Maps and diagrams inside a book
A map is the one piece of artwork readers go looking for: fantasy readers turn to it before chapter one, history readers every time an army moves. The drawing is rarely what goes wrong. Maps are ruined by the production decisions made after the art is finished — where it sits, how big it prints, and what happens to it in black ink.
Where a map goes
- In the front matter, before the text starts. The default, and right for most books: the reader studies it once and knows where to flip back to. What goes in the front of a book, and in what order places it among the other front pages.
- On the endpapers of a hardcover. The endpaper is the sheet pasted inside the cover boards, and a map printed there is the handsomest solution available — but a paperback has no endpapers, so a book in both bindings needs the map inside the text too. Not every print-on-demand hardcover offers printed endpapers; check before you design around it, and see Paperback, hardcover, dust jacket: what changes.
- Facing the first page. Good when the map is the setting of the opening scene, wasteful if the reader needs it again in chapter twelve.
The gutter eats the middle of a spread
The tempting move is to run the map across two facing pages for twice the width. Resist it.
A perfect-bound paperback does not open flat. The inner edges curve down into the binding, and on top of that curve sits the gutter — the inside margin, which grows with the book: 0.5 inches up to 300 pages, 0.625 from 301 to 500, 0.75 from 501 to 700. That is margin on each side of the fold before the paper starts to bend, so a two-page map loses an inch or more of its middle to a place the reader cannot flatten or see into. The capital city you centered is the part that disappears.
If one page is genuinely not enough, rotate the map onto a single landscape page, or split it at a seam that costs nothing — an ocean, a border, an empty quarter — rather than through the territory the story happens in. Margins and gutters explains where the inside margin comes from.
Labels decide the size, not the drawing
This is the real failure, and it happens in the last five minutes of the job. A map drawn on a screen is drawn at a size that does not exist in print. Dropped into a 6 × 9 book it has to fit inside the margins, which take a real bite out of that six inches, and every place name shrinks with it. Type that was comfortable at screen width lands at a size nobody can read, and nothing but redrawing rescues it.
So work the other way around. Fix the printed width, set the labels at a size that belongs on that page — no more than a point or two below the body text, as in Type size, leading and the line that reads well — then draw the map to suit the labels.
That forces the second discipline: name fewer places. Label what the book mentions and leave the rest as terrain.
Black ink is not a filter you apply at the end
Most print-on-demand interiors print in black only. A map colored by region — a green kingdom, a blue one, a brown one — converts to three grays of near-identical brightness, and the borders doing the work vanish. The map becomes a mass with a coastline around it.
Design for black and white from the first draft. Distinguish areas by texture, hatching, stipple and white space rather than hue, and vary line weight deliberately: coastline heaviest, rivers lighter, roads dashed, borders dashed differently. If the map already exists in color, convert it and look at the result at printed size — the same trap photographs fall into, in Photo inserts and plate sections.
Resolution is measured at printed size
Line art is less forgiving than a photograph. A soft photographic edge hides low resolution; a hairline river and a small place name do not. The number that matters is pixels divided by the inches the image occupies on paper: aim for 300 DPI at printed size and treat anything under 200 as a warning. A full-page map on a 6 × 9 page with bleed covers 6.125 × 9.25 inches, which is 1,838 × 2,775 pixels at 300 DPI.
Better still, keep it vector — PDF, SVG or EPS. Vector artwork has no resolution to run out of, and a map is exactly the flat-shape, fine-line drawing those formats were made for.
In the Interior Formatter. A map can go in as an inline image, a full-page plate, or a bleed image that runs off the edge of the paper, and each one is checked against the size it will really print at, so a soft file shows up before the proof does. Start your interior → · about the Interior Formatter
Commissioning one
A cartographer needs five things from you: a sketch, however bad; the place names spelled exactly as the manuscript spells them; the printed trim size and binding; the instruction that it prints in black only; and the route the story follows through the territory.
The sketch is the one people skip, and it beats a page of description: a rough drawing settles in ten seconds what is north of what. Commissioning an illustrator covers the rest of the working relationship.
The same map on a phone
In an ebook the map becomes an image in a reflowing file, sized to a screen that may be four inches wide, and a map that works on paper is usually unreadable there. Supply a simplified version with fewer names and heavier lines. Write alt text describing what the map shows rather than naming the file — see Accessible ebooks, and why they are now everyone's problem.
Typeset your book
The Interior Formatter is free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript, and it sets real pages you can read before you commit to anything. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Timelines, family trees and other structured diagrams · More: Putting images inside a book · Tables, charts and data in a printed book · Field guides and reference layout