Have you fallen for fancy fonts and styles?
When you look at the vast list of fonts available, with some of them being very stylish, it is sometimes hard to contain the urge to use them in your book. But it important to contain that urge. The most important thing when you are designing a book is the readability of the fonts you use. Avoid difficult to read stylish fonts except when you want something to stand out.
A rule of thumb is that sans-serif fonts look good on screen, while serif fonts look good on print. For the main text of your book, pick up one of the serif fonts like Times New Roman, Palatino Linotype, Baskerville etc. for the main text of your book. You can find a list of fonts of various types on this wikipedia page. Keep the stylish fonts for occasional use in titles, headings etc. Also, do not use bold, italic or underline styles unless required to make some content stand out.
Is your spacing right? And font sizes?
Too often, people have too much spacing in the book and use too big a font. While it is a good idea to have enough spacing and sufficiently large font size to make the book readable, it is not a good idea to unnecessarily increase the number of pages in the book by having very large font sizes or too much of spacing. In general single line spacing works fine for printing. If you are printing something for proof-reading etc., you may want to have a 1.5 or double spacing between the lines, so that there is space for writing comments. But not in the final copy. In the font sizes, for most serif fonts for Latin alphabets, font sizes of 8-11 work well. They may look too small on screen, but are fit for print. A good way to judge it is to take a printout of a single page on any printer close to you (at home or nearest cybercafe) and compare the font size in print with that of any of the books you own.Is the formatting consistent through out the book?
Unless required by the context of the content, you do not want to have a single spacing on some pages and a spacing of 1.15 on some others. Nor do you want the text alignment, fonts styles, or font sizes to change arbitrarily. Make sure your formatting is consistent throughout the book.
For tips on ensuring correct line spacing in MS word, check out this article.
Have you taken care of formatting the content pasted from web?
It is specially necessary to ensure that the formatting is correct when you paste the content from your blog or website. Most word processors try to be intelligent and keep the original formatting intact. This hurts the formatting for print. Take special care of the following:- Hyperlinks: Remember, in a printed book, readers can not click on a hyperlink. So, make sure you remove the hyperlinks. If you do need to point out a particular link, give the complete text of URL. Also avoid giving pointers to complicated URLs in a book intended to be printed, as typing them out is difficult for the readers. If there isn't an alternative to the complicated URL, tell the users how they can reach to the intended page from a simple URL (e.g. homepage)
- Fonts, spacing, alignment: It would almost always be necessary to reformat the content pasted from web for it to be consistent with your books. Do not be lazy on that front!
- Tables: Tables are the most difficult things to format in a word processor if they are pasted from the web. It is likely that you'd have to re-write the tables totally. Do it! It's worth the time to get a consistent look in the book.