A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Using Images to Bring Your Book to Life

Transcript:

Many of our authors like to include their own artwork, illustrations, or photographs on their covers or interiors. This is a great way to make your book more appealing to readers, but there are very specific requirements an image must meet in order to be published. 

In this video we’ll help you determine which kinds of pictures to send and which kinds probably can’t be printed. First let’s talk about where you can put images.

Images for Your Cover: We’ll design a cover for your book but if you have specific pictures you would like to use, we can accept one or two of your own images, as long as they meet the size and resolution requirements we’ll learn about later in this video. If you’re selecting cover images from a stock photography Web site, there is a per image fee. 

Images for Your Interior: Since working with images is one of the more time-consuming things our book designers do, we can accept black and white or grayscale images for your book’s interior for an additional fee. Images include photographs, drawings, artwork, screen shots, charts, or any other graphic that would need to be inserted into the text. See our fee schedule or contact a representative to learn more about image insertion fees. 

Making sure your images are legal or sending the necessary written permissions will help keep your book moving through production without delays. You must have legal permission to use any images you submit. iUniverse reserves the right to refuse to process graphic images that seem to come from copyrighted sources unless written permission from the copyright holder is included. It is usually safe to use your own artwork or personal photographs, but a photograph taken by a photography studio or a professional photographer will require the studio’s or the photographer’s permission, even if you paid for the photograph to be taken. In addition, most images on the Internet or in newspapers or magazines are copyrighted, and will require written permission to reproduce. 

You’ll want to make sure your images appear in your book as crisp and as clear as possible. To keep your book’s production moving smoothly, you’ll also want to send it in a way that is easiest for us to understand and work with.  

First, your images should be submitted as separate individual files. We prefer that you include image insertion placeholders in your manuscript to indicate what image file should be placed where. For instance, ‘insert image one here.’  You can embed your images in your manuscript, as long as you also submit them as separate files. We prefer to receive your images as .tif files. ‘tif’ is an acronym for Tagged Image File Format. We like this format for its ability to hold massive amounts of detail. By submitting your images as .tif files, you will see cleaner, crisper definition in all of the images you send, both on the cover and in your book. We can also accept .jpeg or .gif files. 

If you have only hardcopy images that you would like to send, they will need to be scanned or converted into electronic files before they can be inserted in your book. Scanning services are usually available at your local office supply store. We also offer scanning for an additional fee.  See our fee schedule or ask a representative if you have questions about our scanning services. 

An image is only as good as its resolution, relative to its size. Size and resolution together determine the quality of your image and how it will look in your final book. Problems with image size or resolution are the number one reason for production delays, so we’ll do our best to help explain. We also have a video tutorial available on how you can check your images to make sure they meet our printer’s requirements but first let’s talk about resolution and then we’ll talk about how it relates to size.

You can think of resolution as the crispness or quality of focus in your image. Obviously, we want the best possible resolution. Resolution is measured in dpi or dots per inch. You may also see it measured in ppi, or pixels per inch. They both mean about the same thing, and can be used interchangeably. Images for your book should be no less than 300 dpi or ppi. Anything less than 300 will not print with accurate clarity and may appear fuzzy or jagged in your final book. 

As we mentioned earlier, an image’s resolution is directly related to its size. For pictures that go in your books interior, we recommend that they be roughly four by six inches or larger. If you send an image that is smaller, we may be limited in where we can place the image and how big it will be in the final book. If you are sending images for your cover, we recommend they be slightly bigger than the cover itself. For example, if you are publishing a six by nine book and you want an image to fill the front cover, the image should be at least six-and-an-eighth by nine-and-a-quarter inches. This will allow for an eighth inch of bleed space that the printer requires at the top, bottom ,and outside edge of the front cover. 

The bigger the picture, the better. We can always make an image smaller without sacrificing its quality, but we cannot enlarge an image without decreasing its resolution. You can learn how to check your images and make sure they meet the minimum requirements by watching our video tutorial on Checking Image Size and Resolution.

Once you are ready to submit your images, you’ll also want to help us understand where they go. Here’s our preferred way of communicating image placement.

First, we recommend renaming your image files in chronological order, as they should appear throughout your book. This tells us very quickly how many pictures there are, and what order they go in. It also helps us recognize if we may be missing an image. 

Then we suggest you type your image placement instructions in the manuscript itself, exactly where you’d like each image to go. We ask that you keep your image placement instructions between paragraphs, never in the middle of a paragraph. The instructions should stand apart from the main text for easy recognition. We recommend making the placement instructions bigger, bolder, and in red. 

In production, we will simply replace these easy to spot instructions with the images that should go there. Please be sure that the instructions refer to the images by their exact file names, or we may not understand which image goes where. This is our preferred method, but if you have another way you’d like to communicate image placement, please contact a representative to let us know. 

If your images have captions or descriptive text that should accompany them, you can include the captions along with your image placement instructions in the manuscript itself or in a separate document. If you send your captions in a separate document, please clearly label the document ‘Captions,’ and remember to make sure that each caption is paired to an image by a specific image file name. 

If your book contains special formatting concerns such as footnotes, tables, columns of text, or an index, we recommend watching our subject-specific videos on these topics before submitting your materials. Otherwise, if you’re ready to submit your materials, watch our video ‘Submitting Your Materials, What Happens Next.’

If you have any additional questions or concerns for you book you are always welcome to contact us at 1-800-AUTHORS.