There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing.—Ray Bradbury, from Fahrenheit 451
Welcome to Compass Rose Horizons.
We offer expert proofreading, editing, book design, and transcription services.
Sample Title Page.
Budget Book Design
If you are an author who plans to self-publish a novel, we can create a printer-ready book layout from your Microsoft® Word document. For $350, we will create a complete interior text layout of your book (up to 250 pages) including the title page, copyright page, and table of contents. We also include page numbers and running heads at the top of each page, and drop caps for the first paragraph of each chapter (if desired). There is an extra charge for photos, charts, tables, bibliographies, and for layouts in excess of 250 pages.
Interior Layout and Design
Our designer will work with you to select fonts and create a basic book design that will compliment your subject matter. Prior to flowing the text into the document, your Microsoft® Word or text file will be cleaned to remove all extra spaces, tabs, and breaks. Then it will be placed into the layout document and the designer will check each page for readability, removing any gaps, bad breaks, or other typographic errors that can ruin your book’s appearance. The file will be sent to you as a PDF (Portable Document Format). Our price includes one round of corrections (up to two dozen corrections). We will send you a final PDF for approval, and will create a high-resolution file for your printer. If you wish, we’ll even e-mail or upload the file directly to your printer.
Why You Should Hire a Professional to Design Your Book
One of the most common questions self-publishing authors ask is whether or not they can submit a book designed in Microsoft® Word to their printer. After all, most people own Word and it makes sense that you can save some money by designing the book yourself.
While it’s true that you can create decent, clean layouts in Microsoft® Word, the software was not specifically designed for creating extensive page layouts. You may have problems with final output. For example, word processor files may reflow text when moved from one computer to another—your document may have radically different formatting or pagination even if both computers have the same version of Microsoft® Word!
We use Adobe PageMaker® and InDesign® to create interior book layouts, and we generate the final output as a Portable Document Format (PDF). PDFs are used to encode the exact look of a document so that it will appear the same on every machine that opens the file. It is the format most printers prefer.
We Also Create E-Books!
Sample Book Cover.
We can help you create an e-book version of your text in PDF format suitable for quick downloading from your Web site.
Sample Layouts
Please note, these are low-resolution versions of the layouts to facilitate quick downloading. All hyperlinks in sample pages have been disabled.
- Sample A (PDF file, size 108KB)
- Sample B (PDF file, size 197KB)
- Sample C (PDF file, size 1355KB)
- Sample D (PDF file, size 421KB)
Book Covers
If you already have the artwork available, we can help you design your book cover as well. Please write editor@compassrose.com for more information.
