Book design

This is the page that replaces a week with a book designer, or a fortnight fighting a template. Every choice here is opinionated on purpose: sensible defaults, a short list of good options, and a live page that shows the result immediately. Nothing to configure that a novel doesn't need.

You'll find these settings two ways: on a book's Metadata page under Book design, and in the Book Settings modal from the dashboard. They're the same controls in both places, and every change saves the moment you make it, just like the cover. What you set here is what the book prints as, whatever face you happen to be writing in.

Trim size

The physical page dimensions. This drives everything downstream: margins, the gutter, how the text reflows, the page count your printer quotes from. Six standards, mass-market to Royal:

Mass market · 4.25×6.87″

The supermarket paperback. Dense and portable.

Small trade · 5×8″

Novellas and shorter fiction.

B-format · 5.06×7.81″

The classic UK and European paperback novel.

Digest · 5.5×8.5″

A roomy small format. YA and literary fiction.

US Trade · 6×9″

The self-publishing standard, and a safe default.

Royal · 6.14×9.21″

Larger UK trade paperbacks and hardbacks.

You can also switch trim straight from the editor toolbar while you write; it's the same setting.

Japanese formats

Set a book's language to Japanese and the trim list gains the sizes Japanese books are actually printed at, in millimetres, because that is how they are specified:

Shinsho · 103×182mm

新書判. The pocket format.

105×173mm

The nearest to a 文庫 pocket paperback that print-on-demand offers.

Shirokuban · 127×188mm

四六判. The standard Japanese novel.

Tankobon · 128×182mm

B6判. Single volumes.

A5 · 148×210mm

A5判. Literary hardbacks and larger editions.

Kikuban · 152×218mm

菊判. The large literary format.

All six are on Amazon KDP Japan's own trim list. A true 文庫 is A6, 105×148mm, and no print-on-demand service offers it, which is why the second entry is named for its size instead of being sold to you as a bunko. A book in any other language is offered the six standards above and never these.

To see the six drawn against each other before you decide, and what your word count runs to in each, there's a free trim size comparison outside the app, and a word count to page count calculator beside it.

Typeface

Thirty-four book faces, every one licensed for commercial publishing, so nothing here can come back to bite you at print time. Pick from the editor's typeface dropdown; the face you write in is the face the book prints in.

The list you see depends on your book's language. A face that cannot render a single character of your script is not a choice, it's a trap, so Galley doesn't offer it. Set a book to Japanese and you get the faces cut for Japanese, not the fifteen that would print empty boxes.

Why these faces

Two rules decide the shelf, and a face has to pass both. It must be the kind of face a novel in that language is actually set in, and it must be licensed so you can sell the book. Galley embeds the font inside your print PDF and your EPUB, which counts as redistribution, so every face here is under the SIL Open Font License.

That second rule rules out most of what the publishing trade uses. Sabon, Bembo, Minion, Adobe Garamond, Morisawa's Ryumin for Japanese, Founder's Songti for Chinese, SM Myeongjo for Korean, Noori Nastaliq for Urdu: all proprietary, all licensed per title or per print run. Where the standard is unavailable, Galley ships the closest honest revival or a face in the same tradition, and the lists below say which.

Latin script

Fifteen faces, and the default shelf. English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, the Nordics, Polish, Czech, Turkish, Vietnamese and the rest.

Recommended

EB Garamond, Crimson Pro, Cormorant, Lora, Libre Baskerville. Safe, handsome, and proven for long-form fiction.

More faces

Literata, Source Serif 4, Spectral, Alegreya, Vollkorn, Cardo, Gentium Book Plus, Newsreader, Libre Caslon Text, Charis SIL.

Most are revivals of what English fiction has been set in for centuries. EB Garamond is Claude Garamond, Libre Baskerville is Baskerville, Libre Caslon Text is Caslon, Cardo follows Bembo, and Source Serif 4 comes out of Fournier. Literata, Newsreader and Spectral were drawn for long-form reading, and Alegreya specifically for literature. Cormorant is a display face: lovely at a chapter opening, light for a whole novel at body size.

Not offered: Sabon, Bembo, Minion, Adobe Garamond, Granjon, Dante, Janson Text, Electra, Palatino. Proprietary, every one.

Ten of those also set Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian) and seven set Greek, so those books draw from the same shelf, filtered to the faces that carry the alphabet. Coverage is measured against a full alphabet rather than a couple of letters, because several Latin faces carry alpha and omega as maths symbols and no Greek alphabet at all.

Every other script

Arabic

Amiri, Noto Naskh Arabic, Scheherazade New. Amiri is the literary one, modelled on the type of the Bulaq Press.

Persian (Farsi)

Markazi Text, Amiri, Noto Naskh Arabic, Scheherazade New. Markazi was drawn for Persian rather than adapted to it. All four carry the four letters Persian adds to the Arabic alphabet, and the Persian digits, so numbers come out in the forms a Persian reader expects.

Urdu

Noto Nastaliq Urdu, Gulzar. Nastaliq, not Naskh. Urdu set in an Arabic face reads wrong to an Urdu reader, so the shelf is its own.

Hebrew

Frank Ruhl Libre, David Libre. Frank Ruhl is the classic Hebrew book serif.

Hindi and Devanagari

Noto Serif Devanagari, Tiro Devanagari Hindi.

Bengali

Noto Serif Bengali, Tiro Bangla.

Thai

Noto Serif Thai, Taviraj.

Japanese

Shippori Mincho, Noto Serif JP. Shippori is a mincho cut for books rather than screens.

Chinese

Noto Serif SC for simplified, Noto Serif TC for traditional.

Korean

Nanum Myeongjo, Noto Serif KR.

The standards you won't find, by script. Arabic: DecoType and Monotype Naskh, though Amiri is a real Bulaq revival so the gap barely matters. Persian: Nazanin, Lotus, Mitra. Urdu: Noori Nastaliq, the widest gap here, since Urdu publishing runs on it and no open equivalent exists. Hebrew: Hadassah and the Narkis families, though Frank Ruhl is the standard and it is on the shelf. Devanagari: Shree Lipi and Kruti Dev. Bengali: Shree Bangla and the older Lipi families. Thai: Angsana, Browallia and the DB families. Japanese: Ryumin, Iwata Mincho, Hiragino Mincho. Chinese: Founder's Songti and Shusong. Korean: SM Myeongjo and Sandoll. Cyrillic: Literaturnaya and Akademicheskaya. Every one is licensed per title or per user, which an embedded font cannot be.

Emphasis: italic, and bōten

Latin, Cyrillic, Greek and Vietnamese emphasise with italic, and ⌘I does what you expect.

Japanese emphasises with bōten (傍点), small dots set beside the emphasised characters. In a Japanese book the italic button is replaced by a bōten button, ⌘I applies bōten instead, and the dots carry through to the print PDF, the EPUB and the Word file. Word has carried this since 2003, so it survives the handoff to an editor.

Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew, Devanagari, Bengali, Thai, Chinese and Korean get neither. Those scripts have no emphasis convention I can set correctly, so the button is not there. Text you paste in that already carries italic keeps it in the file; it just won't be slanted on the page, because a synthetic oblique is wrong in every one of those scripts.

Japanese, Chinese and Korean

What changes in a CJK book beyond the typeface:

Chapter numbers

第一章 in Japanese and Chinese, 제1장 in Korean, in the book's own numerals rather than "Chapter One".

Counting

Japanese and Chinese count characters, not words, everywhere a number is shown. Korean spaces its words, so it counts words.

Line breaking

Kinsoku shori. A line never opens on 。、」 or a small kana, and never closes on 「（. A full stop that would push a line over hangs in the margin instead.

Mixed text

A quarter-em space between Han or Kana and a Latin word or digit, which is what a Japanese compositor sets and most software leaves out.

Drop caps

Not offered. A dropped Han character reads as a rendering fault, and small caps need a script with two cases.

Front and back matter

A Japanese book carries a 奥付 colophon on its last page instead of a copyright page at the front, written from the same live fields.

The faces are embedded in your exports. On screen the editor uses your own system's mincho or myeongjo, because the Japanese and Chinese faces are tens of megabytes each and sending one to the browser would make the page slow to open. The two can look a little different. The book says so when you create it.

Vertical writing (縦書き) is not built yet. Japanese books set horizontally today. It's on the roadmap.

Chapter openings

How the top of every chapter is dressed. Pick one and it applies to the whole book, so your chapters open consistently the way real novels do. Chapter numbers are computed from chapter order and renumber themselves as you rearrange.

Title only

A small-caps title. The literary standard.

Ornament + title

Your chapter ornament above the title.

Chapter number + title

"CHAPTER ONE" above the title. The commercial standard.

Chapter number only

Titles stay in the sidebar and contents, but never print.

Ornament + number + title

Full dress: ornament, "CHAPTER ONE", then the title.

The ornament itself is an image you can upload (a small printer's flourish), set alongside these options.

First line of each chapter

The traditional flourish on the opening line of a chapter:

Plain

The first line reads like any other.

Small caps opener

The first few words in small capitals.

Drop cap

A large initial letter, three lines deep. The classic novel opening.

Scene breaks

What the pause between two scenes looks like. You make a break by typing --- in the editor (see The editor); this decides how it's drawn everywhere in the book:

Three asterisks

* * *. The common convention.

Asterism

⁂. A single centered cluster.

Short rule

A centered horizontal line.

Blank line

Just white space. The literary choice.

If you upload a scene-break image, it overrides this and prints your own device instead.

Running heads

The small lines at the top of each page in the print PDF (they don't apply to ebooks, which have no fixed pages).

Title & chapter

Book title on the left page, chapter on the right.

Author & title

Author on the left page, book title on the right.

None

No running heads. Minimalist.

House style

The regional punctuation convention Galley follows when it typesets:

US style

Double quotes, em dashes—like this.

UK style

Single quotes, spaced en dashes – like this.

Language

Set the book's language and four things follow: your browser's spellcheck switches to that language on the page, the print PDF hyphenates by that language's rules, the EPUB is tagged with it so e-readers and stores handle it correctly, and the quote marks you type become the ones that language uses. The spellcheck dictionary is your browser's own, so nothing about your words leaves your machine to check them. There's a long list, well beyond the languages Galley hyphenates. See also Series, editions & translations.

Quote marks are per language, not per region. A straight double quote becomes “curly” in English, «guillemets» in French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Norwegian, Russian, Ukrainian, Greek and Persian, „low-then-high“ in German, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Icelandic, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian, „low-then-right” in Hungarian and Romanian, »reversed« in Danish, and ”right-facing on both sides” in Swedish and Finnish. Brazilian Portuguese takes the English pair where European Portuguese takes guillemets. The rule is off entirely for Japanese, Chinese and Hebrew, where the convention is its own subject.

Justify body text

Toggle this on for flush margins on both sides, the traditional printed-book look. Off keeps a ragged right edge, which some writers prefer for a softer, more modern page. It applies to the print PDF and the preview; the editor shows a live approximation as you write.

Galley's justification isn't the crude word-stretching a browser does. At export it controls how loose a line is allowed to get, avoids stranding a single line of a paragraph at the top or bottom of a page (widows and orphans), and turns on the typeface's real ligatures. It's the fussy typesetting work that normally needs a designer.

Hyphenate

This one only appears once justification is on, because ragged-right text is never hyphenated. With it on, the default, Galley breaks the occasional long word at the margin so the spaces between words stay even, hyphenating by your book's language rules. Turn it off and the same text justifies on word spacing alone: no broken words, at the cost of looser, more visible gaps between them. It's a genuine matter of taste, so it's yours to set.

Front & back matter conventions

The pages around your manuscript, the dedication, the copyright page, the acknowledgements, the About the author, are typeset by convention, not by hand. Each one is placed the way published books place it, so you can just write the words:

Dedication

Centred, italic, floating in the upper middle of the page.

Epigraph

The quotation centred, its attribution set beneath it.

Copyright

Small type, ranged left, settled onto the foot of the page.

Acknowledgements & About the author

Running prose that flows from the top and can carry across as many pages as it needs.

Empty pages that are the writer's to fill, a dedication, an epigraph, show a faint prompt of the form they usually take. That prompt is a hint, never content: it can't be exported, so an untouched page simply prints blank.

The copyright page

The copyright page is the one page that's legal text rather than prose, with strict conventions most people copy out of whatever book is nearest. Galley writes it for you, but as ordinary, editable content on the page, so you can see it, change it, and own it. It's created already filled in from your book's details.

Along the top of that page sits a row of blocks you can stack in any combination: the rights reservation, a Creative Commons licence, the fiction disclaimer that every novel carries, a no-reproduction clause, your publisher, ISBN, and edition line. Add and remove them freely, the two rights statements are alternatives, so choosing one swaps the other rather than printing two contradictory notices.