Printing music and notation
Start with the honest part, because it saves you weeks. Setting music is not typesetting. It is engraving: a separate craft with its own dedicated software, its own conventions about stem direction, beam slope and the space a half note is owed, and centuries of practice behind it. A general book typesetter does not set music, and ours does not either. What it does with music is place finished notation on the page.
So the working route is to engrave in notation software, export at print resolution, and place the result as an image. That puts your production risk in one place: how the exported image behaves at the size it prints.
Three books, three problems
A songbook or hymnal is mostly music. Page after page of notation, lyrics under the staves, an index of first lines. The layout question is where a piece breaks and how it is found.
A method book is music interrupted by prose. Exercises, an explanation, more exercises, on a page that holds both. The hard part is keeping the two in a stable relationship so a student can follow a numbered sequence.
A novel with four bars in it has one image. A character plays something, the reader sees the phrase, and the book moves on. This is the easy case and the one people overbuild: an engraved snippet, placed like any inline image, sized to the text column.
Decide which you are making before you touch the layout, because the trim and binding answers differ sharply.
Resolution is the whole game
Notation is thin black lines on white, and thin lines fail first. A staff line, a stem and a slur are all hairlines, and at low resolution they break up, thicken unevenly, or disappear into the paper.
Check every image at the size it will print, not at the size of the file. Pixels divided by printed inches is the only number that matters. Aim for 300 pixels per inch at printed size; treat anything under 200 DPI at printed size as a warning. Two worked figures:
- A full-page example on a 6 × 9 page with bleed covers 6.125 × 9.25 in, which is 1,838 × 2,775 pixels at 300 DPI.
- On an 8.5 × 11 page with 0.75 in margins the live area is 7 × 9.5 in — 2,100 × 2,850 pixels at 300 DPI.
Export at a size that meets those numbers rather than scanning a printout or screenshotting the editor. A screenshot is sized for a monitor and will never survive the page. Resolution: why a good-looking image prints badly explains why a file's own pixel count tells you nothing on its own.
One more trap: a print-on-demand interior is printed in black ink alone, so gray pixels go through a halftone screen rather than printing as light gray, and anti-aliased edges on a small export can come out mottled.
In the Interior Formatter. Inline images, full-page plates and two-page spreads are all supported, and each image is checked against the size it will actually print at — which is the check that decides whether notation reads. Start your interior → · about the Interior Formatter
The page is sized by a music stand
A novel is read at reading distance by someone holding it. Music is read at arm's length, on a stand, by someone whose hands are busy. That single fact sets the page.
Music has a minimum legible size, below which a performer stops being able to sight-read it, and that minimum does not shrink to fit your trim. Work backwards: pick the staff size the player needs, see how many systems fit, and let that choose the trim — which for a performing edition is almost always larger than a novel's. Choosing a trim size covers what the printers will take.
Margins run generous for the same reason. Treat the standard safe area of about 0.25 in inside the trim as a floor, never a target, and respect the gutter table: up to 300 pages, 0.5 in; 301–500, 0.625; 501–700, 0.75. A bar line swallowed by the fold is a bar the player cannot read.
Page turns govern everything
This is the constraint unique to music, and it outranks every aesthetic preference. A player cannot turn a page mid-phrase: both hands are occupied, or the breath is in progress, and a turn in the wrong place stops the performance.
So the layout works backwards from the turns. Find the rests, the section ends, the places where one hand is free, and put the page break there. Then fit the music to those breaks — adjust the systems per page, let a page carry less than it could, or end a piece with white space rather than pushing two bars over. A page with a comfortable turn and a half-empty foot is correct. A full page that turns mid-phrase is not.
For a piece that will not fit, the traditional answers still work: lay it over a two-page spread so nothing is turned at all, or plan the turn where a player can manage it one-handed. Keep the whole unit on one page where you can — the rule that also governs Cookbooks: the hardest easy book to make.
Binding, and the trade you cannot avoid
Music wants to stay open on a stand with nobody holding it. A glued perfect-bound spine is under tension and springs shut, which is precisely the wrong behavior.
Spiral, wire-o and lay-flat bindings solve it. The honest cost is that a coil binding has no printed spine at all: no shelf presence, no spine text, and most retail distribution will not take it. Even on a glued paperback, KDP prints spine text only above 79 pages, so a slim songbook may have none either way. Read Books that need to lie flat before you decide — this is a trade, not an upgrade.
Lyrics, chords and the line at the foot of the page
Lyrics under a staff are part of the engraving, not text you set in the book. Set them in the notation software so each syllable sits under its note and the hyphens and extender lines behave. Chord symbols go above the staff at one consistent size and height, because a player scans the chord line horizontally and any drift reads as an error.
A lyrics-and-chords songbook with no staves is a different job — that is text, and the chords have to hold position over the words, so it wants a fixed-width relationship rather than flowing prose.
Permissions are where this kind of book gets stopped. Song lyrics and most compositions written in the last century are licensed material, and what a rights holder grants for music is narrower and more formal than the short prose quotation many authors assume they can rely on. Clear it before you lay out the book, not after. What is required varies by country and by rights holder, so ask the holder and take advice if the answer is not clear; Quoting other people's work in your book covers the shape of the problem for text. Where a permission line is required, it goes at the foot of the first page of that piece, where a reader looking at the music will find it, rather than only on the copyright page.
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: Books that need to lie flat · More: Putting images inside a book · Setting poetry without wrecking it · Quoting other people's work in your book