"[...] though largely forgotten today, methods and rules upon which it is impossible to improve have been developed over centuries. To produce perfect books these rules have to be brought back to life and applied."
-Jan Tschichold (1902-1974) - the "father of modern typographic design"
What are the various book elements?
These quick notes are designed to ease the entry of your manuscript into our editorial and production processes, and discuss the various book elements and parts of a book. Our processes are designed around the standards of the publishing industry, and your review of the material below will ensure your publishing project flows as smoothly as possible.
All manuscripts should be delivered to Dog Ear electronically - either via email or on a CD/DVD. Your Editorial Manager will give you the email address to which to send your manuscript. All of your book elements / parts of your book should be in one single file.
PLEASE NOTE - follow our manuscript formatting guidelines here. ALL parts of the interior of your book should be in ONE MS Word file. Please do NOT submit multiple files for the interior of your book. ALL of the parts of the book should be combined into your manuscript file.
Book Elements (also called Manuscript Elements and Parts of a Book)
Book Elements - Order of the Parts of a Book
You may most certainly set the order of elements within your book - but there are standards for professional books and textbooks that are accepted within the industry. Those standard elements found in most books should be in the following order:
Front Matter (occurring prior to the core content of the book)
Front matter is the first part of a book and is the part of a book that outlines the 'technical details'. The front matter pages are numbered in lowercase roman numerals. Even though all of the pages in the front matter 'count', no page number is placed on either display pages (such as Title or Copyright pages), or blank pages.
Here are the typical parts of a book's frontmatter:
Body Matter (the core content of the book)
End Matter (optional materials at the back of the book)
Notes on book elements:
All books include the part of a book called "front matter." Front matter is often composed of a Title Page, Copyright Page, and a Table of Contents (if needed). Your Title Page will show the full title of the book with subtitle, your name and any affiliations you want us to list.
Table of Contents
A Table of Contents is an essential element of many types of books, and is essentially the book element that is the the 'road-map' for your reader. If needed for your book, upon completion of your 'core' manuscript content, please prepare a Table of Contents (TOC) listing the parts, sections, chapters, and headings that you feel are appropriate. Most non-fiction books and textbooks list at least the primary heads in each chapter (called "A-Heads" or "1-Heads"). Your manuscript must match the order, context, and titles of the TOC.
Parts, Sections, and Chapters are the book elements that break up the text by topic. Your Chapters should be divided into various levels of headings - usually not more than 2 or 3 levels deep. Chapters that contain similar content are 'chunked' together in Sections or Parts. A Section is a set of Chapters that are related closely, and Parts are Sections that are related. When organizing your manuscript, think of it as a loose outline of your content and the order in which you want your readers to progress through the book.
Some books contain End Matter like a Glossary, Bibliography, and Index. These elements should be sent as part of your full manuscript. Dog Ear can discuss a variety of options for creating an index for your book.
Additional Manuscript Preparation notes:
Your manuscript must be your final manuscript. Editorial changes or alterations - other than to correct minor errors - will significantly slow the process and will incur a charge to the author.
Art, Images, Figures, Graphs, Tables, etc.
"Non-text" elements will be placed as close as possible to where they are referenced within the text (your Art Reference). These elements will fall AFTER the reference, at the top or bottom of a page, typically within (1) page of the Art Reference. Tables are considered text and will be positioned within the text. Images will appear in the printed book as submitted (both in size and quality). Graphs or figures should use text printed as solid black and white with no shading. Shading causes images to lose quality when books are printed digitally. Art or images that require manipulation will increase our production time and costs to the author. All "non-text" elements should be numbered consecutively and must be referenced within the text..
A note on photographic elements
Photos reproduce best when submitted as original digital files in high resolution. Any scans should be submitted at 300 dpi black and white.
Book Elements and MS Word Styles
Microsoft Word is very good at creating 'styles' that help our production department understand each of the parts of a book. This usually is centered around the various book elements that have to do with the parts of the book within the main text - things like chapter titles, heads, sub-heads and the various text elements.
Your Editorial Manager can supply a MS Word template with the following styles embedded: