Book Formatting for Authors: Books for Authors, #1

By Craig A. Price Jr.

Want the interior of your book to look as great as your favorite books on the bookshelf...

Are you on a budget?

Learn how to navigate Microsoft Word to format your book properly so it stands out ... in a good way!

One of the hardest things for self-published authors to do is stand out. With great formatting, readers won't be able to tell the difference between your book and a book on the shelf!

Craig A. Price Jr. was the president of the Mobile Writers Guild for several years and worked with a lot of Indie authors. He saw a wide range of poorly and well formatted books. He wanted to create this guide to help people from making some of the mistakes he found in new self-published authors books.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Craig Price
• Release date: Sep 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393641117

Book preview

Introduction

Why is book formatting important? You want your best product in front of the reader. I’m the former President of a local writers group in my area: The Mobile Writers Guild. I was president there for several years, and so I see a lot of books, a lot of self-published books. It baffles me when I see a self-published book and the formatting is terrible. Many authors are proud of their books, and they don’t understand how bad it looks. This has nothing to do with the story. I’ve even had some small publishers get mad at me for politely suggesting they clean it up and make it look better, to make it look as good as a book from the shelf. It’s fine because it meets CreateSpace standards, or nowadays, KDP Print Standards. Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t want my books to meet Independent Print standards, I want my books to exceed publishers standards. What many people don’t understand, is standards are in place for what you have to have as a minimum. If you meet standards for you to pay a printer to print your book, you’re well below what Publishers would consider standards. I want my books to look as good as a Stephen King book, heck, I want it to look even better.

Top things that I have noticed:

Tabs. Tabs are bad. Don’t use them. Use proper indention instead. And don’t use publishing standards of 0.5. That is ONLY for submissions to publishers, and because they are used to reading 8x11 inch pieces of paper. You should set your indentions from 0.25-0.3. I prefer 0.25.

Double-Spaced. No. Just, no. You’ll be paying more for your book, and it looks terrible. No published book should be double-spaced. You’ll want it from 1.0-1.5, depending on your genre, or mainly, depending on the age group. Younger readers have more white space.

White space between paragraphs. Don’t do it. The only time you do this is with non-fiction where you don’t have paragraph indentions. The white space is a breather for your eyes, so you know you’re slightly changing topics, usually between paragraphs. Fiction uses indentions, as does narrative non-fiction, but informational non-fiction uses blank lines instead of indentions.

Gutter. This is the section at the spine of the book. Make sure the gutter isn’t too small,