Book Design

Book design determines the layout of interior pages and covers of books. In some cases, illustrators or photographers also contribute to the design of book covers.

Featured Articles

Three award winning book covers from AIGA's 2019 50 Books 50 Covers competition

What Goes Into Designing an Award-winning Book Cover?

For these 50 Books 50 Covers winning designers, it’s all about bold typography, texture, and a ton of wit.

The Detroit Printing Co-op image of book interior

The Detroit Printing Co-op Showed the Revolutionary Potential of Design

The prolific producer of leftist literature worked to define a different relationship to wage labor, materials, and politics

Montage of book covers by Jason Ramirez

Jason Ramirez Wanted to Become a Doctor. Now He Brings Stories to Life

The Viking Books art director came to cover design late, but he's made up for lost time with a prolific portfolio of titles

Interior view of Madeleine Morley cookbook

Designing a Cookbook That’s as Much About Life, Love, and Sex as Food

“At least one can turn pain to color”

Montage of Jo Walker book covers

Want To Make Something Novel? Start With an Idea, Not an Aesthetic

For book designer Jo Walker, good design is all about the thinking behind the image

Montage of ten book covers using identical images

Why Do So Many Book Covers Look the Same? Blame Getty Images

Meet the cast of stock image characters that grace dozens of book covers

50 Books | 50 Covers

This time-honored competition aims to identify the 50 best-designed books and book covers yearly. The juror-selections exemplify the best current work in book and book cover design.

50 Books 50 Covers

Featured Talks

View of book cover of Wa The Essence of Japanese Design

Julia Hasting

Designing Phaidon Books

A conversation with Julia Hasting, Creative Director, Phaidon.

Chip Kidd at the AIGA Design Conference

What Are You Doing Here?

After 25 years working nonstop as a graphic designer and writer, it happens: Chip Kidd gets the commission of a lifetime. That should be a good thing, shouldn't it? Well, shouldn’t it?!

The AIGA Design Archive

View the collection of books in AIGA's archive.

Recommended Reading

A book on books: new aesthetics in book design.

By Victionary

Thinking with type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students

By Ellen Luptin

Editorial Design: Digital and Print

By Cath Caldwell

The New Typography

By Jan Tschichold

By Peter Mendelsund

The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design

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How to design a book: the creative's guide

Take your book design to new heights with this expert advice.

essay book design

We all know the unspoken rule is you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. Indeed, in terms of design thinking , there’s a hell of a lot more to creating a beautiful, legible book than what’s on the outside. The principles of layout, type selection and use of imagery are complex; the role of a book designer holds much more than meets the casual reader’s eye.

As with any creative project, there are no hard and fast rules for designing a book, but there are a few basic principles that designers adhere to. Again though, such rules are often there to be broken: legibility seems like an obvious one, but with more conceptual art books, for instance, sometimes you can get away with type and layout that challenge the reader to look as much as to read; images can be layered and morphed and chopped and screwed around with; stories can be told in traditional, linear formats, or as post-modern, nonlinear modes of expression.

Sometimes a relevant solution can also be something that doesn’t suit the content Sara De Bondt

The basic tenet is design should adhere to what’s being designed, format should work with content, and design shouldn’t (most of the time) overshadow what the book is conveying to its readers.

Naturally, a shiny, seductive cover just isn’t enough. Erik Spiekermann once said that a book with a great cover and shoddily designed interior is “like great packaging, but when you open it, the food inside looks brown and boring. It may still be nourishing, but my appetite is gone.” So how does good book design keep us hungry, and ultimately satiate us?

The book design process

Once a designer has been commissioned to design a book, they’re usually briefed on the concept, and given some placeholder content to play around with. After that, it’s often a period of heavy research into the book’s themes and topics. Then it’s on to some experimenting with rough ideas of layout, playing around with typefaces, possible colour combinations, and the image selection.

Along the entire process, a good designer will also be considering the mechanics of the production: how it will be bound, the paper, cover stocks, and so on.

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“I start by listening to the people involved: the authors, editors, artists, etc,” says designer Sara De Bondt . “Then I try to find out more about the subject, and find relevant design solutions that suit the content of the book. Sometimes a relevant solution can also be something that doesn’t suit the content, but that contrasts it.”

While as a designer you aren’t always in a position to pick and choose the projects you take on, the vast majority agree that an interest in the subject matter – or at least, working to find something in it that piques your interest – is pretty important.

“The better you understand the content, both text and images, the better you can deal with it in terms of positioning and sizing as well as coming up with hierarchies,” reveals graphic designer and art director Maximilian Mauracher .

“Of course it’s possible to make a nice book layout by having a grid first and then just strictly laying out the content according to it, but I think it’s only going to be outstanding if you adapt typography, colours and the page layout to the content.”

Book covers usually go through a series of meetings with the editor, the sales and marketing teams, the designers and eventually the author before being approved.

“As a designer, hearing so many opinions can be a bit daunting, but I often find it opens me up to pathways I might not have considered,” says Henry Petrides , designer at Cornerstone, part of Penguin Random House. “The whole process usually lasts a few weeks; sometimes shorter, and sometimes longer,” adds Emma Grey Gelder , senior designer at the publisher.

Typography in book design

Great book design is only as good as its typography. In very basic terms, it makes sense that fonts should be unobtrusive, in as much as the reader doesn’t ‘notice’ the font, simply the words. It’s often said that monospaced typewriter fonts such as Courier are to be avoided in body copy, as the uniform spacing gives too much standout to individual letters.

The debate is still very much raging as to whether serif or sans serif fonts are the most legible, or most suited to body copy: and after decades of research and bickering over the matter, we’re still far from a conclusion. So really, do what you feel in that sense: legibility wise, there’s not much in it.

Petrides and Grey Gelder agree that while there are fonts designers fall back on, it’s more interesting to use less known typefaces, and introduce handwritten elements where appropriate.

“I work on women’s fiction titles and I find that hand calligraphy works well on these kind of covers, and often feels more organic with the illustration used,” says Grey Gelder. “It’s really enjoyable to commission hand lettering artists to create a signature look for a cover.”

Mauracher takes a strongly typographic approach to his designs for books, mainly in the cultural field, and advises that type-wise, “less is more.” He explains: “It’s all about readability – that’s what most books are for, to be read – and the mood I want to create or feelings I want to evoke when reading or looking at it.

"Of course I have some favourite fonts, but I usually vary them and see what matches the content best. As soon as I choose one or two typefaces I have a look at the hierarchies – headlines, sub-lines, body text and pagination.”

Book design is all about rhythm and pacing Sara De Bondt

It all comes back to there being certain rules – those dictated by content, and a somewhat intangible sense of what feels and looks right – and then letting each project dictate how such rules are executed. “Book design is all about rhythm and pacing,” advises De Bondt, and points out that the typography is only as good as the production.

“You might design the most beautiful layouts on screen, but if you haven’t fully considered the binding or grain direction of the final thing, your book will end up looking like a hostile brick that doesn’t open.”

Layout in book design

Layout is made up of a careful selection of decisions regarding page size, font styles and combinations, line spacing, margin size, and which images are used.

The vast majority of designs will adhere to a grid system , which at their most basic can be broken down into four categories: 

1. Manuscript grid – a rectangular space made up of large text blocks and margins, often used for large blocks of text such as essays. 

2. Column grid – helpful for presenting text that isn’t necessarily continual, perhaps with various boxouts, images, and captions.

3. Modular grid – prizing order and clarity to organise a series of complex information and images, as popularised by the Swiss International Style and Bauhaus School.

4. Hierarchical grids – more often used online than in print, where the column widths differ, and the designer needs to unify a number of disparate elements.

Considerations around layout come down to vertical (typographical hierarchies) and horizontal (double-spread design and sequencing).

“I prefer reducing the typographical image to its core essence and try to establish clarity for the reading,” says Hanover-based designer and art director Yevgeniy Anfalov . “Sometimes the structure is more complex and requires more hierarchies. At this point, I need a good grid to use the surface in a rational and flexible way. The sequencing has a cinematic nature. It is less about graphic design, but narration.”

Swedish designer Marcus Gärde has created an online grid calculation tutorial for figuring out the basics in any book design project. It’s based on a ratio method that works with all paper formats, and “always results in both horizontal and vertical lines fitting perfectly within the area,” according to Anfalov.

Again, the right layout is only correct for the book it’s meant for. “In the end it always depends on the content and the book format,” Mauracher says. “That’s why I never reuse a grid or a page layout for another book. I want to create something new every time.”

Anfalov agrees that ‘golden rules’ are inherently fluid. “It’s good to learn different approaches in layout composition and to always extend that knowledge,” he says. “I don’t believe in the power of dogmas. Approaching new projects, I often think: ‘Should I have a grid? Or is there no grid at all? How can I design something without sticking too mechanically to the rules?’ But it’s really up to the project’s nature. The content gives me clues on how I should proceed.”

De Bondt has an “internal unspoken rule” when it comes to the process of designing layouts, “which is to try not to be too wasteful – the environment is already suffering so much.” Where possible, she tries to use standard book sizes to avoid paper wastage, and steers clear of laminating.

“Unfortunately a lot of books get shrink wrapped in plastic, I hope someone will invent a more ecological solution for that soon,” she says.

Printing a book

Once you’ve slaved over a book project for weeks, months or even years, it would seem frankly daft to relinquish control once it all goes to print. As such, most designers work very closely with the printers themselves, building up relationships over many years and meeting to discuss the process way before the printing wheels start turning.

It’s only by working closely with printers and really understanding how they work that you can push the limits of the books you’re making, and deliver something truly unique.

De Bondt emphatically states that it’s “incredibly important” to work closely with the printer. “Printers often have good ideas,” she says. “Sometimes I ask them to help find a paper, or we try to find solutions together when we hit a problem. I really like going to printers’ offices to see other things they’ve made and learn about techniques I wasn’t aware of. Print technology is moving all the time.”

Berlin’s Studio Yukiko art directed the first publishing venture from gay dating app Grindr – Home. Formed of a collection of photographs by artist Matt Lambert , it explores intimacy and LGBTQ stories.

The book is characterised by bold and complex printing flourishes, including black passe–partout frames, spot varnishes, a special cold foil production technique, and use of shiny, near invisible text. The production wasn’t without its challenges: they couldn’t get the cold foil to stick to the original choice of paper; and the varnish machine even caught fire.

The result was worth it, and a testament to the drive and vision the studio has become known for. “We’re so grateful to have a really good relationship with our printer, and every time we come up with an idea we discuss it and see what’s actually possible,” says Studio Yukiko co-founder Johannes Conrad.

“So we’re not trying to come up with ridiculous things that aren’t doable... We’re always in very close communication.” The ultimate project for him is when it becomes “more than just designing, but creating something that hasn’t been done before.”

A book is an object

It’s worth remembering in a design process so largely screen-based, that a book is a tactile thing to be held, touched and pored over in a very physical way, so its manifestation as an object should always be front of mind for designers. One of the most important decisions – and one that’s as much dependent on budget and printers’ limitations as imagination – is materials.

Book designer Emily Benton recommends building up a paper library of swatch books and samples, containing everything from standard uncoated and coated stocks to coloured, transparent, mirrored and textured substrates. Other samples might include grey board, marble papers, head and tail bands, and ribbons.

After a few years I realised how misleading the layout on the screen can be Yevgeniy Anfalov

The vital element of tactility in books means it’s perhaps little surprise that many book designers featured here espouse the importance of looking away from the computer as part of the book design process. Anfalov sometimes takes images, cuts them out by hand in various sizes, and moves them around. “After a few years I realised how misleading the layout on the screen can be, if it happens without proper paper proofing,” he explains. “Scissors, glue, and handcraft tests became essential.”

“I learn a lot from the mid-century magazines, where the editing is sharp, generous, reductionist,” he adds. “The page is never alone, but is a part of the whole. Images on the double spread interact with each other. The way they are set is the means to establish the rhythm and dramaturgy.”

Mauracher agrees, and advocates the importance of looking outside of the obvious touchpoints for ideas: “Of course I get inspired by other books, but they’re mostly not about book design. I read a lot and I think that’s important, to see what works and what doesn’t.”

As Petrides states, the best book designs come from being relentlessly curious: explore film, fashion, art, music and illustration “away from a phone screen,” he says. “The more you see, the more you’re building a bank of references to pull from as a designer.”

This article originally appeared in Computer Arts , the world's leading graphic design magazine. Buy issue 281 or subscribe here .

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Emily Gosling

Emily Gosling is a freelance art and design journalist currently writing for titles including Creative Review, Eye on Design, Creative Boom and People of Print. She’s previously worked at Elephant magazine, It’s Nice That and Design Week, and was editor of Type Notes magazine. Her book Creative Minds Don’t Think Alike was published by Ilex Press in 2018, and she also plays bass as one-quarter of the eight-titted beast, Superstation Twatville.

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Blog • Book Design

Last updated on Aug 08, 2022

How to Format a Book (the Free and Easy Way)

So, you've finished writing your book, and your editor has whipped your story and prose into shape. Now it's time to format that manuscript into a beautiful book that readers will want to devour from cover to cover.

In this post, we’ll show you how to use Reedsy's free Book Editor tool to prepare your book for publication. So – here's how you can format a book in six steps:

1. Import your fully-edited manuscript

2. format your chapter titles and paragraphs, 3. add images, endnotes, and page breaks, 4. upload your book cover in the correct size, 5. set your table of contents and copyright page, 6. finally, export your print and ebook files.

Sign up to the Reedsy Book Editor here to unlock it, and then let’s get to it! 

FREE FORMATTING APP

FREE FORMATTING APP

The Reedsy Book Editor

Format your manuscript for print or EPUB with a single click.

Regardless of the writing software you've been using , you can use the .docx import function on the Reedsy Book Editor to continue working on manuscripts you started on any major word processor. To keep all your chapter breaks and headings, be sure to: 

  • Use "styles" for each chapter title and heading; or
  • Use "chapter …" at the beginning of every chapter. 

Another option is to copy-paste your book in the Reedsy Book Editor and then use our "chapter break" feature to split it into chapters. Throughout this process, you should note that Reedsy respects the existing formatting of your manuscript, which means that our software will retain elements like headings, links, and inline styles (italic/bold). Here’s what it looks like:

Once your manuscript is nestled comfortably into the editor, the formatting can begin!

One feature that makes our book production tool smart is the formatting bar: simply select the type of paragraph or character style you want to use, and the formatting will be applied.

The paragraph styling options are:

  • Default paragraph: your standard styling
  • Three levels of headings to structure your content (mainly for non-fiction books)
  • Two types of lists: bullet points and numbers

essay book design

Once you’ve defined your paragraphs’ styling, you can customize your font styling with the following options:

  • Link and cross-references

essay book design

You may also want to be aware of the existence of widows and orphans. No, not the Oliver Twist ones of the Dickens variety! In publishing speak, a widow is a word (or small group of words) that sits by itself at the bottom of a paragraph or page, and orphans are words leftover from a paragraph on the previous page. 

Orphans and widows

Format fact: The most common font size for books is 12-pt. However, ebook readers can customize their devices to display whatever size they find most comfortable.

You’ve mastered this step and are ready to get a little fancy. On to step 3...

Books that meet industry standards but are also unique and personal? Brilliant! The next step is to enrich your existing content with:

  • Images and captions
  • Scene breaks (for fiction)

ebook formatting - insert images, captions and scene breaks

You will find your endnotes in a dedicated chapter at the end of your book for reference:

How to format a book: Reedsy book editor endnotes

At this point, your manuscript’s interior is taken care of, and it’s time to focus on its exterior.

Note : the Reedsy book editor will take care of your page numbering — so no need to worry there!

You can now click on the Export icon, which will lead you to our Export page — where most of the magic happens.

The first thing you should do here is to upload your cover. Make sure you upload an image following the requirements of the ebook stores you use for distribution. For best results, we recommend your cover image use a ratio of 1:1.6 and measure at least 2500px on the longest side. But if unsure, check out our handy guide on choosing the right book cover dimensions .

Note that POD services will require a PDF with the full jacket and a separate PDF for the book’s interior for physical books. For the book’s jacket, we recommend working with a designer from the Reedsy marketplace who knows the requirements of different POD services and will be able to provide you with the right file.

Format fact: The most common paperback size in the US is 6"x9" — also known as a trade . Check out our post on standard book sizes to find out more.

“Front matter” refers to the parts of your manuscript that come before the actual content begins. This also applies to ebooks. With the Editor, you can manage your book's  front matter elements  in two sections: the   Copyright Page and Table of Contents.

essay book design

On this page, you can manage your:

  • Edition number
  • Year of publication
  • Collaborators
  • Publisher name and logo (if any)
  • Copyright clauses
  • ISBN number(s)

Note that you won’t need an ISBN for most ebook retailers, as they have their own identifying number. For instance, Amazon uses the Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) and creates a new one for free every time you publish with Kindle Direct Publishing ( KDP ). Similarly, Apple iBooks no longer requires an ISBN .

There’s currently a debate about whether or not ISBNs still make sense, and you can read more about it here. For now, you’ll need an ISBN if you’re planning on printing POD versions, and most POD services will provide you with one for free.

Once your ISBN has been added, you can turn your attention to your table of contents.

Table of Contents

essay book design

This is where you can choose how detailed your table of contents will be. If you're writing a novel, you may only want to list the chapter titles in the table of contents (above). However, you can also choose to list your sub-headings as well (below).

essay book design

And once you're done with configuring your copyright page and table of contents, you're just about ready to export your book.

We’re getting closer! It’s now time to decide whether you want to create an ebook, print copies, or both. This will also determine whether you need an EPUB, or PDF file. Check out our guide to publishing file formats to learn more about these formats.

End note positioning for EPUB ebooks: at the end of the chapter or the book

For ebooks: download an EPUB file

EPUB files are compatible with the Kindle Store, Apple’s iBookstore, the Kobo Store, Nook Press, Google Play, and NetGalley.

Next, decide how you’d like to organize your endnotes (if applicable). You can position them at the end of every chapter or all together at the end of the book.

For print copies: download a PDF file

The files created are currently compatible with most POD services ( Lulu , KDP Print, IngramSpark , CPI, etc.). Again, the first step is to position your endnotes. For physical copies, you can decide whether you’d like them to be footnotes at the bottom of a page or actual endnotes at the end of your book.

Unlike ebooks, your physical copy needs to be set to a trim size ready for printing. Reedsy currently offers a few different options, based on popular industry standard sizes :

  • Pocket 4.25 x 6.87 in (10.80 x 17.45 cm)
  • Reedsy 5 x 8 in (12.7 x 20.32 cm)
  • Digest 5.5 x 8.5 in (13.97 x 21.59 cm)
  • Trade 6 x 9 in (15.24 x 22.86 cm)

Which trim size should you pick? There’s no clear-cut answer. Your choice depends on a few factors: the genre and audience of your book, the length of the manuscript , and, of course, your personal preference. To make a decision here, we recommend that you spend some time in a bookstore with a ruler to determine what makes the most sense for your future bestseller.

Here are a few pictures to give you a sense of what those different sizes look like:

How to make a book trim sizes examples for print books

Once you’ve selected your trim size, simply pick a template and hit the download button. Your moment of glory is only seconds away as the editor typesets your book and gets it ready to be downloaded!

As a bonus, we have a short video tutorial for formatting your manuscript in the Reedsy Book Editor.

ZF6MHRgMQIo Video Thumb

Head to our Reedsy Book Editor and format your book for free in just a few seconds. 

58 responses

Malaika Rose Stanley says:

29/07/2016 – 08:19

The Reedsy Book Editor really is an amazing resource for indie authors, as I know from experience! But I'd still like to see the option to add 'untitled' front matter, such as a quote... and an option to remove/change the formatting of lower case, italicised roman numerals page numbers, which I guess is a feature more common in the US than the UK.

↪️ Reedsy replied:

29/07/2016 – 09:04

Thank you for the testimonial! The front matter options are receiving a major revamp in the coming weeks, as we know they can be improved as you have suggested. There are infinite possibilities for customization when it comes to books, which overwhelms many authors. This is one of the reasons why we have kept a few things simple. Thank you for suggesting these ideas however, we will look into it :)

Colin Smith says:

03/08/2016 – 14:45

How does it handle footnotes? I have seen published novels where footnotes appear as pop-ups without having to navigate away from the page you're reading. That's the format I'd like for my work.

04/08/2016 – 08:17

Hi Colin, good question! Currently we handle footnotes on ePub by placing them at the end of each chapter, or in a chapter of their own at the end of the book. We have now moved to ePub3, which is the format that allows you to have these "popup footnotes", and while we have not yet optimized the export to accommodate these, it is definitely on our radar to support soon :)

Kate Gesch says:

14/09/2016 – 02:40

I'm working in the book editor right now, and there are significantly fewer options in the formatting bar than what is pictured above. My only choices are regular paragraph, headings 1,2,3, block quote, numbered list, bullets, bold, italic, underline, and hyperlink. I'm particularly looking for the sans paragraph font and the center text options, where did they go?

14/09/2016 – 09:07

Hi Kate, the formatting bar images on this post are slightly ahead of our roadmap — the alignment and sans paragraph font will come within an update of the Book Editor in a year or so (i.e. Oct 2017). Sorry about that!

Milk for Dead Hamsters says:

19/10/2016 – 12:31

I want to love Reedsy's ebook creator so badly. It has a beautiful interface and produces a nicely templated book. BUT it's light on one too many features. Section breaks do not work. Center adjustment isn't available. Hyperlinks on pictures would be useful. As someone mentioned, all of the "front matter" is considered chapters and roped into the Table of Contents. I'd like to be able to put a dedication and a teaser for another book before the ToC and not have it show up on that list. Any word on when the new features will be coming out?

↪️ Amber Deann replied:

19/01/2018 – 22:00

Milk for dead hamsters, I have a question. IN the past year have the problems you mentioned about been resolved. Can you deal with "front matter" with out it being part of Table of Contents? I have poetry in my manuscript. Hope I can get it formatted easily. Love any comments or suggestions you could give. amber

↪️ Milk for Dead Hamsters replied:

19/01/2018 – 23:37

Not sure. I never revisited this product. I went with vellum, which was a pretty penny, but did exactly what I needed it to do.

Gustavo Razzetti says:

29/04/2017 – 16:50

I'm about to submit my manuscript to an editor. Shall I uploaded on the Reedsy Book editor before or after is been edited? Most probably, I will be working with an editor from the Reedsy network so I want to understand if your editor use this tool for editing or is it something that authors use once the book has been edited? :)

01/05/2017 – 11:59

Hi Gustavo, at this point, the Reedsy Book Editor is not collaborative, so we recommend you only use it for the final steps: formatting to EPUB and print-ready PDF. Thanks for your question! :)

Joanna @ MumsKidsJesus.com says:

08/09/2017 – 20:07

Is there an option to justify text in the Reedsy editor?

08/09/2017 – 20:34

Hi Joanna, Your text will be automatically justified when you export it. We give you the best experience to write and our tool takes care of the formatting itself at the end.

Elle Clouse says:

26/11/2017 – 20:18

This is a great tool. I'm working on formatting a paperback and I don't see where I can force chapter/title pages onto the right hand page. And alternatively the copyright notice needs to be left hand page. Is this something that can be done and I can't locate the functionality? Or is it a feature that's coming soon?

19/04/2018 – 08:59

This isn't a feature that's available. We don't allow for infinite customization as we really want to avoid users making basic typesetting mistakes. We'll probably add templates in the future though where chapter and title pages will be formatted differently.

Jason says:

29/01/2018 – 23:03

I'm wondering why the text for a typesetting/formatting software cuts off the last few characters of each line of the preceding explanatory website text. This blog entry was supposedly updated in September 2017. Has no one noticed this? Not a particularly good first impression. I guess you get what you pay for.

Lisa Santika Onggrid says:

19/04/2018 – 02:34

What do I do if it returns a failure on me whenever I try to export a book? There's not even a notice telling me the reason it fails.

19/04/2018 – 08:58

Our team is instantly notified whenever there's a failed export, so they can look into it. Please allow a few days until they get back to you and identify the issue.

I.P.A. Manning says:

13/06/2018 – 14:15

In downloading a word doc onto the ebook creator my endnotes come out numbered in Roman numerals in the text instead of in standard numbers ( I have many endnotes) and the reference appears at the end of the chapter instead of the end of the book. I also wish to hyperlink some of the URLS? How do I do I do all this?

13/06/2018 – 14:20

You can select the position of the endnotes on the export page, in the "End note positioning" section. For hyperlinking, just highlight the text you'd like to hyperlink, then click on the link symbol and fill in the link. Hope this helps!

↪️ I.P.A. Manning replied:

13/06/2018 – 14:26

Will give it a bash, thank you. What about changing the Roman numerals for 1,2.3. etc?

13/06/2018 – 14:36

That depends on the template, and right now our templates use Roman numerals, as it is more the standard for typesetting.

13/06/2018 – 16:33

Thanks. The endnotes insist on going to the end of the chapter? Woud appreciate a step by step guide as to how to persuade the endnotes stuck at the end of the chapter to move and join the herd of endnotes in a chapter at the end ? Many thanks.

14/06/2018 – 19:23

I have set the marker for the endnotes to appear at the end of the book, yet it continues to the end of the chapter. Any ideas?

Syntell Smith says:

22/08/2018 – 14:33

I can't insert scene breaks with a centered group of three asterisks. Is there a work around for this?

22/08/2018 – 23:03

You can add three-asterisk scene breaks by clicking on the plus sign in the top bar and then on "insert scene break"

Melanie Rambo says:

23/08/2018 – 09:30

I have a client that would like to convert her Weebly blog into a book with the hope of printing just 1-3 copies. Is Reedy a good place for me to come for that? Thanks for your time

Katie Lile says:

30/08/2018 – 17:38

I have a completely different formatting bar than the one that they show everywhere else. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/263be34c2703a465bcdf30f934c4f60c7ff5454d69d0e18def0d45685c7d68ae.jpg

03/09/2018 – 14:48

Great point. We created those mock-ups a short while ago with all the functions we want (and are perhaps going) to add to the editor. However, as you pointed out, it may be more useful to show how the toolbar *actually* looks — so we've updated the post to reflect that. Thanks :)

Lucretia Cargill says:

01/03/2019 – 16:11

I have been having an issue trying to double space my document. I have been trying to figure that out. But overall my book looks good! Any suggestion on how to double space?

08/05/2019 – 12:28

Sorry, we automatically remove double spacing, as that is not a standard in novels or trade non-fiction.

Alana Khan says:

I wrote in google docs, imported to word, then imported to Reedsy. Every single paragraph break (double spaced) was removed and replaced with a 3 space paragraph indent. I personally hate to read books formatted like this and also don't want to have to manually change every single paragraph break. Is there a fix to this? Thanks.

08/05/2019 – 12:29

Hi Alana, there's no fix to this as our Reedsy Book Editor automatically follows and defaults to standard typesetting rules. If you pick a book on your shelves, you'll see there are very few (if any) line breaks, and that all new paragraphs are indented. If you prefer not to follow typesetting standards, the Reedsy Book Editor is not a good option for you.

Glen Kenner says:

I've just tried to use the manuscript creator tool for the first time but it didn't work for me. I wrote my novel in Google Docs and saved it as a .docx file. When I try to import it into the tool, I get an error message "Manuscript has an invalid error type". Anyone know what I should do from here?

We're looking into it. For now, we recommend either copy-pasting your manuscript in the Editor, or saving your file first in MS Word or Open Office.

Tom Dorr says:

24/06/2019 – 12:29

Wow! I feel like a complete idiot. I joined Reedsy, have an account and have used this to hire a designer, yet i cannot find anything about the Reedsy Book Editor or a way to contact anybody at Reedsy. If you would be so kind as to help me in any way I would be very appreciative. Thanks

25/06/2019 – 11:58

Hi Tom, When you log in to Reedsy, you'll see an option in the sidebar that says "My Books" — if you tap on this and create a book, that will take you straight to the formatting tool. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected] :)

Lannan says:

14/07/2019 – 01:41

I signed up to use the Reedsy editor almost a year ago, and have cracked it open again today to see how things are coming along - I didn't like it much for my fiction novel, and decided to try it for formatting a nonfiction guide book I've finished. In discovering this re-posted blog article, I see that there are some things that users asked for several years ago that have not been implemented yet - are there any plans on the horizon to allow for page-end or chapter-end notes? Also, when is it anticipated that the "editing" version of the editor (as opposed to the "writing" version) will be released?

↪️ Lannan replied:

14/07/2019 – 01:44

Ah, eating my words a bit - the notes function is hidden away in the "export" page. While the editor is a fantastic resource, there are a few basic things that could be improved upon a great deal - more transparency about how to accomplish these things might help! (Or at least a way to see many of these export-only formatting options from in the writing editor would help a lot.)

louise says:

16/08/2019 – 15:04

Hey, just considering using the editor interface and wondered if it's possible to resize an image? When I import an already small image, it makes it fit the width of the page? also is it possible to move it around the page? Thanks :)

↪️ Martin Cavannagh replied:

19/08/2019 – 09:01

Hi Louise, we only support full-width images at the moment, unfortunately. Smaller images get tricky for us to handle when we're dealing with a variety of screen sizes for epubs. To get a smaller image, you have to manually “pad” the image — add white/transparent space either side of it — and reupload. Hope that helps!

sean moore says:

16/08/2019 – 16:45

I can't find the actual blank place for me to download some book copy

19/08/2019 – 08:56

Hi Sean, if you're still having trouble could you email our team ([email protected]) — they should be able to sort it out for you :)

S Yhan says:

17/08/2019 – 03:22

How can I add a back cover of my book to the editor? I only see option to upload the front cover.

19/08/2019 – 08:55

If it's for the print version, almost all printers will ask you to upload your covers separately. Our print PDFs export with no cover at all for this reason. Hope that helps :)

Isobel says:

21/08/2019 – 07:54

Does the Book Editor support other languages and if so which ones? (for the text of the book I mean, not that the software itself)

23/08/2019 – 09:23

Currently, we only fully support English — but we're looking into adding other languages at some point in the future.

Peggy chappell says:

05/09/2019 – 21:48

Justifying margins is standard for most books and yet I see no way to do that. After working on my manuscript and wasting a couple of hours I discovered this. Anyone have any solution?

Adam Blumer says:

15/10/2019 – 13:48

Where should I post my book endorsements? I don't see that option in the front matter. Thanks.

15/10/2019 – 14:08

You can just add a new section/chapter and drag it into the front matter to use as any sort of section you like. Hope that helps

Nancy Richards says:

01/11/2019 – 01:04

I believe my book/workbook, which is intended to be filled out by the reader, would work better in a larger size. Are the given sizes the only sizes with which the Reedsy Book Editor can work?

01/11/2019 – 12:21

At the moment, we don't have any additional sized on offer with this app. If you're working on a fillable workbook, you might actually be looking at creating a book with a fixed format — and for that, you may want to have a look at working with a human book designer.

Khalil Assi says:

25/12/2019 – 18:04

Is it possible to write from Right to Left using reedsy

26/12/2019 – 11:35

I'm afraid this is not currently supported by the Reedsy Book Editor. We'll keep this in mind as we look to make it available in other languages.

↪️ Khalil Assi replied:

27/12/2019 – 22:36

Thank you Martin. When do you think such a support for other languages might be available? In my case I need Arabic support.

Sahara says:

25/02/2020 – 03:32

I don't want chapter numbers—can they be eliminated?

25/02/2020 – 09:15

Yes, you can! When you come to export the book, one of the options is to "Hide Chapter Numbers". If you want to see it, just tap the export/download button.

Eddie Lay says:

28/02/2020 – 00:31

I have a children's picture book. Can I get it formatted in landscape and double-page?

Comments are currently closed.

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A graphic essay (sometimes called a visual essay) uses a combination of text and images to explore a specific topic. Graphic essays can look like comics, graphic novels, magazines, collages, artist books, textbooks, or even websites. Graphic essays often first take the form of written essays and then have graphic elements added to enrich the reader experience. Unlike infographics, which also combine text and images, graphic essays are often more text-based and usually have a narrative arc or specific reading order.

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Book description

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Effective design is at the heart of everything from software development to engineering to architecture. But what do we really know about the design process? What leads to effective, elegant designs? The Design of Design addresses these questions.

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The author tracks the evolution of the design process, treats collaborative and distributed design, and illuminates what makes a truly great designer. He examines the nuts and bolts of design processes, including budget constraints of many kinds, aesthetics, design empiricism, and tools, and grounds this discussion in his own real-world examples—case studies ranging from home construction to IBM’s Operating System/360. Throughout, Brooks reveals keys to success that every designer, design project manager, and design researcher should know.

Table of contents

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  • About the Author
  • 1. The Design Question
  • 2. How Engineers Think of Design—The Rational Model
  • 3. What’s Wrong with This Model?
  • 4. Requirements, Sin, and Contracts
  • 5. What Are Better Design Process Models?
  • 6. Collaboration in Design
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  • 19. Great Designs Come from Great Designers
  • 20. Where Do Great Designers Come From?
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  • Title: The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist
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25+ Book Review Templates and Ideas to Organize Your Thoughts

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Danika Ellis

Danika spends most of her time talking about queer women books at the Lesbrary. Blog: The Lesbrary Twitter: @DanikaEllis

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When I was a kid I loved reading, but I hated book reports. It felt impossible to boil a book down to a few lines or even a page of writing. Besides, by the time I had to write the report, I had already forgotten a lot. It never ceases to be painful to try to pull my thoughts and opinions out of my head and put them on the page, especially in a coherent way.

As an adult, I continue to usually find writing book reviews painful . And yet, I maintain a book blog with reviews of all the (bi and lesbian) books I read. Why? For one thing, I want to raise the visibility of these books — or, in the case of a book I loathed, warn other readers of what to expect. It helps me to build community with other book lovers. It’s also a great way to force myself pay attention to how I’m feeling while I’m reading a book and what my thoughts are afterwards. I have learned to take notes as I go, so I have something to refer to by the time I write a review, and it has me notice what a book is doing well (and what it isn’t). The review at the end helps me to organize my thoughts. I also find that I remember more once I’ve written a review.

Once you’ve decided it’s worthwhile to write a review, though, how do you get started? It can be a daunting task. The good news is, book reviews can adapt to whatever you want them to be. A book review can be a tweet with a thumbs up or thumbs down emoji, maybe with a sentence or two of your thoughts; it can also be an in-depth essay on the themes of the book and its influence on literature. Most are going to fall somewhere between those two! Let go of the idea of trying to create the One True Book Review. Everyone is looking for something different, and there is space for GIF-filled squee fests about a book and thoughtful, meditative explorations of a work.

This post offers a variety of book reviews elements that you can mix and match to create a book review template that works for you. Before you get started, though, there are some questions worth addressing.

black pencil on top of ruled paper

Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Book Review Template

Where will you be posting your book reviews.

An Instagram book review will likely look different from a blog book review. Consider which platform you will be using for your book review. You can adapt it for different platforms, or link to your original review, but it’s a good starting point. Instagram reviews tend to be a lot shorter than blog reviews, for instance.

Will you be using the same template every time?

Some book reviewers have a go-to book review template. Others have a different one for each genre, while another group doesn’t use a template at all and just reacts to whatever each book brings up.

Heading or no headings?

When choosing which book review elements to mix and match, you can also decide whether to include a header for each section (like Plot, Characterization, Writing, etc). Headers make reviews easier to browse, but they may not have the professional, essay-style look that you’re going for.

Why are you writing a review?

When selecting which elements to include in your review, consider what the purpose is. Do you want to better remember the plot by writing about it? You probably want to include a plot summary, then. Do you want to help readers decide whether they should read this book? A pros and cons list might be helpful. Are you trying to track something about your reading, like an attempt to read more books in translation or more books by authors of color? Are you trying to buy fewer books and read off your TBR shelf instead? These are all things you can note in a review, usually in a point-form basic information block at the beginning.

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Book Review Templates and Formats

Essay-style.

This is a multi-paragraph review, usually with no headers. It’s the same format most newspapers and academics use for book reviews. Many essay-style reviews use informal categories in their writing, often discussing setting, writing, characters, and plot in their own paragraphs. They usually also discuss the big themes/messages of a story. Here are some questions to consider when writing an essay-style review:

What is the author trying to do? Don’t evaluate a romance novel based on a mystery novel’s criteria. First try to think about what the book was attempting to do, then try to evaluate if they achieved it. You can still note if you didn’t like it, but it’s good to know what it was aiming for first.

What are some of the themes of the story? What big message should the reader take away? Did you agree with what the book seemed to be saying? Why or why not?

How is this story relevant to the world? What is it saying about the time it was written in? About human nature? About society or current issues? Depending on the book, there may be more or less to dig into here.

What did this book make you think about? It may be that the themes in the book were just a launching off point. How did they inspire your own thinking? How did this book change you?

A Classic Book Review

This is probably the most common kind of book review template. It uses a few criteria, usually including Setting, Writing, Characters, and Plot (for a novel). The review then goes into some detail about each element, describing what the book did well, and where it fell short.

The advantage of this format is that it’s very straightforward and applies to almost any fiction read. It can also be adapted–you will likely have more to say about the plot in a mystery/thriller than a character study of a novel. A drawback, though, is that it can feel limiting. You might have thoughts that don’t neatly fit into these categories, or you could feel like you don’t have enough to say about some of the categories.

Pros and Cons

A common format for a Goodreads review is some variation of pros and cons. This might be “What I Liked/What I Didn’t Like” or “Reasons to Bump This Up Your TBR/Reasons to Bump This Down On Your TBR.” This is a very flexible system that can accommodate anything from a few bullet points each to paragraphs each. It gives a good at-a-glance impression of your thoughts (more cons than pros is a pretty good indication you didn’t like it). It also is broad enough that almost all your thoughts can likely be organized into those headings.

This is also a format that is easily mix and matched with the elements listed below. A brief review might give the title, author, genre, some brief selling points of the novel, and then a pros and cons list. Some reviews also include a “verdict” at the end. An example of this format:

essay book design

The Tea Dragon Society by Katie O’Neill

🌟 Fantasy All-Ages Comic 💫 Adorable pet dragons ✨ A diverse cast

Pros: This book has beautiful artwork. It is a soothing read, and all the character are supportive of each other. This is a story about friendship and kindness.

Cons: Don’t expect a fast-moving plot or a lot of conflict. This is a very gentle read.

Another approach to the review is not, strictly speaking, a book review template at all. Instead, it’s something like “5 Reasons to Read TITLE by Author” or “The # Most Shocking Plot Twists in X Series.” An advantage of this format is that it can be very to-the-point: if you want to convince people to read a book, it makes sense to just write a list of reasons they should read the book. It may also be more likely to get clicked on–traditional book reviews often get less views than more general posts.

On the other hand, listicles can come off as gimmicky or click-bait. You’ll have to decide for yourself if the book matches this format, and whether you are writing this out of genuine enthusiasm or are just trying to bend a review to be more clickable.

Your Own Original Rating System

Lots of reviewers decide to make their own review format based on what matters to them. This is often accompanied by a ratings system. For instance, the BookTube channel Book Roast uses the CAWPILE system:

CAWPILE is an acronym for the criteria she rates: Characters, Atmosphere, Writing, Plot, Intrigue, Logic, Enjoyment. Each of those are rated 1–10, and the average given is the overall rating. By making your own ratings/review system, you can prioritize what matters to you.

My favorite rating system is Njeri’s from Onyx Pages , because it shows exactly what she’s looking for from books, and it helps her to think about and speak about the things she values:

A “Live Tweet” or Chronological Review

Another format possibility is live tweeting (or updating as you go on Goodreads, or whatever your platform of choice is). This has you document your initial thoughts as you read, and it’s usually informal and often silly. You can add what you’re loving, what you’re hating, and what questions you have as you go.

This is a fun format for when you’re reading a popular book for the first time. That way, other people can cackle at how unprepared you are as you read it. This requires you to remember to always have your phone on you as you read, to get your authentic thoughts as they happen, but it saves on having to write a more in-depth review. Alternately, some people include both a “first impressions” section and a more in-depth analysis section in their final review.

Get Creative

There are plenty of book review templates to choose from and elements to mix-and-match, but you can also respond in a completely original way. You could create a work of art in response to the book! Here are some options:

  • Writing a song , a short story, or a poem
  • Writing a letter to the author or the main character (you don’t have to send it to the author!)
  • Writing an “interview” of a character from the book, talk show style
  • Making a visual response, like a collage or painting
  • Making a book diorama, like your elementary school days!

Mix-and-Match Elements of a Book Review

Most book reviews are made up of a few different parts, which can be combined in lots of different ways. Here is a selection to choose from! These might also give you ideas for your own elements. Don’t take on too much, though! It can easily become an overwhelming amount of information for readers.

Information

Usually a book review starts with some basic information about the book. What you consider basic information, though, is up for interpretation! Consider what you and your audience will think is important. Here are some ideas:

  • The title and author (pretty important)
  • The book’s cover
  • Format (audiobook, comic, poetry, etc)
  • Genre (this can be broad, like SFF, or narrow, like Silkpunk or Dark Academia)
  • Content warnings
  • Source (where did you get the book? Was is borrowed from the library, bought, or were you sent an ARC?)
  • Synopsis/plot summary (your own or the publisher’s)
  • What kind of representation there is in the novel (including race, disability, LGBTQ characters, etc)
  • Anything you’re tracking in your reading, including: authors of color, authors’ country, if a book is in translation, etc

Review Elements

Once you’ve established your basic information, you’re into the review itself! Some of these are small additions to a review, while others are a little more time-intensive.

Bullet point elements:

  • Rating (star rating, thumbs up/down, recommend/wouldn’t recommend, or your own scale)
  • Who would like it/Who wouldn’t like it
  • Read-alikes (or movies and TV shows like the book)
  • Describe the book using an emoji or emojis
  • Describe the book using a gif or gifs
  • Favorite line(s) from the book
  • New vocabulary/the most beautiful words in the novel
  • How it made you feel (in a sentence or two)
  • One word or one sentence review
  • Bullet points listing the selling points of a book
  • BooksandLala’s Scary, Unsettling, and Intrigue ratings, for horror
  • World-building, for fantasy and science fiction titles
  • Art, for comics
  • Narration, for audiobooks
  • Romance, for…romance
  • Heat level, for erotica

Visual elements:

  • Design a graphic (usually incorporating the cover, your star rating, and some other basic info)
  • Take a selfie of yourself holding the book, with your expression as the review
  • Make a mood board
  • Design your own book cover
  • Make fan art

Elements to incorporate into a review:

  • Quick/initial thoughts (often while reading or immediately after reading), then a more in-depth review (common on Goodreads)
  • A list of facts about the book or a character from the book
  • Book club questions about the book
  • Spoiler/non-spoiler sections
  • Research: look up interviews with the author and critique of the book, incorporate it (cited!) into your review
  • Links to other resources, such as interviews or other reviews — especially #OwnVoices reviews
  • A story of your own, whether it’s your experience reading the book, or something it reminded you of

This is not a complete list! There are so many ways to write a book review, and it should reflect your own relationship with books, as well as your audience. If you’re looking for more ways to keep track of your reading, you’ll also like 50+ Beautiful Bujo Spread Ideas to Track Your Reading .

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Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

Emily Temple

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  • Example of a great essay | Explanations, tips & tricks

Example of a Great Essay | Explanations, Tips & Tricks

Published on February 9, 2015 by Shane Bryson . Revised on July 23, 2023 by Shona McCombes.

This example guides you through the structure of an essay. It shows how to build an effective introduction , focused paragraphs , clear transitions between ideas, and a strong conclusion .

Each paragraph addresses a single central point, introduced by a topic sentence , and each point is directly related to the thesis statement .

As you read, hover over the highlighted parts to learn what they do and why they work.

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Table of contents

Other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about writing an essay, an appeal to the senses: the development of the braille system in nineteenth-century france.

The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability. The writing system of raised dots used by visually impaired people was developed by Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness. This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.

Lack of access to reading and writing put blind people at a serious disadvantage in nineteenth-century society. Text was one of the primary methods through which people engaged with culture, communicated with others, and accessed information; without a well-developed reading system that did not rely on sight, blind people were excluded from social participation (Weygand, 2009). While disabled people in general suffered from discrimination, blindness was widely viewed as the worst disability, and it was commonly believed that blind people were incapable of pursuing a profession or improving themselves through culture (Weygand, 2009). This demonstrates the importance of reading and writing to social status at the time: without access to text, it was considered impossible to fully participate in society. Blind people were excluded from the sighted world, but also entirely dependent on sighted people for information and education.

In France, debates about how to deal with disability led to the adoption of different strategies over time. While people with temporary difficulties were able to access public welfare, the most common response to people with long-term disabilities, such as hearing or vision loss, was to group them together in institutions (Tombs, 1996). At first, a joint institute for the blind and deaf was created, and although the partnership was motivated more by financial considerations than by the well-being of the residents, the institute aimed to help people develop skills valuable to society (Weygand, 2009). Eventually blind institutions were separated from deaf institutions, and the focus shifted towards education of the blind, as was the case for the Royal Institute for Blind Youth, which Louis Braille attended (Jimenez et al, 2009). The growing acknowledgement of the uniqueness of different disabilities led to more targeted education strategies, fostering an environment in which the benefits of a specifically blind education could be more widely recognized.

Several different systems of tactile reading can be seen as forerunners to the method Louis Braille developed, but these systems were all developed based on the sighted system. The Royal Institute for Blind Youth in Paris taught the students to read embossed roman letters, a method created by the school’s founder, Valentin Hauy (Jimenez et al., 2009). Reading this way proved to be a rather arduous task, as the letters were difficult to distinguish by touch. The embossed letter method was based on the reading system of sighted people, with minimal adaptation for those with vision loss. As a result, this method did not gain significant success among blind students.

Louis Braille was bound to be influenced by his school’s founder, but the most influential pre-Braille tactile reading system was Charles Barbier’s night writing. A soldier in Napoleon’s army, Barbier developed a system in 1819 that used 12 dots with a five line musical staff (Kersten, 1997). His intention was to develop a system that would allow the military to communicate at night without the need for light (Herron, 2009). The code developed by Barbier was phonetic (Jimenez et al., 2009); in other words, the code was designed for sighted people and was based on the sounds of words, not on an actual alphabet. Barbier discovered that variants of raised dots within a square were the easiest method of reading by touch (Jimenez et al., 2009). This system proved effective for the transmission of short messages between military personnel, but the symbols were too large for the fingertip, greatly reducing the speed at which a message could be read (Herron, 2009). For this reason, it was unsuitable for daily use and was not widely adopted in the blind community.

Nevertheless, Barbier’s military dot system was more efficient than Hauy’s embossed letters, and it provided the framework within which Louis Braille developed his method. Barbier’s system, with its dashes and dots, could form over 4000 combinations (Jimenez et al., 2009). Compared to the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet, this was an absurdly high number. Braille kept the raised dot form, but developed a more manageable system that would reflect the sighted alphabet. He replaced Barbier’s dashes and dots with just six dots in a rectangular configuration (Jimenez et al., 2009). The result was that the blind population in France had a tactile reading system using dots (like Barbier’s) that was based on the structure of the sighted alphabet (like Hauy’s); crucially, this system was the first developed specifically for the purposes of the blind.

While the Braille system gained immediate popularity with the blind students at the Institute in Paris, it had to gain acceptance among the sighted before its adoption throughout France. This support was necessary because sighted teachers and leaders had ultimate control over the propagation of Braille resources. Many of the teachers at the Royal Institute for Blind Youth resisted learning Braille’s system because they found the tactile method of reading difficult to learn (Bullock & Galst, 2009). This resistance was symptomatic of the prevalent attitude that the blind population had to adapt to the sighted world rather than develop their own tools and methods. Over time, however, with the increasing impetus to make social contribution possible for all, teachers began to appreciate the usefulness of Braille’s system (Bullock & Galst, 2009), realizing that access to reading could help improve the productivity and integration of people with vision loss. It took approximately 30 years, but the French government eventually approved the Braille system, and it was established throughout the country (Bullock & Galst, 2009).

Although Blind people remained marginalized throughout the nineteenth century, the Braille system granted them growing opportunities for social participation. Most obviously, Braille allowed people with vision loss to read the same alphabet used by sighted people (Bullock & Galst, 2009), allowing them to participate in certain cultural experiences previously unavailable to them. Written works, such as books and poetry, had previously been inaccessible to the blind population without the aid of a reader, limiting their autonomy. As books began to be distributed in Braille, this barrier was reduced, enabling people with vision loss to access information autonomously. The closing of the gap between the abilities of blind and the sighted contributed to a gradual shift in blind people’s status, lessening the cultural perception of the blind as essentially different and facilitating greater social integration.

The Braille system also had important cultural effects beyond the sphere of written culture. Its invention later led to the development of a music notation system for the blind, although Louis Braille did not develop this system himself (Jimenez, et al., 2009). This development helped remove a cultural obstacle that had been introduced by the popularization of written musical notation in the early 1500s. While music had previously been an arena in which the blind could participate on equal footing, the transition from memory-based performance to notation-based performance meant that blind musicians were no longer able to compete with sighted musicians (Kersten, 1997). As a result, a tactile musical notation system became necessary for professional equality between blind and sighted musicians (Kersten, 1997).

Braille paved the way for dramatic cultural changes in the way blind people were treated and the opportunities available to them. Louis Braille’s innovation was to reimagine existing reading systems from a blind perspective, and the success of this invention required sighted teachers to adapt to their students’ reality instead of the other way around. In this sense, Braille helped drive broader social changes in the status of blindness. New accessibility tools provide practical advantages to those who need them, but they can also change the perspectives and attitudes of those who do not.

Bullock, J. D., & Galst, J. M. (2009). The Story of Louis Braille. Archives of Ophthalmology , 127(11), 1532. https://​doi.org/10.1001/​archophthalmol.2009.286.

Herron, M. (2009, May 6). Blind visionary. Retrieved from https://​eandt.theiet.org/​content/​articles/2009/05/​blind-visionary/.

Jiménez, J., Olea, J., Torres, J., Alonso, I., Harder, D., & Fischer, K. (2009). Biography of Louis Braille and Invention of the Braille Alphabet. Survey of Ophthalmology , 54(1), 142–149. https://​doi.org/10.1016/​j.survophthal.2008.10.006.

Kersten, F.G. (1997). The history and development of Braille music methodology. The Bulletin of Historical Research in Music Education , 18(2). Retrieved from https://​www.jstor.org/​stable/40214926.

Mellor, C.M. (2006). Louis Braille: A touch of genius . Boston: National Braille Press.

Tombs, R. (1996). France: 1814-1914 . London: Pearson Education Ltd.

Weygand, Z. (2009). The blind in French society from the Middle Ages to the century of Louis Braille . Stanford: Stanford University Press.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

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An essay is a focused piece of writing that explains, argues, describes, or narrates.

In high school, you may have to write many different types of essays to develop your writing skills.

Academic essays at college level are usually argumentative : you develop a clear thesis about your topic and make a case for your position using evidence, analysis and interpretation.

The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order:

  • An opening hook to catch the reader’s attention.
  • Relevant background information that the reader needs to know.
  • A thesis statement that presents your main point or argument.

The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay .

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

A topic sentence is a sentence that expresses the main point of a paragraph . Everything else in the paragraph should relate to the topic sentence.

At college level, you must properly cite your sources in all essays , research papers , and other academic texts (except exams and in-class exercises).

Add a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize information or ideas from a source. You should also give full source details in a bibliography or reference list at the end of your text.

The exact format of your citations depends on which citation style you are instructed to use. The most common styles are APA , MLA , and Chicago .

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Bryson, S. (2023, July 23). Example of a Great Essay | Explanations, Tips & Tricks. Scribbr. Retrieved February 22, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/example-essay-structure/

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