesetting or interior design) is the process of taking your raw manuscript and laying it out as a finished book. This includes choosing fonts, setting margins and line spacing, designing chapter title pages, handling widows and orphans (stray lines at the top or bottom of pages), formatting headers and footers, and ensuring everything looks polished whether it's an ebook or a print book. The goal is invisibility: great formatting never draws attention to itself, but bad formatting immediately makes a book feel amateur.
Why It Matters
Readers may not consciously notice good formatting, but they absolutely notice bad formatting. Cramped margins, inconsistent spacing, awkward page breaks, and poor font choices all signal that a book wasn't professionally produced. For self-published authors, formatting is one of the easiest ways to close the quality gap between your book and traditionally published titles. It's also one of the most overlooked steps, and it's often the thing that makes a reader decide within seconds whether your book is worth their time.
Types of Book Formatting
Common Mistakes
Word processors like Google Docs or Microsoft Word are designed for writing, not typesetting. Use dedicated formatting tools like Vellum, Atticus, or Adobe InDesign. They handle the technical details (like embedding fonts, generating ebook code, and creating print-ready PDFs) that word processors simply can't.
A widow is a single line of a paragraph stranded at the top of a new page. An orphan is a single line left alone at the bottom. Both look sloppy. Professional formatters adjust spacing, tracking, or page breaks to eliminate them. Most formatting software can handle this automatically.
Body text needs to be readable across hundreds of pages. Stick to proven book fonts like Garamond, Caslon, Palatino, or Baskerville for print. Save decorative fonts for chapter headings or drop caps, and even then, use restraint.
Any text changes after formatting mean redoing layout work. Finish all editing, proofreading, and revisions before you start formatting. The formatting step should be one of the very last things you do before publishing.
Try It Yourself
Pick up three traditionally published books in your genre and study their interiors. Note the font, font size, line spacing, margin width, chapter heading style, and any decorative elements like drop caps or ornamental breaks. Write down exactly what you see for each book. This gives you a concrete visual target for how your own book's interior should look.
Write now, format later
Novelium's manuscript editor keeps your focus on the words while maintaining clean, structured text that exports smoothly to professional formatting tools when you're ready to publish.