Formatting
What about what I do—formatting? For most books, you should not spend a lot of time or money on the book’s interior format. As I’ve told my clients: no one ever bought a novel because it had an expensive, fancy font!
There are exceptions to this rule, of course. I had an author approach me about a picture book. He was also a photographer, and his vision was a high-end “coffee table” book. I had to tell him I wasn’t the right guy for his project. I use Microsoft Word to format books and that is not the right tool for what he wanted to accomplish. In fact, I also told him I didn’t think KDP was a good choice. He wanted heavy, glossy photo-grade paper and KDP doesn’t offer that option. He needed a book designer that used Adobe InDesign, which has better, more precise positioning capability and access to approximately 30,000 Adobe fonts. It is the right tool for his project.
For a novel or non-fiction book, even with some images, Microsoft Word is a good choice to create a readable, professional looking printed book. In fact, the major online print-on-demand services are largely designed around Microsoft Word. The Kindle format is quite a bit easier to format than the printed version and Word is more than capable of generating a good-looking Kindle book. If this is the book you’ve written, do not spend much money on formatting.
One type of book that is difficult to format is a book of poetry. The main culprits are long poems, wide poems and poems where the shape on the page is important to the author. The problem is the page size. I tell poets: 8.5” x 11” is not your friend! Most authors compose using the standard page size in Word (or whatever word processor). Poems that look great on 8.5” x 11” may not look good at all in a book or a journal. Most books are 5” x 8” to 6” x 9”. What I recommend is the poet resize the page in Word before they start composing their work. Go to Layout, click the “Size” button at the top, and go down to “More Paper Sizes.” Key in the anticipated size of your book or the journal you’ll send it to and start writing. You’ll have much more control over how your poem looks on the page if you use the correct page size from the beginning.
I know I’ll learn more as I format more books. In fact, I learned something new about Microsoft Word as I was typing this piece!
The world of publishing is changing, not always for an author’s benefit. Competition is crazy—there are more than 3,000 self-published books put online each and every day. Generative Artificial Intelligence is now creating books at a pace that mere humans cannot keep up with. I thought, years ago, that the “cream would rise to the top.” I still hope that is the case, but it is an uphill battle. Keep writing!
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