Consequences of Poor Book Design

I’m fascinated by ads lately.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t ever see ads unless I’m out, or using someone else’s device.

But I’ve been actively hunting for ads over the last three weeks.

I want to see what my potential clients see, and how they came to whatever perspective they currently hold by the time they make it to me. This is a lesson I learnt from Heidi Weinberg .

Heidi is one of the smartest people I know. When we worked together she told me that she tried to DIY her book and most of what she was looking at looked like gobbledygook to her.

I publish, edit, and format books everyday, so to me there’s nothing confusing or even difficult when I’m doing book design or publishing. I don’t remember her analogy, but I think she asked me if I thought I could walk into a cockpit and fly a commercial airliner. To a seasoned pilot, all the instruments are second nature. I wouldn’t be able to distinguish an aileron from a Pez dispenser. Point taken Heidi.

The ad

Three days ago I came across an ad that led me to a series of videos on YouTube where a young man claims to be teaching people how to format books with MS Word. At the end of the video, I notice that the book violates most typesetting rules and best practices.

• Page numbers appear on chapter opening pages where they shouldn’t appear.
• The kerning and the leading on the book are incorrect.
• The book lacks proper hyphenation.
• And even worse, the book combines indents with block paragraphs.

This person obviously never heard of Butterick, or Bringhurst and he’s giving people typesetting advice. To the trained eye, the book looks like garbage. You really shouldn’t do this. Your book will be more difficult to read, your audience will think you’re a fraud, and no matter how good the content, the poor packaging will diminish your credibility in your readers’ eyes.

I see a lot of books released on Amazon by executives and thought leaders who should have either hired better, or known better. So many mysteries solved with this little adventure.

Now I understand why so many authors claim to have a #bestseller but when I look at the book, I see Amazon has slapped it with a “Quality Issues” tag.

Your readers may not know the difference between a Bastard Title and a Title Page, but they can tell when something is off… when something is missing.

And if you formatted your book in Word and omitted the Bastard Title page, and the Title page, or otherwise butchered the order of the Front Matter your book will be perceived as a low-quality effort. By Amazon, AND by your readers.

Lots of people don’t peer under the hood. But if you do you can see that Amazon calculates all kinds of signals about a book. It’s not just taking the metadata you supply into account. Amazon’s software (this one is called KindleGen) reads what is known as the book’s “semantic tags” when your book is uploaded. I’m not so sure why this isn’t common knowledge. Did people forget that Amazon started life as an online bookstore, run by the world’s biggest book nerd?

This is the reason why when your reader purchases a book on Amazon, the first page the reader sees is either Introduction or Chapter 1. When Amazon is processing your book, KindleGen reads the semantic tags and it skips all the pages marked as “Front Matter.”

I’m not going to use ominous words like “shadow ban” because as far as I know, that doesn’t happen on Amazon. But the algorithm will treat your book differently. Let’s say Amazon will treat your book, AND your author name, as less “authoritative” than another author who isn’t making these mistakes.

This is also a good reason to steer away from producing “low-content” books. If you’re someone in the #hustlelife and you found a community of people who like to read your content and you’re writing books now, you would be better off creating a completely new account for your new author persona. You really don’t want the persona that has legs and might be able to take flight, to be weighted down by the “low content” or "low quality" association. At a bare minimum, you should go back and either unpublish the low quality books or fix them.

TLDR – Don’t follow advice from ads. Don’t format your book in MS Word unless you are an MS Word expert. Learn how to correctly organize your book, and organize it like a professional would. It matters.

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