![]() ![]() The print-on-demand arm of Amazon, CreateSpace, offers templates for free. I recommend using an MS Word template, just so the basic formatting settings are already in place. ![]() Personally, I found the 6″ x 9″ size too floppy, so I went with the next-largest 5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″ size, but this is a “your preference may vary” choice. Tip: Handle paperback books of these different sizes to test the feel of each. This results in cheaper “author” copies and means we can either charge less or take a larger royalty. The fewer pages in our book, the cheaper it will cost to print it. The more words on each page, the fewer pages our formatted book will be. Tip: The larger the page size, the more words we can fit on a page. From what I’ve seen, the most commonly used page dimensions for trade paperbacks are 6″ x 9″, 5 1/2″ x 8 1/2″, and 5″ x 8″. Trade paperbacks are larger than the mass-market paperbacks that many of us are used to. The print-on-demand options for indie authors will generally produce what are called trade paperback sizes. Decide on the Physical Size of Our Book:.So it’s best to follow these steps in order: For example, if we change our mind about our font or margins after we started dealing with nitpicky things, everything we did to fix issues will need to be redone. I know MS Word inside and out, so formatting in Word works for me.Įach decision step will affect the layout of our book in the later steps. There’s no wrong answer, only what works for us. Still others format within Adobe InDesign. Others complete their editing steps-and even their formatting steps-within Scrivener. Personally, I draft in Scrivener and export to MS Word for editing and formatting. So maybe our first decision is figuring out what programs we want to use. Note: These steps assume that our manuscript is in Microsoft Word and that we’re going to be doing our formatting in MS Word as well. 8 Decision Steps for Print Formatting in MS Word *smile* But if we learn the basics of print formatting, we’ll know which of these decisions do matter to us, and we might be able to make sure we get what we want, no matter who does our formatting. Obviously, not all self-publishers are as much of a perfectionist control-freak as I am that they’d care about these little details. Also, most of us won’t sell many print copies, and anything we can do to save money helps to make offering a print version a no-brainer. If we leave those decisions up to someone else, they may make decisions different from how we would. Print formatting requires countless detail-oriented decisions, and for that reason alone, we might want to take control if we self-publish. It doesn’t require us to follow the different header or footer rules. It doesn’t require us to worry about hyphenation or come up with a policy for how to handle widows and orphans. It doesn’t require us to decide on a font or font size. Even the highly successful Hugh Howey likes doing his own print formatting.Įbook formatting-aside from the technical nature-is relatively straightforward. However, many of those same authors (including me) decide that print formatting might be something they can handle. Many indie authors hand off their ebook formatting to someone else because of the technical issues, such as HTML coding, etc. My previous experimenting helped me finish print formatting my entire book in half a day (and that’s with me being nitpicky about everything in this post). So even if we’re not ready for print publishing yet, it doesn’t hurt to think about these issues in advance. I’m too much of a newbie to write up The Perfectionist’s Guide to Print Formatting for those of us self-publishing, but maybe this will be a good start.Īs I’ve written about before, we can practice print publishing with CreateSpace. I love how my print edition turned out, and since I did it myself, I figured I’d share a few pointers and highlight a few potential problems. ![]() Yay! There’s nothing like being able to hold your book in your hands to make this “being published” thing feel real. This past weekend I shared a photo on Facebook of my box of print books for Treasured Claim. ![]()
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