Figures and Images Guide
General
You should report the number of figures, images, and tables in your final manuscript on the manuscript submission checklist.
Being intentional about the figures/images included in your manuscript is important for a few reasons:
Figures can negatively impact readability by interrupting the flow of text, requiring the reader to flip pages back and forth, or otherwise making the book unnecessarily confusing. Getting text and images to interact seamlessly is a significant design challenge, and there’s not always a good solution. Further, once images are converted to black and white (as they typically are) and printed at the resolution and size necessary to get them into a typical academic book format, they may be too grainy or difficult to decipher.
Having many images can significantly increase the printing costs of a book, especially if they are in color and/or demand a different type of paper, etc. The Press normally prints figures in black and white, unless there are special considerations made in advance. Being intentional about image choices is one way for us to control the printing costs for our books, allowing us to produce more content. It’s also important to know that permission costs are the author’s responsibility, which means there may be costs on your end to consider as well.
Questions for you to consider
How many images can or should you include?
There is no single answer here, as each book has its own needs based on content and scholarly discipline. As a general rule, we encourage you to keep the image count as low as possible. For most books, this means figures should be kept at 25 or fewer. What’s most important to us is the specific vision of each book we publish, and we understand that some books are significantly more visual in nature and require a more extensive collection of illustrations.
When should you use images?
In a typical scholarly book, we encourage our authors to think of images as primary sources or evidence. You could ask whether the inclusion of an image significantly strengthens the argument(s) in a particular passage, or the book as a whole. Does the image offer context that would be difficult to explain only with words? Does the text engage with the image (e.g., close reading)? Or is the image simply something “extra” that could be accessed elsewhere and/or doesn’t advance the discussion? If the image isn’t serving the argument of your book, you might not need to include it.
Additional Questions
Authors with any questions or issues, should submit their questions to the Press at westpointpress@westpoint.edu