Basic Book Formatting for Indie Publishing

Even if you have an unfinished manuscript, it is not too early to think about how you are going to get your book formatted for print and eBook publishing. I could have saved myself a lot of time if I had known the following:

If you are writing your book in, say, Microsoft Word, don't spend a lot of time formatting page size, margins, page numbering, etc. The reason is, you are more than likely to need to reformat the whole shebang anyway, so much of your MS Word formatting either won't work in another format, will be unnecessary because it will need to be done differently anyway, or was not required.

Here's why:

Let's say you decide you want IngramSpark's print on demand (POD) service to print and distribute your book. (Not a bad choice, since they are a big outfit, with worldwide facilities and distribution, although cheaper printers are out there). But you are not going to get much support from Ingram unless your are using Adobe's latest InDesign desktop publishing software to create your file; Ingram says "We cannot offer technical support with file creation or provide cover templates for any of the following programs: Microsoft Word* / Microsoft Publisher, Adobe PageMaker, QuarkXPress 6.5 & older versions, InDesign CS2 & older versions." Ingram also requires all print book files to be submitted in pdf format. This information was enough to make me swallow hard, shell out $30 per month for cloud-based access to InDesign, and spend the time to learn the program. Knowing that Ingram provides a book cover template in InDesign was enough to convince me I would be ahead in the long run.

Learning InDesign: This software is daunting at first look because it can do so much, and therefore it has a lot of complexity. Do not be discouraged. Other than cover design, which Ingram's free InDesign template will simplify, you need only learn a few basics of how to use their layout and typography tools. These are all covered in a lot of online tutorials. It will still require a time commitment from you, but if you are at all comfortable with MS Word, it is doable. In fact, once you layout your book page size, specify margins and page numbering, and define a style for your chapter headings and your text sections, you can import your MS Word manuscript text and watch it automatically reformat to fit your InDesign book layout. It gets easier with practice and is actually fun to watch it happen.

So if you are using Ingram, it does not make a lot of sense to get too fancy with your MS Word layout. You will be redoing it anyway. The same is true if you plan to upload you manuscript to Amazon for a Kindle eBook. You can upload a Word document, but all you need is standardized chapter styles, page breaks between chapters, and a table of contents. If you have page numbers on each page and on your table of contents, you will just have to strip these out, because they will never coordinate with what a "page" is on a Kindle reader or any mobile device, for example. More on this when I get to blogging about my eBook experience.

For now, just do a little poking around and think about what book print format you will really need to go with a certain printer. You can save a lot of work, because you will have a better idea of what you need to do to get to where you want to end up.

Look for more tips as they come to me.

In the meantime, stay inspired.