The "Read Sample" Test: 5 Formatting Red Flags That Signal Amateur

Your cover got the click. Congratulations. That's the hard part, right?

Not quite.

Every major retailer lets readers preview your book before buying. Amazon calls it "Read Sample." Apple has "Preview." These features exist for one reason: to let readers confirm that what's inside matches what's on the outside.

And here's the uncomfortable truth: this is where many self-published books lose the sale.

Readers may not consciously know why a book feels off, but they sense it immediately. Something about the page just looks... cheap. Within seconds, they've clicked away. No purchase. No review. No word-of-mouth.

The culprit? Interior formatting mistakes that traditionally published books almost never make.

The good news is these errors are fixable once you know what to look for.

Red Flag #1: Margins That Suffocate the Text

Open any major publisher's book and you'll notice generous white space around the text block. It's not wasted space. It's breathing room that makes reading comfortable.

Amateur formatting often crams text too close to the edges, particularly the inner margin (the gutter). This creates two problems: the book feels claustrophobic, and on physical copies, readers have to crack the spine just to read words that disappear into the binding.

Professional interior margins typically run 0.75" to 1" on the outside edges, with an even larger gutter margin. When margins are too tight, the text block dominates the page in a way that feels subtly wrong to anyone who's spent time with traditionally published books.

Red Flag #2: Times New Roman

Nothing announces "I wrote this in Microsoft Word and exported it" quite like Times New Roman.

It's not that TNR is an ugly font. It's fine for documents. But it was designed for newspapers in the 1930s to be legible at small sizes in narrow columns. It was never meant for book interiors.

Professional book designers typically choose serifs built specifically for extended reading: Garamond, Caslon, Baskerville, Sabon, or Minion Pro. These fonts have subtle design features that reduce eye fatigue across hundreds of pages.

When a reader sees Times New Roman in the preview, they're not thinking "what a classic font choice." They're thinking, consciously or not, that no one with publishing experience touched this book.

Red Flag #3: Inconsistent Chapter Openings

Flip through any bestseller and you'll notice that every chapter opening looks identical: same font treatment for the chapter number, same spacing before the first paragraph, same drop cap or small caps styling (if used), same starting position on the page.

Amateur books often have chapter openings that drift. Chapter one might start mid-page, chapter two near the top. One chapter has extra space after the heading, another doesn't. The chapter titles shift between centered and left-aligned, or toggle between bold and regular weight.

These inconsistencies accumulate. Each small variation whispers to the reader that this book wasn't professionally produced. By chapter three, they've absorbed enough of these micro-signals to form an opinion, even if they couldn't articulate exactly what felt off.

Red Flag #4: Walls of Text and Bad Spacing

Line spacing (leading) and paragraph formatting might sound like minor details. They're not.

When lines are packed too tightly, the eye struggles to track from the end of one line back to the beginning of the next. When they're too loose, the page looks sparse and the text loses cohesion. Professional typesetters typically use leading that's 120-145% of the font size. Enough room to breathe, not so much that the page falls apart.

Then there's the question of paragraph breaks. Books use either first-line indents or block paragraphs with space between. Never both, and ideally not neither. Many amateur layouts either indent and add space (redundant and cluttered) or forget to differentiate paragraphs at all (creating walls of text that exhaust the eye).

Red Flag #5: Orphans, Widows, and Awkward Breaks

Here's where the real craft of book design shows itself.

A "widow" is the last line of a paragraph stranded alone at the top of a new page. It has a past but no future. An "orphan" is the first line of a paragraph abandoned at the bottom of a page, with the rest continuing overleaf. It has no past. Both are considered amateurish in professional publishing.

Worse still are chapter breaks that leave just a line or two at the bottom of a page before a new chapter starts, or hyphenated words that break across pages. Professional formatters manually adjust spacing, tracking, and page breaks to eliminate these issues.

When readers see orphans and widows scattered throughout a preview, they're seeing evidence that no one reviewed this book page by page before publication. The author just hit "export" and uploaded whatever came out.

The Standard You're Competing Against

Here's what self-publishing authors sometimes forget: your book isn't being judged against other self-published books. It's sitting on a digital shelf next to Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster titles.

Readers don't grade on a curve. They don't think "well, this looks rough, but it's probably self-published, so I'll lower my expectations." They just move on to the next book.

The readers who do buy despite visible quality issues are primed to be critical. They went in with lowered expectations, and they'll be looking for the content to disappoint them too.

How to Fix It

The mistakes above aren't hard to correct. You just need the right tools.

Dedicated book formatting software like Vellum (Mac only) or Atticus (cross-platform) handles most of these issues automatically. They use professionally designed templates that take care of margins, font choices, chapter styling, and paragraph formatting out of the box. If your budget allows for the upfront cost, these tools pay for themselves in time saved and quality gained.

Professional formatters can be found through marketplaces like Reedsy or 99designs. For authors who'd rather focus on writing than production, hiring a specialist ensures your interior matches industry standards. Expect to pay $100-300 for a straightforward novel.

If you're formatting manually, use a style guide and be obsessive about consistency. Create master paragraph styles and apply them uniformly. Print proof copies and flip through them with fresh eyes, page by page, looking specifically for the red flags above.

The Real Test

Before you publish, try this: open the "Read Sample" preview of three or four bestsellers in your genre. Then open yours.

Set aside what you know about your own book. Ignore the words. Just look at the pages as objects. Shapes of text on white space.

Does yours look like it belongs with the others?

If not, you know what to fix.