Designing great book layouts and interiors
Don’t underestimate the value of well-designed book pages. Text layout, typography, image quality, and navigation links help make the reading experience pleasurable and memorable. Additions like an author bio, or links to your other titles, are smart ways to build your business and connect with your readers.
Use these tips to create polished, professional-looking book interiors.
Choose the right format for your book
The EPUB file format is the popular industry standard for digital books and the best way to get a great-looking book on Apple Books. There are variations of EPUB formats for different kinds of books. Choosing the right kind of EPUB format for your book is important, as it heavily impacts the readability of your book.
Use a reflowable EPUB format for novels and books that don’t include a lot of images, illustrations, or other kinds of visuals like charts or diagrams. Reflowable EPUB files allow the reader to adjust the font size to their preference on Apple Books. Use a fixed-layout EPUB format for children’s books, cookbooks, and books that include lots of images, illustrations, or other kinds of graphic elements.
Use legible and genre-appropriate fonts
The typeface, or font, in which your book is set contributes not only to the effectiveness of the reading experience, but the tone and personality of your words. Different fonts make different impressions: some are formal, some are modern, some are playful. Some research can help you make design decisions. Are there general styles or trends within your genre to consider? Look at the designs and fonts of digital books by best-selling authors, and consider your own reading experience. It’s also important to choose a font that is easy to read, especially on iPhone and iPad.
Use font styling, such as italics, where appropriate to bring emphasis. Use accent fonts for pull quotes or special passages you want to set apart, such as a section meant to appear in a character’s written voice. Be sure to use these elements only where appropriate and avoid using too much styling that could make for a distracting layout or even cause eye fatigue.
Select great quality images and decorative elements
Readers use devices of all sizes. Use the highest quality images to ensure clarity across device sizes and to make sure your book is providing the best experience. Avoid using pixelated, misaligned, or poorly cropped images. Apple Books accepts images up to 5.6 million pixels, so your readers will be able to pinch and zoom.
Use links to help readers navigate your book
Links and a table of contents can make it easy for your reader to navigate your book. Use hyperlinked text in an index and linked footnotes to help readers easily find their way back to the original text. Create a navigational table of contents. If you’re formatting in Pages, the table of contents is based on paragraph styles used in your document. Refer to our Pages user guide for more instructions.
Great books are free of text and layout errors
Spelling and grammar errors distract readers and undermine the quality of your writing. It’s crucial to comb through your book and fix any spelling, spacing, hyphenation, and punctuation missteps. You could even enlist someone else to help. A fresh set of eyes is often sharper, and therefore better at catching mistakes.
Include cross-sell and author bio pages
Cross-sell pages, which can go at the front or at the back of your book, list your other books (or even other media you might be creating and releasing). You can make it convenient and easy for your readers by directly linking to the Apple Books product pages for these titles.
Use book templates in Pages
Pages is Apple’s free, powerful word processor that lets you write, design, and publish stunning books, whether you’re on a Mac, iPad, or iPhone, or using a PC. Start with a great-looking template — choose from a selection of Apple-designed book templates, and customize the design any way you like. From novels to travel books, Pages makes it easy to make beautiful, interactive books that readers will love.
Start by choosing a template that works for your book genre. After you’ve picked a template you can add text, photos, image galleries, videos, audio, shapes, tables, charts, and more to your book.