Layout Design
After examining your manuscript, one of Chapel Hill Press' book designers will develop, for your consideration, several alternate "looks" for the printed pages of your book. These design concepts will be appropriate to your book's subject matter and intended audience, as well as conforming to your expressed preferences and general specifications. We will work with you to arrive at a final design that pleases you.

Even given pre-specified page dimensions, book designers can achieve an almost infinite number of "looks" through different combinations of typefaces (a.k.a. "fonts"), fonts (a.k.a. "font sizes" or "type sizes"), leading (a.k.a. "line spacing"), rule lines, margins, page-header/-footer content and positioning, treatment of chapter titles, etc.

Cover Design
As important as the content of your book is to its ultimate success, the most crucial initial quality and marketing aspect of any publication is its cover. An attractive, appropriate, professionally designed cover can capture the attention of your book's potential readers (and, perhaps more significantly, purchasers) and create a good first impression of your work.

After reviewing your manuscript and considering any pre-design input you may have provided, Chapel Hill Press' designers will develop several different cover concepts for your book. They will incorporate into their design concepts any photograph(s) or other image(s) you provide or specify and for which you own or obtain publication rights.

As with your book's interior design, our designers' cover concepts will be appropriate to its subject matter and intended audience, as well as conforming to your expressed preferences and general specifications. We will, of course, work with you to arrive at a final design that not only pleases you, but will also attract your book's potential readers and buyers.

Illustrations
Chapel Hill Press can incorporate photographs and/or other images into your book. Depending on the book design you choose, they can be scattered appropriately through the text and/or placed together in one or more folios (groups of pages) devoted to illustrations.

Your illustrations, including photographs, can be black & white and/or color. You should bear in mind, however, that printing color illustrations is significantly more expensive than printing them in black & white. Printing high-quality color reproductions requires specialized four-color processing. This involves photographically or electronically generating color separations to produce four printing plates and performing a separate, high-precision press run for each of the three basic colors (yellow, red, and blue) plus a final run for black. Moreover, high-quality color reproductions need to be printed on specially coated, "glossy" paper, which is more expensive. So, unless color illustrations are essential to your project (e.g., a children's picture book or a book of or about fine art that reproduces paintings or artistic photographs), we usually recommend that all illustrations be printed in black & white.

If some or all of your illustrations are color originals and you want to have them printed in black & white, we can convert them with very little, if any, loss in clarity.

Before they can be printed, your illustrations need to be scanned into digital format. You can either have this done (and give us the resulting JPEG files on 3.5" floppy disk) or bring us the original photographs or other images, and we will scan them for you for a reasonable charge. If you scan them yourself or have someone else do it for you, each of your illustrations must be scanned at a:

• resolution of 300 dpi (dots per inch) or higher and a
• size no smaller than it will appear in your book.

Please note that neither we nor anyone else can make an image look any (or at least very much) better than what you provide to be scanned (without spending a very significant amount of time and money). If you bring us a photocopy of a picture, it won't look any better in your book than it does on the piece of paper that you hand us. For that reason, please, whenever possible, provide us the original image (or a scan of it). We want your book to look as good as it possibly can.

As is the case with the rest of your book's content, you must own or obtain publication rights for any photographs or other illustrations.

Typesetting
Typesetting used to be the most time-consuming and error-prone step in the publishing process. Typesetters had to take the manually marked-up manuscript and set it, character by character, into type. Then they would run off a quick "proof" printing, which one or more proofreaders would laboriously compare against the marked-up manuscript to ensure that it had been accurately translated into typeset form. Then another round of proofs; and then, perhaps, another; and another; and . . .. But, thankfully, computers have changed all that.

Today, at Chapel Hill Press, one of our designers will take your final, fully edited manuscript, which has been in the digital realm throughout the publishing process, and transfer it into a special page-layout computer program that has been set up with your chosen book design. They will work with the type and/or images on each page to ensure that the layout and page presentation are as they should be and make whatever adjustments are necessary for readability and form. We then print out a paper copy for your inspection and signoff, and then digitally ship the final computer file to the printer.

Barcodes
The barcode printed on (or affixed to) the back of virtually every book you see these days is a machine-readable version of its ISBN (for details, see "ISBN Numbers"). If your book is intended for any type of commercial distribution, it is essential that it have a barcode, which book distributors and retailers use for inventory management and point-of-sale processing.

Chapel Hill Press will assign an ISBN and its corresponding bar code to your finished product as a standard part of our service for books intended for commercial distribution.