Interior Layout · PDF, DOCX & ePub

Your book, typeset page by page.

Send the manuscript as it is, and Cantos sets the whole book: a real title page and copyright page, a contents page carrying real page numbers, running heads that change with the chapter, folios that alternate the way a bound book demands, and chapter openers that look made rather than generated. Sixteen designs, nine trim sizes, $99.99 a book, and you read the finished thing before you pay.

See My Finished Book Free

Cantos builds the whole book first. You read a watermarked proof copy at full print resolution, and payment releases the clean files.

Your manuscript is never used to train AI. Ever.

A finished non-fiction interior designed by Cantos: chapter opener, subheadings, and a full-width figure with its caption

An actual interior designed by Cantos.

How It Works

Three steps, and you pay after the third.

Step oneSend the manuscript as it is

A Word document, however it looks today. An older .doc, an .rtf or an .odt is converted for you. A folder of chapter files is joined, in an order you confirm first. Before that upload, a short card tells you what makes a clean book file, and a free prep template is there if you would rather start from one.

Step twoPick the trim, then the design

Nine trim sizes and sixteen designs, with the ones that suit your genre suggested first. Each design card shows how densely it sets a page at your trim and roughly how many pages your book will run, so the choice is made on facts rather than on a thumbnail.

Step threeRead the whole book, then decide

Cantos builds the complete interior and hands you a proof copy of it: every page, watermarked, at full print resolution. Change whatever you like, and pay only when it is the book you wanted.

What A Designed Interior Means

The parts nobody notices until they are wrong.

A book is not a manuscript in a nicer font. It is a set of conventions readers have absorbed since childhood and will feel the absence of without being able to name them. Cantos builds every one of them, fresh, for the trim size you chose.

Built for you, from nothing

Front matter in its proper order: half title, title page, copyright, dedication, epigraph, contents
A contents page carrying real page numbers, not a row of placeholders
Running heads that carry the book on the left and the chapter on the right, and step aside on opening and display pages
Folios that alternate, even on the left and odd on the right, dropping to the foot of a chapter opener
Chapter openers with the sinkage, the ornament and the spacing your design calls for
Widow and orphan control on every page, so no line is left stranded alone

Kept, exactly as you wrote it

Your italics and bold, run by run, never flattened into the body style
Footnotes on the page their marker is on, and endnotes in a section of their own
Tables set to the measure of the page instead of spilling off it
Images with their captions, placed and sized for your trim
Lists that keep their own numbering, including a restart partway through a chapter
Epigraphs, block quotes, verse and scene breaks, recognized and set as themselves

Tracked changes are accepted and review comments removed before a single page is designed, and Cantos tells you how many of each it found. A marked-up draft never becomes a marked-up book.

Sixteen Designs, Nine Trims

A design that already knows your genre.

Thriller, fantasy, science fiction, historical, business, memoir, self-help, literary, and a large-print design built for accessibility. A design here is artist's direction, not a form you pour words into: Cantos follows it while it makes the thousand small decisions your particular book needs.

5×85.25×85.5×8.56×97×108.5×8.58.5×11A4A5

Magnificent, in large printGenerous 14-point type for readers with low vision and for tired eyes, on fiction and non-fiction alike. It pairs beautifully with the 7×10 or 8.5×11 trim.

Pulp, for the long novelThe highest words-per-page of any of our designs, which is what keeps a very long literary novel inside a sane page count and a sane print cost.

Elite and Leadership, for an argumentExtensive styling for headings, subheadings, quotations, lists and captions, so a structured business or self-help book reads as structured.

Noir, Bard, Asimov, HistorianThriller, fantasy, science fiction and historical fiction, each with the chapter opening and the ornament its shelf expects.

See all sixteen designs and what each one is for →

It Asks Before It Decides

The questions only you can answer.

Most choices are craft, and Cantos simply makes them. A few are yours, and guessing at those is how a book ends up subtly not your own. So after you pick a design and before the build, a card headed Cantos found these items in your book asks only the questions your manuscript actually raises, at most four of them, each arriving with an answer already selected.

What it asks

A contents page, or none? Asked only of a book that reads as a novel and wrote no contents list of its own
Acknowledgements at the front or the back? Asked only when you wrote them before chapter one
Where should each chapter start? A right-hand page always, or either page
The order of your closing pages, shown when there are two or more of them

And what comes back

One click takes the recommendations, so nobody has to have an opinion
A receipt, "What I did to your manuscript", naming what was set, what was converted so it would print, and any line left out, quoting your own words
Nothing is permanent. Every answer can be changed afterwards on Revise, in plain language
You are asked once per book, and the answers survive a refresh, a dropped connection or a return the next day

The Price

Free to build. Paid to publish.

$99.99 a book

Cantos builds your whole book free. You review a proof copy of the finished interior, watermarked and at full print resolution, and payment releases the clean, unwatermarked PDF, DOCX and ePub. No card to start, no deadline on your side, nothing to cancel.

Three books bought together are $199.99, held as a credit balance you spend whenever the next book is ready. Add a cover and the pair is $149.99; interior, cover, copy editing and the Marketing and Book Premiere Kit together are $249.99.

Every part of your book includes three free revisions while you review the proof, and the Revise workspace is open the whole time: tell Cantos what to change in plain words and it rebuilds. After you release the files, further revisions are priced per revision.

If it is not what you wanted after you buy, a flat 50% comes back within 14 days, with no usage counter to game. The full wording lives in the Terms.

Being Straight With You

What this is not.

Not our craftNot a cookbook or picture-book studio

Cookbooks, children's picture books and textbooks are page-by-page art direction rather than typesetting, and we do not take them. Prose non-fiction is another matter entirely: business, memoir, self-help, history and reference all belong here, with their tables, footnotes, callouts and numbered steps intact.

Not offeredNot a back-of-book index

We do not compile one, and we will not imply that we do. A real one is human work: a judgement about ideas, not a list of where words appear. If your book needs one, a professional builds it against finished page numbers, which is exactly what your PDF gives them.

Not a rewriteNot an editor of your prose

The interior sets what you wrote; it does not change it. If you want the words corrected as well, that is the copy edit, and it runs free on your proof, so the book you read is already the corrected one.

One App, The Whole Book

And everything around the pages.

The interior is where a manuscript becomes a book, and it is rarely the only thing an author needs that week. Each of these is built from the same manuscript, in the same project, which is why they agree with one another.

CoverThree complete designs. You choose. Copy EditingCorrections, not rewrites. Marketing KitAround 30 pieces, written from your book. PDF to ManuscriptAn old edition, back as an editable file.

Why We Built This

A note from Tracy Atkins, founder

Fifteen years ago my team and I started BookDesignTemplates.com because first-time authors kept telling us the same thing: I wrote the book, but I have no idea how to make it look like a real one. More than 70,000 authors have used our designs since, and more than 300,000 books have been published with our work inside them.

A template gets you a long way, and for many authors it is still the right answer. But a template cannot see your book. It does not know that chapter nine opens with a letter, that your footnotes cluster in the middle third, or that your subheads were typed in bold because your word processor made that the easy thing to do. Cantos knows, because it reads every word before it sets a single one.

So we built it to show its work and to ask before it guesses, and then we turned the business model around: it builds the whole book first, and you pay only once you have read it. Your words stay yours. We claim no copyright on your book and we never use your manuscript to train AI.

Tracy Atkins, founder

Before You Start

The questions authors ask.

What do I actually receive?

Three files for the same book: the print-ready interior PDF, the editable DOCX master, and the ePub for e-readers. The DOCX is a real Word document in which every style is a real named style, so an edit you make next year keeps the design. They are yours to download and keep, and nothing is locked inside our app.

Do I have to pay to see it?

No. Cantos builds your whole book first, for free, and hands you a proof copy of the finished thing: every page, watermarked, at full print resolution. You read it, you change what you want, and payment simply releases the clean, unwatermarked files. Nothing is a sample and nothing is a mock-up.

What kind of file do I upload?

A Word .docx is taken as it is. An older .doc, an .rtf or an .odt is converted for you automatically, with a line telling you so. A folder of chapter documents is offered as a join, with the order shown first. An Apple Pages export, a PDF or an ePub is turned away with the route out named, and every refusal that has a way forward ends by offering the free manuscript prep template.

Will my footnotes, tables and images survive?

Yes. Footnotes stay on the page their marker is on, endnotes keep their own section, tables are set to the measure of the page, images are placed with their captions, and lists keep their own numbering. Tracked changes are accepted and review comments removed before anything is designed, and Cantos tells you how many of each it found.

Which design should I pick?

Sixteen designs across nine trim sizes, and Cantos suggests the ones that suit your genre. Magnificent is the large-print design, set in generous 14-point type for readers with low vision. You see roughly how many pages your book runs at each trim before you choose, and you can change your mind: swapping the design is a revision, and the proof gives you three of those free on every part of your book.

Does Cantos decide everything on its own?

No. Before it builds, it asks about the handful of decisions that are genuinely yours and that your manuscript actually raises: a contents page or none, acknowledgements at the front or the back, whether chapters open on a right-hand page, and the order of your closing pages. Every question arrives with an answer already chosen, so one click takes the recommendations. Afterwards, the receipt lists what it did to your manuscript, line by line.

Which printers can I use these files with?

Amazon KDP takes the interior PDF, which is the safer of the two, or the DOCX, and takes the ePub for the eBook. IngramSpark takes the print PDF and no Word file of any kind. Lulu takes the print PDF for print and the ePub for the eBook. Never send a printer the watermarked proof copy: it is a picture of every page, not a print file.

What kinds of books do you not take?

Cookbooks, children's picture books and textbooks: all three are page-by-page art direction rather than typesetting, and we would rather say so than sell you a disappointment. Prose non-fiction is very much in scope, including business, memoir, self-help, history and reference, with tables, footnotes, callouts and numbered steps that stay numbered.