7 Things to Know About Book Formatting

You may not be the one designing the final version of the inside of your book. I know I've never done it, but a little knowledge can help you know what you're looking for in your book formatting. Hire the right designer for you and get a beautifully designed book that creates an amazing experience for your reader. If you're wondering all about book formatting basics, then this video is for you. Hey, I'm Julie the Book Broad, the founder of a fabulous full service marketing focused self publishing services company, Book Launchers. I'm not going to teach you how to format your book, but if you have patience and an eagle eye for design and grammar, there are programs out there that will help you to do the job. Atticus is new on the scene and has potential to make layout simple for books that can work on a templated format. It's fairly inexpensive, works on Windows or Mac, and is improving every day. I wrote my latest book on the Atticus software, but I had to export it to go to the editors. They don't have collaboration feature yet and we'll be designing the book in Adobe InDesign. And by we I mean my team. But designing your own book can potentially save you money, but it's really hard work to do really well. Book formatting can be crazy complicated, especially if you're adding figures, graphics or images. Most complex and more impressive book designs come to Life using Adobe InDesign. If you care about having a design that looks as good as that bestseller you're going to be competing with, save yourself the hassle. Skip the simplified beginner software and hire someone who can do the job really, really exceptionally well. Let's just jump in and talk about some of the details you need to know, including file types, font choices and best practices for a nonfiction book. Ready for your five tips? Number one Know the file formats each platform accepts specific file formats, although you don't have to worry about Mobi anymore. It's all EPUB for the E readers now, just like in the contest between Betamax and vhs. Goodbye Betamax. VHS emerged the winner and so too has epub. But you do need to create the correct kind of file for the distributors or retailers who you choose to carry your book. There's a lot of file types epub, PDF, Docx, kpf, HTML, txt, Multi, Touchbooks. Trying to keep them all straight can make you go crazy. Instead of trying to figure out which platform wants what, you need to remember two things. If you're creating an ebook, you need an EPUB file. It's accepted. Basically all ebook marketplaces and is a highly standardized format within most formatting programs. When it comes to a printed book, every print on demand platform accepts a PDF file number 2. From file types to formatting guidelines, this is where a pro has it covered and you can sit back and relax. But mistakes mean annoying and time consuming rejections and alterations that can delay and even mess up launch dates completely. So make sure you know the specs before you upload. One of the first decisions you'll need to make when you start the design stage is the trim size of your book. A smaller trim size will result in a higher page count. If you wrote a long book and you want to lower your page count, it can help to pick a bigger trim size. If you wrote a shorter book and you need to buff it up, a smaller trim size will do it. The standard trim size varies from one publisher to another based on your own preferences and genre. Typical size ranges are 5 by 8 to 6 by 9. Trade paperbacks, which is what you see in bookstores, usually measure 5 by 8 or 5 point by 8. Hardcovers tend to be more towards the 6x9 or 6.25 by 9.5. Other popular sizes include 4.25 by 6.87 for mass market paperback. Other popular sizes are listed over here. The 6.625 times 10.187 is more common for comic books. If you're not sure what size is best for your book, keep get yourself a ruler and head to your bookshelf or library. Find some books that are similar to yours or what you want yours to look like and measure them and then pick your comparable trim size. Once you've got your trim size picked out, you need to dive into the meat of your book. Well, not actual meat. I'm a vegetarian, but we're talking front matter, main body and back matter number three. The front matter in particular contains mandatory elements for your book. Without them, you won't be able to distribute through mainstream channels. The front matter, obviously, at the beginning of your book it consists of the first pages. Most books have a minimum of a title page and a copyright page. Nonfiction books usually have more front matter than a fiction book. Aside from the mandatory title and copyright page, you may want to consider adding some optional sections such as a foreword, a preface, or acknowledgments. We've talked about all that before, so stick to the end and I'll hook you up with what you need to know and about the front matter of your book, because it's pretty important stuff. The main body is your book content, and I'll come back to that in a sec. The back matter is, you guessed it, made up of the final pages in the back of your book. I know the publishing industry isn't very creative when it comes to naming things, right? Just like your front matter. What you include here depends on personal preference and the type of book it is. At a minimum, you'll want an acknowledgments page and your about the author page. Some other options to consider are an afterword index, glossary or even discussion questions, or a book sales page. Lucky for you, I also have a video on back matter, and I'll include that at the end too. The body of your book is where the majority of formatting focus lies. Not only do you need an appealing design to intrigue your readers, you also want them to have a smooth ride from page to page. The more professional and easy to read design, the happier your readers will be. So the next tips are going to be some of the important considerations for that proper interior formatting Number four Margins and Bleeds the blank areas around the edges of your pages. Well, those are margins and they're more important than you think. Just like when you sit in a bad chair at a theater to watch a great movie, the experience is lessened by that horrible chair and the raging back pain. Not having white space or having bad formatting or can make even the greatest read much less enjoyable for a reader. For nonfiction books, a 1 inch margin will be your best bet. You have enough room to add page numbers and a header without things getting too crowded, along with enough white space to keep the eyes from getting tired. Now, despite the gory name, a bleed doesn't mean your book is in pain or bleeding. A bleed is a small border that's added when there's an image or a color that extends to the edge of the page. It helps prevent printing and trimming errors that can cause unexpected white lines along the edge of your page. A designer will know what to do to keep things clean here. Most bleeds will be set at 0.125 inches. Number five headers and footers I can't kick up my feet when it comes to headers, footers and page numbers, you get to have a bit more flexibility. Headers go in your margins. Think of them as your navigational tool for your reader. You want to keep the reader informed of their current location with elements like page number title, author name and or chapter title. Typically, the book title goes on the left hand page and the title of the current chapter is on the right hand page. Footers can be found in the bottom margin of your book, unlike your header. These usually only include the page number in nonfiction, though footnotes can also go here. Page numbers go in either your header or footer, not both. Front and back matter don't get page numbers, but you can use Roman numerals if you'd like. Again, it's your choice. It's a matter of preference. Number six Fonts are also a matter of preference, but the wrong choice will turn off your readers and maybe even give them a headache. Me personally, I only know when I don't like a font, not what makes a font the right font, so I trust my design team for that. The tricky part is that you might not be able to tell which fonts work and which doesn't which when you look at them separately. It's all about the fonts working together. Remember, your number one priority is to create an easy and comfortable reading experience. You want movie theater recliner comfort, not old fold up chair discomfort. Some safe picks here. Try Joanna MT Garamond, Bakersfield, or even the old trusty reliable Times New Roman. After all, if it's not broken, don't fix it. Number Indents, Spaces and Rags Yep, rags. In fiction or narrative nonfiction, the first line of a paragraph should be indented, unless it's the first paragraph of a chapter or after a scene break. For other nonfiction, another option is to forego indenting the first line of paragraphs and add a space between paragraphs instead. And there's actually an interesting reason behind this. Since nonfiction books contain a lot of information that readers need to process, adding spaces between the paragraphs actually lets them take a mental breather and think through the content they just read. You'll need to make sure there's enough space between lines so your reader can keep their place. The standard across the board is usually 1.3 line spacing, but you can go a little smaller, down to 1.2 for nonfiction. A great designer will also need to make sure to keep your pages safe from rags, widows and orphans. Rags occur when a left or right alignment results in an uneven margin. That's the rag on one side of the page. A justify alignment for body text will add hyphens to some of your long words to make them fit nicely into the margins and will keep a rag from happening with very slight adjustments to your margins, line height or letter spacing. You can also help avoid widows and orphans, those stray words that become detached from their paragraphs or pages. They're all by themselves. Some smart tweaks will keep your book orphan and Widow free and looking clean and professional. Those are the fundamental design elements and the seven tips I promised, but we haven't talked about one important design thing yet. Any idea what that is? Go ahead, take a guess in the comments below. And when you comment the day a video is released, you'll be entered to win some sweet book Launcher Swag. And of course, you want to make sure you're subscribed to the channel with notifications on so you know when we go live and announce the winners of those SWAG prizes. All right, the piece we haven't covered is the chapter page design. This is where you get to have fun and add your creative flair. Fun fonts, drop caps, illustrations, embellishments, borders, and more. We take design elements from the COVID and use them on the chapter page to create an experience that starts with the COVID and flows with the interior. I look at a few examples we did here like Becca Powers book, you can see the COVID and then the interior. We love those design touches because it's those little things that just bring a book to that highest level quality possible. But for the basics, a solid chapter page will have the chapter number, the title, the subtitle. It's not publishing law, but chapters always begin on the right you you won't go to publishing jail if you break this, but it could be jarring to your readers, and you don't want to give anyone a reason to leave a bad review if you don't have to. While it's a blast to take artistic liberty here and fill your chapter pages with all sorts of embellishments, it's better to have less than more when it comes to design, so take it easy. Body text should begin about halfway down the chapter page, with the chapter heading centered in the top half of the page. Don't indent the first paragraph of a chapter. If you're a fan of how that looks. You can use a drop cap or make the first line all capitalized. Omit the headers and footers for that particular page. Including page numbers is optional. Unless the font on your cover is too difficult to read. You might want to think about using that same font for your chapter headings. If that's a no go, then find one that's easy to read but not the same font as the body text. That was a lot. You can see why I leave it to the professionals, because there's more to think about, which we've covered in this video right here. Like the back matter of your book and this one right here on the front matter. And because this is just one of those times where I think you need three videos. This book, not book video is right on book cover considerations with some cool examples for you too. So go ahead, click on one of those three videos. I'm waiting for you.