: Re: Are illustrations in novels frowned upon? Lately I've been thinking that I don't know of a single novel that has illustrations in it. I've tried finding out the reason why, and came across

@Annie587

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Many good points here. I won't repeat what others have said. Let me just add ...

Color illustrations are particularly a problem. Printing a color page is more expensive than printing a black & white page. So if there are color pictures in the book, do we print the whole book in "color", when in fact for 90% of the pages the only colors are black and white? That would greatly multiply printing costs. Or do we print just the pages that actually have color in a color process? But then we have to insert those pages into the right places in the black & white pages. Complicated and error prone.

I once wrote a software package for the Air Force that read PDF files of their technical manuals and separated out color pages and fold-out pages from the plain black & white, routed them to separate printers, and then produced what they called a "reproduction assembly sheet" that gave the printing people instructions on how to put it all back together. It was a gigantic pain for everyone.

Furthermore, as someone else briefly mentioned, even for an eBook or a print-on-demand book, you have to figure out where the illustrations go in the book. I've written several POD books that had charts and diagrams -- not pictures but they presented the same problem: You had to figure out what page to put them on and where on the page and how to flow text around them. This is a gigantic pain in layout. Then you edit the text, add one word or fix a spelling mistake, and the placement of all these illustrations could be ruined and you have to do it all over again. Microsoft Word says it automatically flows illustrations with the text. If this really works, I haven't figured out the trick.

So putting illustrations in a book is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive. That doesn't mean you never do it, but it means you should think carefully about it.

I wrote a book on database design where I included a number of diagrams and some cartoons to lighten the mood, and I thought it was worth the effort. But it was a lot of effort.

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