What are you, a cyborg?

Believe me, if I could get out of that damned chore called “sleep,” I’d submit to any electronic implantation.

And no, Th., I did NOT get a paper ARC for Angel Falling Softly.

What are you, a cyborg?

I can hear my mother in the background: “You’ll find out!”

Of course she said this when she thought I was going to procreate, but yeah. haha.

I agree that typesetting a novel shouldn’t be rocket science. I can see where you might need a more complex program for a nonfiction book with graphs and charts and weird bulleted text. But novels are pretty straight forward.

The most obvious way you can tell is in the spacing between the words and letters in a paragraph–especially if there are tables and pictures that the text flows around.

Technically, InDesign/PageMaker does a better job than Word of shifting the words in a paragraph to the margins and spacing them out in a visually appealing way. But sometimes it doesn’t do that very well because of a combination of the parameters the designer set for the page AND the number of words/letters/length of words in the paragraph. It can’t reconcile the two in a pleasing way. So what you end up with is a paragraph or two of really weirdly spaced out words and gutters.

(In the specific example I’m thinking of, that problem occurred elsewhere, too.)

You can manipulate that more easily by hand in Word (i.e., camouflage it). The problem with doing it in Word is that you have to go through the document manually to get the effect you want and kill the effects you don’t want (and I seriously flubbed up on one page which will get corrected in the next print run), whereas in InDesign/PageMaker, you really don’t have to do that. It does a decent job if you’ve got your settings right.

Don’t get me wrong ID/PM is the superior choice for some things, which I wouldn’t use Word for at all. But for me, typesetting a novel isn’t one of them. K.I.S.S.

And thank you for that clarification MoJo: “Bad Word typesetting can be mildly annoying. Bad InDesign/Pagemaker typesetting is criminal.”

Question: What makes bad InDesign/Pagemaker design SO bad, over bad Word design?

Maybe if you sent her a fuzzier copy of your cover?

I didn’t send her a cover. Would have been polite if she’d just sent an email back and said, “Sorry, don’t feel comfortable telling my audience about your book.”

Looking at Montmorency or the trade paperback edition of All She was Worth or even my hardbound edition of The Amber Spyglass, there’s no way you could tell if they were typeset using Word.

Indeed. What I MEANT to say (I’m having issues with not being clear today) is:

When interior design is done mediocrely or badly, I can tell if the designer was using InDesign/PageMaker or Word. Bad Word typesetting can be mildly annoying. Bad InDesign/PageMaker typesetting is criminal.

I got the hard sell for a professional using InDesign today. Because if you use Word, “readers can tell.”

::roll eyes::

Readers don’t care unless you make their eyeballs tired. What tires mine (in print) really quick is a ragged right margin and not enough spacing between lines (and I don’t care how big the font is).

Your book layout looks fantastic to me.

Thank you!

I read Angel Falling Softly off the manuscript, so I couldn’t say as to its readability in print. As for your cover, it’s brilliant, so whoever did that…kudos.

Zoe, you might like Eugene’s vamp tale, Angel Falling Softly. It’s the one that blew up LDS publishing a while back. Scandalous, is what.

Looking at Montmorency or the trade paperback edition of All She was Worth or even my hardbound edition of The Amber Spyglass, there’s no way you could tell if they were typeset using Word.

As Mojo mentioned, what I think “experts” are referring to are dumb mistakes like first-line indent and leading and font choice. Now, when it comes to designing covers, I plead utter incompetence.