That's a nice package (or, book design 101) 👀

Trim, thickness, layout: how publishers make all those big, hard choices in book design (and who makes them, exactly)

“Do you know what governs the choice for a book to be a particular size, like 9x6 vs 8x5?”

A client texted me this two months ago. She preferred the latter—compact, thick—but like many new hardcovers, hers was the former. Why?

Reader: I had no idea. Publishing people tend to have deep and narrow expertise, and book production was outside mine.

At the time, all I could tell her was that this was the publisher’s call and one on which they rarely solicited authors’ input. Cover design and interior fonts? Sure, they’d consult us on those, but everything else—size, paper stock, deckled edges (or lack thereof), page layout, fancy cover varnishes and foils—was up to them.

…And who was them, exactly? Who’s making these calls behind the curtain?

That, too, I couldn’t say. I thought it might be the production team. (I was wrong.)

BUT GUESS WHAT, I JUST WENT TO SCHOOL. After interviews with one current and one former Big Five Publisher (i.e., person in charge of an imprint), I finally have answers. I now know who decides these things, why they matter, and—crucially—how authors might wrangle a sliver of say over them, provided they care about book design.

If you don’t care about book design, I fear you’ll find this newsletter boring. I’m going to attempt to remedy this for you by making the entire thing needlessly horny.

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Whispering pages; vanilla glue musk; eight or nine inches of thick, stiff spine: from the moment your hand spreads the covers, a book, like a body, tells you exactly how it wants to be touched.

And known. And used.

Those seminal insides have a gift for you, baby, and somewhere in your subconscious, I bet you already know what it is.

How does your subconscious know what to expect from a book, though? And ooh, why are so many of them so big and so hard?

One reason is that Amazon US exhibits increasing disinterest in purchasing paperbacks. Did you know that? I didn’t. Hardcovers are generally more profitable than paperbacks; publishers can get away with charging more for them. For the same reason, large-format hardcovers are more profitable than small: they feel more expensive, so publishers can make them more expensive. And Amazon likes this. They’re keen to milk as much profit as possible from every object they touch.

(So, for the record, is Barnes & Noble, who are likewise ordering fewer paperbacks than ever. If you’re a 2020s author who’s done fairly well in hardcover, but your publisher’s still declined to produce a paperback—this is why.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s slow down. Amazon is only one reason why books have the size and feel they do; there are dozens more where that came from, most far older than one brutish online retailer. Think shipping prices, bookstore shelving standards, carton quantities, reader expectations, unit costs, and a certain forbidden spreadsheet known as the P&L.

The impetus behind all of this remains profit, the second-oldest human impetus there is. And as major publishing houses pump every unit harder and harder for every last drop of that juice (oOoOh), there’s increasingly little room for any single person to impose an original design vision on the proceedings—let alone an author.

That said, there is a tiny window of opportunity for authors to exert some control. And if you’re interested: giddy up, hoss. Let me show you exactly where it is.