Book design

These are the settings for how your book looks in print and as an ebook. Each one has a sensible default and a short list of options, and the page updates as soon as you change something.

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

There are 35 book typefaces, all licensed for commercial publishing, so you can use any of them in a book you sell. Pick one from the typeface dropdown in the editor. The typeface you write in is the one the book is printed in.

The list you see depends on your book's language. Galley only shows typefaces that support it. If your book is in Japanese, you'll see the Japanese typefaces, not the fifteen Latin ones that would print empty boxes.

Why these faces

A typeface is only included if it passes two rules. It has to be the kind of face a novel in that language is actually set in, and it has to 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.

The licence rule leaves out most of the typefaces publishers use. 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 usual typeface isn't available, Galley includes the closest open revival or a similar typeface, and the lists below say which.

Latin script

Fifteen Latin typefaces, shown by default. 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. All good choices for a novel.

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, so it looks good in chapter titles but is too light for a whole novel.

Not offered: Sabon, Bembo, Minion, Adobe Garamond, Granjon, Dante, Janson Text, Electra, Palatino. They're all proprietary.

Ten of those also set Cyrillic (Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian) and seven set Greek, so those books use the same list, filtered to the typefaces that support 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 Bulaq revival, so it's close. Persian: Nazanin, Lotus, Mitra. Urdu: Noori Nastaliq, which is the biggest gap, because most Urdu publishing uses it and there's no open alternative. Hebrew: Hadassah and the Narkis families, though Frank Ruhl is the standard and Galley has it. 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. They're all licensed per title or per user, and a font embedded in your files can't be licensed that way.

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 supported bōten since 2003, so it stays in when you send the file to an editor.

Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew, Devanagari, Bengali, Thai, Chinese and Korean get neither. I don't know an emphasis style for those scripts that I can set correctly, so there's no button. If you paste in text that already has italics, the italics stay in the file, but they won't be slanted on the page, because a fake slant looks wrong in all 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 Japanese typesetters use and most software doesn't add.

Drop caps

Not offered. A dropped Han character looks like a display error, and small caps only work in scripts with upper and lower case.

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 start of each chapter looks. The style you pick applies to the whole book, so every chapter starts the same way. Chapter numbers follow the order of your chapters and update when you move them around.

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

All three: ornament, "CHAPTER ONE", then the title.

The ornament is an image you upload yourself, like a small printer's flourish. You add it in the same place as these settings.

First line of each chapter

How the first line of a chapter looks:

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 break between two scenes looks like. You make a break by typing --- in the editor (see The editor); this setting decides how it looks 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 your own scene-break image, it's used instead of these.

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 are a lot more spellcheck languages than hyphenation languages. 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. Quote marks aren't changed at all for Japanese, Chinese and Hebrew, because they work differently.

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 because it looks more modern. It applies to the print PDF and the preview; the editor shows a live approximation as you write.

Galley's justification works differently from a browser's. When you export, it limits how much space can go between words, avoids leaving a single line of a paragraph at the top or bottom of a page (widows and orphans), and uses the typeface's ligatures. That's usually work a book designer does.

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. If you turn it off, the text is justified by spacing words only, so no words are broken, but the gaps between words are bigger. It's up to you.

Front & back matter conventions

The pages around your manuscript (the dedication, the copyright page, the acknowledgements, About the author) are laid out the way published books do it, so you only need to 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.

Pages like the dedication and epigraph show a faint example of what usually goes there until you write your own. The example isn't exported, so if you leave the page empty, it prints blank.

The copyright page

The copyright page is legal text, not prose, and most people copy theirs from whatever book is nearby. Galley writes it for you as normal text on the page, so you can read it and change it. It's 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. You can add and remove them. The rights reservation and the Creative Commons licence can't both be on the page, so picking one replaces the other.