Cover, typesetting, and formats
Between a finished manuscript and a book on sale sits a set of jobs that authors publishing traditionally rarely see and authors publishing independently have to do or buy. The Chicago Manual of Style's first chapter treats covers, jackets, and metadata as parts of a book in the same way it treats chapters, which is a useful reminder that they are part of the object rather than decoration on it.1 These questions cover who does what.
Who designs the cover, and do I get a say?
The publisher does, through an in-house or commissioned designer, and the author's say is a matter of contract and goodwill rather than right. Consultation is normal, approval usually is not.
The reason is commercial. A cover is a sales instrument aimed at a category of reader, and publishers treat it as their area of expertise in the same way they treat pricing. An author's objection carries most weight when it is factual rather than aesthetic, such as a cover that misrepresents the book's period, setting, or content.
Publishing independently moves the decision and the cost to the author. It also removes the person whose job was to know what the category's covers currently look like, which is the part that is hardest to replace.
Who typesets the interior?
A typesetter or compositor working to a designer's specification, commissioned by the publisher. Their work turns an edited manuscript file into pages with fixed line and page breaks, running heads, folios, and the front and back matter in its conventional order.1
The stage matters because it is where a manuscript stops being editable in the ordinary way. Changes after typesetting are made against proofs and cost money, which is why the copyedit is supposed to be finished first.
An independently published book still needs this done, whether by a designer, by template-based software, or by a service. What it cannot skip is the pass over the typeset pages afterward, since that is the only reading of the book as it will actually appear.
What does a typesetter need from the author, and in what state?
A clean file with its structure expressed in styles rather than by hand. The Chicago Manual of Style treats preparing electronic manuscript files as a stage of the author's own responsibilities, alongside manuscript formatting and cross-checking.2
The practical requirements are consistent. Heading levels applied as styles carry through to the typesetter and manual formatting does not. Images supplied at print resolution as separate files survive; images pasted into a word processor generally do not. Notes, captions, and tables need to be in the file rather than in a separate document nobody mentions.
Anything left inconsistent at this point gets fixed at typesetting rates instead of editing rates. That is the argument for doing the housekeeping earlier, and it is the same argument that applies before the copyedit.
Who writes the back cover copy and the catalog description?
The publisher, usually the editor or a copywriter, and the author is normally consulted rather than asked to write it. That surprises authors who assume the book's own description is theirs.
The reason is that the copy is doing a different job from the book. It has to place the title in a category, signal the reading experience, and work at a glance, which is a specialist skill and not the one the author was hired for.
Independent authors write their own, and it is worth treating as a separate piece of work rather than as a summary. A description that explains the plot in order is the most common failure, and it is the one a comparable title's own copy will demonstrate.
Who supplies the metadata, and what is in it?
The publisher supplies it, and it is the information that decides whether anyone finds the book. Chicago treats metadata, abstracts, and keywords as parts of a book in their own right.1
It includes the title and subtitle, author name, ISBN, format, price, publication date, page count, category codes, and a description. The category code is the BISAC subject heading, issued by the Book Industry Study Group and used to categorize a publication in the systems that stock and sell it.3
For an independently published book the author supplies all of it, and errors in it are durable. A wrong category code or a misspelled series title propagates into retailer databases, and correcting it afterward means correcting it in several places that do not update together.
What does a proofreader check on a typeset page that a copyeditor could not?
Everything that did not exist until the pages did. Editors Canada defines proofreading as examining material after layout or in its final format, correcting errors in textual and visual elements, checking adherence to design, and verifying the consistency of cross-references, running heads, and hyperlinks.4
None of those objects exists in a manuscript file. Running heads are created at typesetting, page cross-references cannot be checked until pages have numbers, and bad breaks at the foot of a page are produced by the layout itself.
The same definitions record that proofreading is not a substitute for editing.4 The reverse holds just as firmly. A book copyedited with great care still needs the second reading, because the second reading is looking at a different object.
Print, ebook, audio, or all three?
Each is a separate product with its own production cost, its own file, and its own identifier, since the International ISBN Agency treats each product form as requiring separate identification.5 Deciding to do all three is deciding to produce three things.
The editorial consequences differ. An ebook has no fixed pages, so an index of page numbers does not work in it and cross-references have to be links. Audio removes everything visual, which means footnotes, tables, and typographic effects all need a spoken solution or a cut.
Publishing traditionally, the publisher decides which formats to produce and when. Publishing independently, the author decides. Producing one format properly usually beats producing three at once, because each additional format multiplies the number of places an error can survive.
Is a trademark spelled the way its owner spells it, and who checks?
An editor checks, and it is a matter of record rather than of preference. Company and product names carry capitalization, spacing, and punctuation set by their owners, and getting them wrong looks careless in a way readers notice.
The check runs alongside factual accuracy, which Editors Canada includes within copy editing.4 What an editor verifies is the current form of the name at the time of writing, since companies rename themselves and books take years.
What an editor does not do is enforce a trademark owner's preferences about grammar, such as instructions never to use a brand name as a verb or a noun. Those are marketing requests rather than rules of English, and the decision belongs to the author. Every document a client sends us is treated in confidence, including material still in production.
References
- The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition, chapter 1, Books and Journals. University of Chicago Press. https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part1/ch01/toc.html ↩
- The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition, chapter 2, Manuscript Preparation, Manuscript Editing, and Proofreading. University of Chicago Press. https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/book/ed18/part1/ch02/toc.html ↩
- Book Industry Study Group, Complete BISAC Subject Headings List, 2025 Edition. https://www.bisg.org/complete-bisac-subject-headings-list ↩
- Editors Canada, Definitions of Editorial Skills, June 2019. https://editors.ca/hire-an-editor/skills/ ↩
- International ISBN Agency, What is an ISBN? https://www.isbn-international.org/content/what-isbn/10 ↩