Especially if writing nonfiction, you’ll likely want to include artwork inside your book. Such artwork will help better illustrate your points (pun intended). Novelists, as well, might wish to use artwork such as illustrations if creating books for teens or young adults.

There are several different types of artwork that could be used in a book:
• Photographs – Pictures taken by a camera can be useful in presenting real-life examples of what is discussed in the text.
• Illustrations – Sometimes photographs don’t work well, such as showing a picture of a heart when a drawing pointing out the organ’s parts would better serve readers.
• Technical drawings – These include standard graphs, tables and charts to help readers visualize data.
• Infographics – Rather than being straight charts, these “factoids” combine simple, easy-to-read text with a photo or illustration.

Art should appear with text known as captions (In the newspaper and magazine business, they often are called cutlines.). Captions shouldn’t state the obvious, such as what any reader can plainly see is in the picture, but instead should add more information to the picture by elaborating on it. For example, if the picture were of a monkey in a zoo exhibit, don’t write “monkey in a zoo exhibit” but instead build upon the photo, such as “Today’s zoo exhibits try to mimic the natural environment of the kept animal.”

When including captions in your book, use a different typeface and point size from your main text so that they stand apart. Often boldface or a font thinner than the main text is used. Sometimes captions are a dark gray to help distinguish them from the main text. When deciding how your captions will appear, look at how a variety of books approach them and decide which works best for your purposes.

Unless you’re an artist or have experience with design, you’ll probably want to contract someone to make these various pieces of artwork for you. While simple tables can be made in Microsoft Word, creating any of the others can be time consuming and downright frustrating for the uninitiated. To a little lesser degree, the same goes with photographs. You probably have experience taking photographs but if lacking the technical expertise to manipulate them to improve such features as their coloring, brightness or contrast, you run the risk of having poorly framed shots and photos that are too dark or too washed out once they’re printed.