#9 in an occasional series on writing non-fiction
Your book may have no illustrations beyond cover art, but much non-fiction relies on illustration to support the text. In cases of say a book on fine art or photography, the text can be there largely to support the illustrations. The book may require photographs, maps, diagrams, graphics and original artworks to fulfil its promise.
Large publishers will often take responsibility for sourcing and creating illustrations or match you up with a designer or illustrator. Most of the time it is up to you, and from the outset you may have brought in an illustrator or designer to collaborate on the project. Illustrations add cost, especially if in colour and publishers may baulk at the number you propose to use. You are unlikely to be able to bulk up the book with as many illustrations you can find, and from an early stage you should plan for the minimum number required for the book to serve its purpose.
As with text, you should choose illustrations to suit your audience, so a book on American jets of the 1950s aimed at aeroplane buffs should contain lots of pictures of American jets. When choosing illustrations consider how they will look in the finished book, taking account of its format and quality of the printing. Will the detail in your diagram vanish in a A5 booklet? Will the map be hard to read if it spreads over the page fold? Will the black-and-white printing process do justice to that colour artwork?
Unless you are creating the illustrations yourself remember there are likely to be reproduction fees on all images still in copyright, and these can quickly stack up. Copyright and image rights is an increasingly fraught area, so care is required. Simply because an image is available on the internet does not mean it is free to use – and it is probably of too low a resolution to reproduce in a book. A publishing contract will require the author to confirm that no copyright has been infringed on any illustrations supplied, and it will be often up to the author to secure the relevant permissions (and be able to prove it in court!). When obtaining rights to an image, ensure you also have permission to use the image in promotional work, on your website, social media and during talks. Don’t paint yourself into a corner by having to get permissions all over again for reprints or second editions of your work.
Ideally the illustrations and photographs will have been created by you or agreeable family members or the institution for which you are working, in which case the copyright issue falls away. Remember the copyright is held by the artist, photographer or draftsperson who created the image not by whoever owns it. However, if you are using works owned by another person or an institution such as a museum that either allowed you to copy the work or supplied you with a copy will need to acknowledge them too, for example:
If you are reliant on a local museum or specialist society for your images, you may be able to reach an agreement with them to avoid per-image reproduction fees. Possibly they will be happy to accept a dozen copies of your book they can sell in their gift shop in lieu of a fee. They may even have their own monograph series that your book can fit into. Books produced for educational or charitable purposes can secure a reduction in fees, but if an institution is going to spare staff time to source pictures and let you have copies, expect to be charged no matter how worthy your project.
In some cases, you will need to adapt or re-draw an illustration already published elsewhere, possibly because you do not have the original or you wish to amend or improve upon it. The convention here is to credit the original illustrator “after Bloggs” but be wary if Bloggs is still alive and likely to object to you plagiarising his work. Consider approaching the original author for their blessing if easily reached.
If you are producing works for children, a lot of illustration will be required. The Dorling Kindersley series contains good examples. As with writing the text, selecting or producing illustrations for children does not give licence to take less care. If producing hand-illustrations or cartoons, remember this is a non-fiction book so detail you include should be accurate. For example, in your Tim and Suzy go to Ancient Rome the pottery cups they drink out of should be based on authentic Roman cups.
Give a temporary catalogue number to every illustration you are considering using, even the ones you need but don’t have yet. That photo of the Great Wall of China may ultimately be figure 7 in your travel guide to China, but for the moment it’s TEMP 1. Your early draft of the book won’t refer to fig 7 but to fig [TEMP 1]. I put all such notes in the text in square brackets so I can find and delete them from the final cleaned-up manuscript. This will help when you decide to slip in that photo of a guy with a rickshaw TEMP 47 as figure 7, meaning that the remaining 110 images in the book will all be shunted along one.
Temporary numbers help you again when the publisher says they can only include fifty illustrations, maximum. For Roman Pottery from York I wanted to illustrate a thousand Roman pots but was told we could afford only two thirds that number. Whilst writing my book on artist Peter le Vasseur I amassed a catalogue of 250 of his works, of which I could select no more than a quarter for the book.
Write a draft caption for each illustration you may use: TEMP 19 Warriors of Xian. I write this directly into my text where the illustration needs to appear. So between paragraph breaks in the tourist guide to China will appear:
Fig. [TEMP 19] then:
[caption; fig. TEMP19 Warriors of Xian]’.
In some cases the caption will be an extended discussion of the image, taking up several lines. Try to avoid repeating information in both caption and main text; you can save space and improve the flow of the book by deciding where to best present it. The discussion within the caption could include information too trivial to include in the main text, or technical data that would otherwise break up the flow of your prose. For example:
Before the text is ready to be sent to the publishers, the captions need to be extracted into a file of their own. If you are self-publishing and doing the layout yourself, you will not need to do this. In either case, make an illustration list:
[caption; fig TEMP 19 Warriors of Xian. The figure on the left was originally holding a crossbow made of bronze whilst the one on the right held a halberd].
Fig.1 Map of China [TEMP 19]
Fig. 2 Mao Tse Tung at the May Day parade 1961 (by permission of the Associated Press) [TEMP 64]
And so on. This will serve as a checklist that you have all these images available at the correct resolution, appropriate format for reproduction and copyright approved.
Save this version of the manuscript so you always have it to refer to, then save your text to a new filename and clean it up by removing the captions. You may at this point be able to write (fig.1) at the relevant parts of the text when referring to a picture or you may still have to write (fig.NN) for now and add the figure number during editing if the number and order of images is still undecided. It is very easy, for me at least, to muddle figure numbers up and not spot this during the proofing stage.
Illustrations also need an editorial eye before the book is deemed finished. Does that diagram need a scale, or that map need a north point? It is easy for digital images to be accidentally flipped so that they are a mirror image of the original, and if you did not intend this as a stylistic choice it is worth checking for. Cropped, straightened and re-sized images are also worth checking to see that the result is what you intended – and that you haven’t inadvertently included the unprocessed version instead. Make sure you have the correct format files ready for the publisher, and not the thumbnails you produced for indexing purposes or the mock-ups.
All this is a series of mechanical tasks which take time and diligence but are essential parts of bringing your illustrated non-fiction work to publication.