Serious Non-Fiction · Tables, Notes, Figures
Tables that collapse into a column of fragments. Footnotes that drift a page away from their markers. Numbered steps that restart at one in the middle of a procedure. A photo caption promoted to a chapter title. Cantos sets the hard parts properly, counts everything it carried, and refuses to hand you a book that lost something on the way. See your whole book free before you pay.
See My Book FreeBusiness, leadership, self-help, how-to, memoir, narrative history, and reference books made of words and tables.
Your book is never used to train AI. Ever.
The subheading is a real heading in the design. The list carries on at seven. The caption sits above its figure and is styled as a caption. Footnote 12 stays on the page its marker is on, as a real footnote you can still edit in Word.
From the team behind BookDesignTemplates.com, trusted by first-time authors since 2011. Real people who have designed books for fifteen years, now working for you.
What Holds Shape
These are the things a non-fiction manuscript is made of, and they are the things that quietly break between a Word file and a printed page.
A table arrives as a table, fitted to the text column of the trim you chose and set in the design’s own typography. Tables in a foreword, an appendix or a glossary reach the book exactly as tables in chapter four do, and a one-cell table, which is nearly always a box drawn around a paragraph, is set as what it really is.
Footnotes stay footnotes, on the page their marker is on, renumbered for the new pagination. Endnotes stay endnotes in their own section with their markers intact. Both remain real notes in the editable Word master, so they keep behaving like notes the next time you edit.
Each list restarts where it should and continues where it should. A procedure that runs one to nine does not begin again halfway through, and the next list does not pick up at ten. Bullets, sub-levels and their indentation survive the journey.
Nothing Lost
A formatter that loses a table is worse than one that never had it, because you find out in the proof, or worse, in the printed copy. So the count is an invariant here, not an aspiration.
Which Non-Fiction
An honest boundary is worth more than a hopeful yes. Here is ours.
Before It Builds
Non-fiction has conventions, and Cantos knows them: chapters opening on the right-hand page is the traditional look and the recommendation for non-fiction and memoir; reference material first among the closing pages, thanks near the end, About the Author last. You are asked about each one your book actually raises, every question already carries its recommendation, and one button takes them all. Afterwards, every one of them can be changed on Revise in plain words.
The Price
One book, sixteen designs, nine trim sizes, print-ready PDF plus ePub plus the editable Word master. Interior and cover together, $149.99; interior, cover, copy editing and the marketing kit, $249.99.
You see it before you buy it. Cantos builds the whole book free, tables, notes, figures and all, and shows you a watermarked, full-resolution proof copy of the finished thing. Payment releases the clean files. No card up front, no trial to cancel, and a book that is held for a fidelity failure is never charged for.
Refunds: a flat 50% within 14 days, self-service, on every purchase; a full refund withholds the files it paid for. The whole policy is in our Terms.
Being Straight With You
If your manuscript already carries Word index marks, Cantos honors yours and recomputes every page number from the finished pages, which is exactly what a reset book needs. It does not build an index out of nothing, and an author who was told otherwise would find that out at the worst possible moment.
Cookbooks, children’s picture books and heavily illustrated reference books are laid out spread by spread by a human being. That is a different craft and a different price, and pretending otherwise would cost you a book.
Formatting does not touch your prose. If you want the sentences read, copy editing is its own component, in three modes, and it runs free while your proof is being built so the book is typeset from the corrected manuscript.
One App, The Whole Book
The interior is the hard part. It is not the only part, and none of the rest needs another account.
Why We Built This
Fiction is generous to a formatter. It is chapters and paragraphs, and almost anything that can set type can get through it. Non-fiction is not generous. It is a table that has to stay a table, a footnote that has to stay on its own page, a numbered procedure that means nothing if it restarts, and a caption that must not be mistaken for a chapter title.
Those are the failures we have spent the longest on, because they are the ones authors discover late. A missing table is not a typo. A business book is your credibility in someone’s hands, and it has to look like the work it represents.
So the counting is built in, and a book that cannot be proved complete does not get delivered and does not get charged for. We would rather tell you than quietly hand you a book with a hole in 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
Yes. A table arrives as a real table, sized to the text column of your trim, in the typography of the design you chose, and it is counted. Tables in an appendix or a foreword reach the book the same way tables in chapter four do. A one-cell table, which is usually a box drawn around a paragraph, is set as what it actually is.
Footnotes stay footnotes, on the page their marker is on, renumbered for the new pagination. Endnotes stay endnotes in their own section. They are real notes in the finished Word file too, not lines of text typed at the bottom of a page, so they keep working when you edit.
Yes, and each list starts where it should. A procedure that runs one to nine in chapter two does not restart at one halfway through, and the next list in chapter three does not carry on from nine. Bullets and sub-levels keep their own indentation.
Your images are carried through, centered, and sized so they cannot run past the margins of the trim you chose, including pictures saved in the old Word format that most tools drop silently. A caption is set as a caption in the design's own caption style, placed above its figure, and it is never mistaken for a chapter title.
No. Cantos works out which bold or capitalized lines are really your subheadings, by looking at how they behave across the whole book rather than one at a time, and sets them in the design's own subheading style. If your own prose uses the same signal, it is left alone.
Not from nothing, and we will not pretend otherwise. If your manuscript already carries Word index marks, Cantos honors yours and recomputes the page numbers from the finished pages, which is exactly what a reformatted book needs. A typed index from an old layout carries page numbers that are wrong the moment the book is reset, so it is set aside rather than printed as if it were true.
Text-forward non-fiction is what this is built for: business and leadership, self-help and personal growth, how-to and instructional work, memoir, narrative history, and reference books made of words and tables. Cookbooks, children's picture books and heavily illustrated reference books and textbooks need a designer laying out every spread, and those we honestly decline.
Most books take minutes. A dense reference book with hundreds of notes, tables and figures can take up to an hour, and that is the work being done rather than a queue. You do not have to wait on the page; Cantos emails you when it is ready to look at.
Then you do not get the book. Cantos counts your tables, images and notes going in and coming out, rebuilds when the two disagree, and if they still disagree it stops, tells us, and charges you nothing. Nothing is quietly dropped, and the finished book comes with a plain list of everything Cantos did to your manuscript.
Tables, notes, figures and all. Read the whole thing before you decide whether it was worth paying for.
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