Children's book interiors
"Children's book" is a category in a store, not a format. Behind it sit three quite different products, and the age of the reader decides which one you are making — along with how the words meet the pictures, how long the book is, how big the type is, and what a copy costs to manufacture.
The three age bands
Trade convention divides them roughly like this. The boundaries blur, but the design consequences do not.
- Picture book, about 3 to 7. Illustration-led. Very few words — often a few hundred in the whole book — and they sit inside the art rather than in a text block beside it. Usually read aloud by an adult to a child who is looking at the pictures rather than the text.
- Chapter book, about 7 to 10. Text-led, with occasional illustrations, often one per chapter. Short chapters, generously sized type, plenty of leading and white space. The child reads it alone, and finishing it unaided is the whole point.
- Middle grade, about 8 to 12. Structurally close to an adult novel: continuous prose, real chapters, sometimes a map or a chapter-head drawing. Larger type and more leading than an adult edition, and otherwise an ordinary interior.
Decide the band before you design anything. A chapter book set at adult type size reads like a book handed to a child by mistake, and a middle grade novel set at picture-book size runs to a page count nobody wants to pay for.
A picture book is built in spreads, not pages
The unit of a picture book is the facing pair — the two pages a child sees at once. Text and art are planned per spread, and the story is drafted as a sequence of spreads with a turn between each one, because the page turn is the only piece of timing you control.
That makes the gutter matter more here than in any other book. Art crossing the fold loses a strip down the middle, and the loss is worse in a thick book than a thin one. A face, a pair of eyes, a word, the point of the joke: none of it belongs in the fold. Sky, landscape and texture cross it happily. The mechanics are in Putting images inside a book.
The page count is settled before the story is
Picture books are printed in multiples of pages, which is why 32 pages is the standard length, with 24, 40 and 48 as the usual alternatives. The consequence is the part authors find strange: the story is shaped to fit the page count rather than the page count being added up from the story.
So you work to a storyboard. Take 32 pages, subtract the front matter, and you have somewhere around fourteen spreads of story; the text is then cut or stretched to land each turn where you want it. Print-on-demand is looser than that — KDP's paperback range runs from 24 to 828 pages and the final count only has to be even — but the convention persists, because booksellers, librarians and parents all expect the familiar shape.
Type for a young reader
- Larger, with more leading. Every band wants type a size or two above the adult equivalent, and the extra line spacing matters as much as the size: a new reader tracks back to the start of the next line by eye and loses the place in tight setting. Type size, leading and the line that reads well has the working ranges.
- Ragged right is fine, and often better. Justified text stretches the word spaces, and an even word space is a stronger signal of where one word ends than a straight right edge is worth. Ragged right also means no hyphenation, and a word broken across a line is genuinely hard for a child sounding it out.
- Avoid all caps and very light weights. Capitals remove the word shape a new reader is learning to recognize, and hairline weights lose contrast at exactly the sizes where contrast is carrying the reader.
- Keep the measure short. Fewer words per line means fewer chances to lose the line.
- Watch text sitting on art. Type over a busy passage of illustration is the commonest failure in a self-published picture book. Give the words a quiet area of the painting, or a panel of flat color to sit on.
In the Interior Formatter. Type size, leading and ragged-right setting are yours to choose, and inline images, full-page plates, bleed images and two-page spreads are all supported — with every image checked against the size it will actually print at. Start a book → · about the Interior Formatter
Color is charged by the page, on every copy
This is the economics that shapes indie children's publishing. A color interior costs more per page than black and white at every print-on-demand printer, and a picture book is color on every page, so there is no cheap version of one. A short color book can cost more per copy to manufacture than a novel many times its length. Work out the per-copy cost before you commit to the format — Color inside the book, and what it costs sets out the trade.
Chapter books and illustrated middle grade sidestep this by keeping the artwork to black line drawings in a black-and-white interior, which is why so much of the category looks the way it does.
What our tools do here, honestly
The Interior Formatter handles chapter books and illustrated middle grade straightforwardly: a .docx of chapters, illustrations placed inline or as full-page plates, bleed images and two-page spreads where you want them, alt text carried into the EPUB, and a final page count that flows to the Cover Maker.
A picture book with the words inside the art is a different job. The usual route is to set the text in the illustration file, export each page or spread as a finished image at full size, and place those as full-page bleed images. You get a correct print PDF that way, but the type is part of the picture, so it is not searchable, not resizable, and cannot carry alt text of its own.
The ebook side has the same split. A reflowable EPUB is wrong for a picture book, because reflowing separates the words from the art they belong to; see Fixed layout: when the page is the design.
Make yours
Everything here is built into the tools, and they are free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript or your artwork, and work as long as you like. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Putting images inside a book · More: Type size, leading and the line that reads well · Color inside the book, and what it costs · Choosing a trim size