Greetings Cartographers,

I'm looking for some advice from those of you with experience creating maps for novels and other books. I don't really have much experience in the print world, especially when it comes to sizing. How do you figure out how to size your map?

Let me elaborate just a bit. I recently received a commission from an author that hopes to go through the publishing process for their book in the future. However, they don't really know much about sizing themselves. I did some quick Googling and found an article about "standard" book sizes in the US and the UK (https://kunzonpublishing.com/2017/07...lf-publishers/), and asked the client which size they predicted their book might appear it. They gave me a soft guess of UK B-format (130mm x 198mm (5.12″ x 7.80″)).

So my questions are this:

1. When you receive a commission for a novel, how do you determine the size of your map? This map will be portrait on one page, which makes it a bit easier.

2. But what about if your map is landscape across two facing pages? How do you manage the gutter, or where the pages fold together?

3. And finally, if you're in a situation like this, where the client isn't 100% confident of their page size, how would you choose a size for your map? There's also the case of maps that appear in books of multiple sizes (hardcover, then paperback, for example). How do you manage that?

Thanks in advance, I really value having such great cartographers brains to pick.