Book typography, typesetting, and the parts of self-publishing nobody explains properly.
Suspense is not surprise. It is the reader knowing something bad is coming and being unable to stop turning pages toward it. What actually generates dread, why the villain decides your pace, and where most thrillers lose the reader.
The world is not the book. Why magic that solves problems has to have rules, why Tolkien's does not, and how to put decades of invented history on the page without stopping the story to explain it.
A romance makes its ending obvious before page one. The craft is making readers desperate to get there anyway — through attraction, obstacles, rupture, reconciliation, and a book design that never gets in the story's way.
Vellum, Atticus, Reedsy Studio, Kindle Create, InDesign and Nueel, judged on three things: whether the file passes the store first time, what the page looks like, and what five books cost. We rank ourselves first, say why, and say when not to buy us.
Ace is the free tool distributors and libraries run on an EPUB before accepting it. What each of its rules checks, which ones you can fix yourself, and what your formatting tool has to get right.
Nearly every novel you have read was set in one of about a dozen typefaces, and the reasons have little to do with beauty. What separates a text face from a display face is how it behaves at 11 point, 300 times a page.
The drop cap, the sunken title, the small capitals on the first three words, the paragraph that is not indented. Chapter openings follow a small set of conventions, and each one exists for a reason worth knowing before you break it.
Turning off hyphenation does not remove the problem, it moves it into the spaces between words. Here is what justification actually does to a line, and why a book with rivers running down the page usually has hyphenation switched off.
The single line stranded at the top of a page is not a typo. It is a decision your software made for you, and it is the fastest way to tell a typeset book from a printed word processor file.