Book Interior Layout, Zombie Girl Omega Series

Mara Publishing (my own imprint; written under the pen name O. T. Riesen)

A six-book military science fiction series needs an interior that sounds like the genre and stays comfortable for three hundred pages. Those pull against each other. Military Sci-Fi readers expect hardness in the packaging, but genre signaling is worthless if the reader’s eye tires by chapter four.

It also has to hold identical across two formats that agree on nothing. Print fixes trim, margin, and line breaks, while the ebook discards all three and reflows to whatever the reader’s device decides. Add multiple point-of-view characters, and readers need orientation at every chapter opener without a note explaining the system.

I split the typographic voice. Display type, on the title page, chapter openers, and running heads, is a squared, technical, all-caps face that reads as institutional and military. Body copy is a classical serif, justified, sized and leaded for sustained reading. The genre lives in the framework, keeping the reading experience quiet.

Series identity runs down into the smallest units. Scene breaks use the Greek letter for that character’s POV, rather than a default asterisk, tying the series title into the typographic system at its most granular level. Chapter openers carry a point-of-view tag beneath the title so readers land oriented. Running heads alternate author and title across the spread.

Each of those decisions had to survive reflow, so the system is built from type, not images. The scene break is a character, not a graphic, and nothing depends on a fixed line break holding. Print trim and margins are tuned for the physical book while type sizes and spacing hold at ebook defaults.

Refined type size and line spacing carried these improvements across the series, producing the most polished interior to date, with the refinements moving forward into Book 4.