Transcripts
1. Course Overview: Hi, my name is Mellor Swinsky. I'm published, author, editor, graphic designer and Demo. I have written, edited
formatted design book covers for several books, both my own and for
popular anthologies with contributions from
other independent authors. In this course, I'm
going to take you step by step and
how to transform your manuscript into a polished print ready PDF appropriate
for self publishing. Together we're going to tackle industry standards
like book sizing, book margins,
chapter title pages, acquiring licenses, font
embedding, and more. I've designed this
course for writers who are tired of waiting for
someone else to tell them. They're good enough for writers who want to learn the trait themselves and take more control over how their
story is presented. At the end of the
course, you will submit a class project of a
few screenshots of your formatted PDF to show real world applications
of the lessons learned. If you're ready to learn
the skills to take your writing career to the
next level, let's dive in.
2. Where Do We Start?: So where do we start,
finish your manuscript? Yes, I'm serious. I think it's tempting to jump
ahead or to say, oh, I'll format as I go. I'm telling you that
is not the way, Maybe you're excited or maybe you are a little
anxious and you're like me, you like to have a
sneak peek of what's coming and you want to do that. But I'm telling
you it's better to finish writing and
then format it. Because when you try to combine your creative
process with the industry standards
that you need to meet through this tutorial, it's going to be too much and you might damage
one or the other. Give your full attention to writing when you feel
content with that, move on and then we'll clean it up in this tutorial
moving forward. Before you get started here, get input from your
developmental editors, even if it's just yourself. Take a break from
your manuscript, come back to it and read
it with fresh eyes. Should run your manuscript
through things like grammar or similar software,
but just trust me, it's easier to format once then, several times after you've
made significant changes, especially if you're bouncing
between two saved versions. One's the formatted one and
one's your rough draft. Maybe it's rough
draft number four. If you need to change
simple things, sentence structure, that's fine. But tell me, don't jump the gun. I'm telling you
this for your sake. I'm a mom, remember? I say it with love for the
purpose of this tutorial. I am moving forward
as though you have a finished manuscript
in hand that's told in the language that you
want. You're happy with it. We are going to move
forward as if we are prepping to move
straight into Amazon. Kdp. Like I said, the introduction, the end goal here is to have your book listed on Amazon as a paperback
that the public can buy. Yeah, you could theoretically
have it listed elsewhere, but that's a different
lesson series. We're going to get into what publishing on Amazon entails, pros and cons, so
on and so forth. For right now, we're just
putting blinders on. We're looking at
formatting problems. I'm going to be walking
through this tutorial in such a way that you are working side by side with
me. I have my laptop here. I'm going to do a screen
recording once we get rolling here so you can see
exactly what I'm doing. If you follow the steps that
I'm doing as I'm doing them, You will finish this tutorial
with a completed PDF. Just a note on PDF and why. That's going to be our final
goal through this tutorial. While Amazon KDP accepts doc
files from Microsoft Word, PDF is the industry
standard file type, it is going to be easier to use across several iterations. If you decided not
to use Amazon KDP, it's easier to E mail copies or pages of your book
for editorial reviews. If someone from a newspaper
wants to write an article, it's easier to send the PDF. It's going to retain the
fonts that you chose. The spacing it's going
on their screen, how it looks on your screen. If you want to leave Amazon KDP, a PDF is what's going
to follow you best. That's really what you're
going to want to do. A PDF also allows
for page bleed, which means that your file, when the printer robot
machine reads it, your file will extend to the edge of the
page if necessary. And like I said, it's easier
to embed fonts this way. If you save in a Word document or another, a Google document, it's not going to preserve
the font that you chose unless the person
who opened the file on the other end also
has that font installed. Which is very unlikely. We're going to get a
totally into fonts. I'm going to bore you
with how nerdy I am about font choices hang
in there with me. Okay, we're starting. You have your finished
manuscript in hand, that could be a word document. That's how we're doing this. You will also need to set up
your Amazon KDP dashboard, even if you are not going
to publish with Amazon. In the end, set up
your dashboard, the tutorial is going to follow a blank template that is
provided by Amazon KD. Just for the sake of the visual cues that it's going to give you
as a new formatter, I think it's an
excellent place to start to dive right in and
see the page layouts. Instead of starting
from scratch, I will be doing a
tutorial on how to do this from a blank
Microsoft Word document. It isn't difficult, I feel for the purposes of
learning how to format, starting with a preset
document that we can manipulate is
going to be more helpful to see the
direction that we're You want to go ahead If you haven't assuming that you have an Amazon account like the rest of the world, I know Amazon is at reputation rightfully
so, here and there. But this is something we're
going to work with here. Pause here. If you don't have an Amazon
KDP account already, they're very easy to set up. You're going to go to Amazon, find the KDP dashboard, and you're going
to just link it to your current Amazon account. I'll be here when
you're done doing that.
3. You Have Formatting Options: Friendly reminder, you
have formatting options. This tutorial uses
Microsoft Word because I love it. I
want to get to why. But you do have options and it would be negligent of
me to not mention them. You can literally hire someone
to do all of this for you. As I said, I think it's
important for a writer, published author, someone who wants to be published
to know these steps. I think that's responsible. I think it's respectful to know all the pieces of
your industry, right? However, freelance formatters
are everywhere. Everywhere. Especially with this huge influx of people wanting
work from home jobs, freelance formatters cost
anywhere from $50 to 300, depending on a lot of factors. Experience the length
of your manuscript, how many revisions
you want from them. If you just want to cut
it here and hire someone, you can go right onto upwork or fiber with two R's
and find freelancers. Or maybe you even know someone
who knows their stuff. You can hire me to
format if you want. I'm here to teach you how to do it yourself, but I am available. We can talk about
if you just want me to do it for you, I'd
be happy to do that. We can have that chat too, but I'm here to teach
you how to do this. I know I've said this
several times already, but I just really think
it's important that if you're serious
about establishing yourself in the literary world, that you familiarize
yourself with the lingo and the work
that goes into it. Because even if you
farm this part out, eventually you don't
want to get caught with your pants down when your formatter comes
to you and says, hey, do you want the page
bleed is this gutter size? Okay? Do you want drop
caps or all caps? And what kind of spacing
were you thinking? And do you want me to do this and this and
that and the other? If you're not keen
on hiring someone, but you're also
not keen on using Microsoft Word to do
your formatting for you. The good news is that there are several programs
that you can download that are made specifically for
formatting your book. Great downside is that most of these are
pretty expensive. Most of them cost either a monthly or a yearly
subscription. Some of them are
a one time cost. Some examples, there's
something called Atticus, which is $150 You
have it for life. There's something
called Adobe in design. You've probably heard of
that. That's $20 a month. That's a little more reasonable. The biggie is a velum, which I hear is awesome, but it's $250 I do not, again, these all have different
capabilities and ease of typically are reflected
in the price point. To be honest, unless you already have a seriously
established fan base, you might not make back those costs with the royalties
from your first book. I don't mean to be a
down, not right away. Maybe eventually down the road, Microsoft Word is
a great option. And I'm going to
walk you through it. You've done this
part. I'm here to walk you through these lessons. These are things that
you'll retain for life. The lessons that
you learn here in familiarizing yourself with
how to use Microsoft Word, why the heck if there's all these different
formatting programs, why am I using Microsoft Word? Why am I teaching you how to do this through Microsoft Word? Well, number one,
it's what I use. It is what I use to format my own books and our
anthologies for other authors. Number two, most of
us Windows users, sorry, I pad users,
we have it already. It's free. It's not really free. If you have a new laptop or you need an
update or something, it's about, it's
like $100 or so. They're always running coupons. But if you've had your
laptop for a little while, or maybe you wrote your book in Microsoft Word and you have
it already, not to mention, Microsoft Word also has a really wonderful editing
option called Track Changes, which is something
I used to offer edits to authors and they can see exactly
what it changed. It's really strong and
even professional editors will use Microsoft
Track Changes. It's very well respected
if you don't have the Microsoft 365 suite of
programs when you download it. You also get Excel
and Powerpoint. Lots of other handy programs that you'll probably
use at some point. Plus the newest versions
of Microsoft Word come with grammar checkers
built in that use AI. It's AI. You still have
to check it for accuracy, but it's handy to have. Another reason
that I want to use Microsoft Word to show
you how to format is that it's ranked as one of the hardest programs
to use for formatting. Little pat on the back for me because that's how I
learned to format. I'm a trial by fire. I'm a tough love parent. I'm going to be a
tough love tutorial, learning designer person. Because if you can
learn how to format your book using a tough
ranked program to do it, then if and when you get one of the formatting
programs down the line, it's going to seem like a breeze to you and you will have learned the lessons of lingo
and how to do things. Instead of just these things
being automated for you, you're going to build
that knowledge base, that skill set that
you can go confidently forward in how to
format your manuscript. And don't forget, even
though I'm tough, love, I'm going to break
everything down for you. As ago you were going to
be amazed at the level of detail that's
in this tutorial. I won't leave you
hanging, don't worry.
4. Sizing Your Book: Sizing your book. I don't know why. Sing
if you've ever seen my social media, you
know that I sing a lot. First things first, we need to decide what size your
book is going to be. That choice is going to be paramount in a lot of the
other choices that we make. We need to decide that first, there are industry
standard sizing options. Here you have quite
an array of options. But I think the smallest book that is available
through Amazon, KP, is five by eight. You don't really
want to go smaller for that for a fiction book. Now I would say the one
thing that should lead your decision here are bookish
promoters on social media. Because what's one
thing we all hate when a book series has
all different sizes for all of the series, right? All the books in the series. Keeping your book
talk and books to grammar audience in mind,
keeping them happy. If you're writing a series, please choose the same
size for all the books in your series that they look
nice on your shelf altogether. I'm saying yes, that's my
opinion, but it's a good one. The most common trim size for
paperbacks is six by nine. This Dark Village from
Dark Village Publications. This is a book that I
edited with my company. This is six by nine. Now remember, the
smaller your book is, the thicker it's
going to be, right? It's like condensing, it's like pouring this much juice
into a smaller cup. So it's going to
change the spine size. Okay. So if you have a short book, it's maybe not as many pages, maybe it's like 160 or so
if you do six by nine. So it's going to
shrink it down a little and the book might
be kind of floppy right. Now. If you have 160 book,
this is five by eight. This is my book,
Desperate Creatures. It's five by eight. Okay. So Desperate Creatures is, I believe, about 255 pages. Okay. It's a pretty standard
size for fiction. Paperback. Okay. Dark Village is about 300 pages and
it's six by nine, so obviously if it
was five by eight, it would be much thicker
than desperate creatures. Okay, I know you guys know
this, but like I said, I'm going to go very detail crazy in these
tutorials for you. Okay. So if you're unsure of what
size to pick for your book, I would look at your word count, which I'm sure
you've been keeping track of like all of us do. I would also look at content
that's similar to ears. I would look at your comp titles, your comparative titles. That would theoretically
be your competition once your book is released and
see what size they have. Every Amazon listing
will have the sizing of the book in the
listing somewhere. The physical details
of by rule of thumb, most novels are at
least 50,000 words. Different enres have
different typical word counts fantasies,
usually pretty long. Sarge Mass, I love her, 800 plus pages, right? Example of world building, thriller and mystery books
are usually a little shorter. Anything less than
40,000 words or so, it's going to depend on the
formatting choices that you make, but 40,000 words. Thanks for very slim paperback. And you may want
to consider just doing an ebook at that point. Although, I mean, I put
out the slimmest of slim paperback for
erotica series before. It's really up to you
what you want to do, but think about your book
sizing because that's going to be part of the foundation of everything we do moving forward.
5. Let's Start with a Template: Okay, we're getting to
the exciting things. We're going to start
with a template. Now if you are set on KDP, which I have recommended, versus other options
like Ingram Spark, we'll talk about that probably another tutorial,
or Smash Words. If you're a romance
erotica writer, an easy place to start is to
head to the KDP dashboard. Like I said, I will
show you how to start formatting from scratch
in a separate tutorial. But let's first start
exploring formatting by using a pre made template made
by Amazon. They're there. Why not? The
templates provided by a KTV are convenient if you're nervous about
where to begin. And they're good for learning purposes because there's
something there already. But I can point
out and say, hey, this is what this
means, this is what this is as an example. Oddly enough, the templates that are currently offered by KDP have innate mistakes in them. You could not theoretically submit the template that they give you and have
it pass KDP inspection. Very innate mistakes in it. So I think that's interesting, it's kind of funny,
but what the heck? Like you said, I'll walk you through how to fix everything, but that always makes me, okay, let's go to our computers
and feel free to pause this tutorial if
I'm going too quickly, Get those captions on too, because I know that I
talk quickly sometimes. But let's look at the top
of your dashboard screen. You'll see the heading
Create, Manage, Publish. The screen will be your new best friend
as a self publisher. So go ahead and
bookmark. Wait, wait. Okay. In the section titled
Create a new title or series, here there's a link
that says Tools and resources that will bring
you to the help section F. In addition to creating
the tutorial K, B has a community board, is also incredibly helpful. Has several active
subs that cover really common questions that sometimes are more current
than the Amazon help desk. Don't sleep on those red. It's actually very helpful. Who knew, but it is. All right. In the menu, click the first link that says Manuscript
formatting resources. Scroll down a little bit until you get to the paperback
and hardcover. Again, this tutorial is
going to cover paperbacks. Ebooks are their own. Beast will cover those
in another tutorial, so keep an eye out for that. But today we're going to focus on paperback for
your manuscript. Okay, choose
manuscript templates from the horizontal menu
underneath the bubble graphic. Honestly ignore that line about. We don't recommend PDF
for text heavy books. That's insanity. I don't
know why that line is there. The industry standard
for formatting is a PDF. Pdf is our final goal,
I believe in the PDF. I'm here for the PDF.
From the contents, select choose a template and you can choose
a blank template or templates with
sample content. For this tutorial,
we're going to choose templates
with sample content, which like I said before, is going to offer
us a nice visual of what is going on
in the template. When you get a little
more familiar, you can start playing around the blank templates
because there are, like I said, there's
a few mistakes that you have to correct. There's table insertions
that can mess things up. Page numbers get a little messy. We'll talk
about all of those. But there is an appeal to a
blank template down the road. But for right now,
just put blinders on. Let's follow the tutorial. I'll get you squared away where. Okay, for this, we're going to choose
Temples Sample Content, which will download a zip file with files of all the format, sizing all the common ones. After you go into your
document download, go in your documents, extract those files, choose English, presumably since you're
listening to me, yammer, and find the
corresponding file of the size book that you've
chosen for your manuscript. For this tutorial,
we are pretending to format a five by eight
book that is like this. This is my book,
Desperate Creatures. This is five by eight, This is a very common paperback size. Okay, so let's open
the template in Word. Okay, so you see this
bar across the top. Choose enable editing,
and you will see a fake book manuscript with a title page front matter including the ISBN and
copyright information, table of contents
and sample chapters. Okay, go ahead and open
your finished manuscript, which should be edited
and complete in Microsoft format
and another window. Okay? All right. So now we are
going to have some fun. In one window, you should have the blank template that
you've been able editing on, and the other
Microsoft Word window, you should have your book.
6. Book Sections & Margins: Book sections and margins. Let's start by taking a look at the details of what it is
that we're looking at here. Choose the layout
tab at the top, and then choose Size. Now hover down to the bottom. And without clicking, just
confirm that the page size that you're working with is the size that you
meant to select. In my case, I'm looking
at a five by eight. That's what I wanted. Perfect. You cannot format like a five by eight book on a
standard word document. Standard word documents
are 8.5 by 11 for like a regular page, printer page of printer paper. It sounds like common knowledge to change the page size for
the book size that you want, but you would be
surprised how many times this is the root
of formatting errors. When people reach out to me for help Mallory, my
books all weird. All the writing is really small and it's centered and I
didn't mean it to be, they never changed
the page size. It's just something you need to think about and make sure that your page size is the size
of the book that you want. Okay. Now click over to Margins, and you're going to see
that the custom margins are already selected
because this template was already set up for you. The page size is correct, and the custom margins
will be selected. But let's look at them anyway. Click the option on
the very bottom, custom margins with the data. This will show you the
margins of your book. It'll show you the top, bottom, the right to the
left, and the gutter, while the rest are
self explanatory. Gutter means the portion
of the book that is pulled into the spine,
it's part of the page. This is right here.
Everything next to the text is the gutter. It's going to be a little
wider to make room for the stitching that pulls all the pages onto the
physical spine of the book. The width is
important because if you don't leave enough
room for the gutter, for the bookbinding machines at Amazon or Ingram where
whoever's making your book, if you don't leave enough room, your words will get pulled too far into the gutter
and it'll be eligible. They'll be in the
curve of your book, resulting in a bad
reader experience. If Amazon even approves it, usually they'll kick it
back when you send it for final approval and they'll say
gutter width insufficient, something along those lines. So one of the beautiful
parts of using a PDF file to format your book
is that you can have page bleeds mentioned
these a couple of times, but page bleed when
it comes to images, that means the image can lead right to
the end of the page. This is an old option Four, I changed things up a little bit of desperate creation
before it came out. You'll see my title
page was originally going to be an image that came right to the edge of the page, meaning that my PDF bled
to the edge of the page. It's a little more complicated. You need to alter the page
size of the document by a quarter of an inch just for the page where you want
the bleed to the edge. If you're new to formatting, I would stick to the
average page margin and an average title page. This is much simpler, You won't get into trouble with your
margins on this point. It can make some
odd errors pop up. I just think that when
you're formatting your book, the most important
thing is readability and success of your
formatting process. You can play around
with this a little bit, but I would stick to a regular title page until you're more
comfortable with formatting. But that is an option
that you can think about and something
that you can play with in future fold lead for pages. And that can be on
a title page and it can be on your
chapter titles. Technically it
could be anywhere. But you don't want to distract
your readers with images. They're there for your story, not for you to get all crazy in the formatting process margins, you're allowed to
change them, okay? I encourage you to play
around a little bit, just see what changes. Just so you know, when you
add or subtract a little bit, just get a feel for like, oh, okay, I need a
little more space here. Or maybe your text
is really close to the page number at the bottom or you just don't
like the feel of it. You have a little wiggle room. There's no law that
the margins have to stay the same as they were in the temple
that they give you. I already said there's
problems in there. The margins are
fine, but it's not a completely perfect template
for you to use again, Amazon, the KDP engine, will yell at you and
reject your book. If something's really wrong, that's going to give your, your readers a bad time when they're trying
to read your book. A few other things to notice about your template
right off the bat. If you have published
other books, you can add in other works
by this author section. You can either put that on its own page or you can put
it above the front matter. I'll cover how to add
sections properly. It's not just a
matter of pressing the space bar a bunch of times. Moving on through the template, you'll see most authors put their acknowledgment section in the back of the
book, not the front. This is a personal
preference, again, there's no rule here, no real industry standard. But it is, I almost always move the section to the back just in case
I have a lot to thank. The reader hasn't even
read the book yet. So it just always feels a little funny to me to put the thank
you right in the front because acknowledgments
are different than the dedication, and
we'll get to that. The template also
doesn't come with an author bio
section at the back. I usually add that
you don't have to, but that is usually something
that I will throw in the back matter and
I'll cover what all these terms mean in detail. A common term in formatting
is called front matter. Front matter is all of the
goodies of the front I know crazy title page of your
other works by author. All of your copyright
information, your dedication,
Content warning, we'll talk about that
later. Trigger warning. Content warning, then
the book begins. In a lot of books,
fiction, non fiction, there's a table of contents, all the things that you would
usually find in the front. It's called front matter. After the front
matter, the dedication and the acknowledgments that
they have in the front here, We're going to leave
them there for now. This template that
we're looking at comes with ten sample chapters. Now you probably have
more than ten chapters. That's fine. Don't sweat it. It's easy to add more, but I will show you
how to do that. There's more to
it. It's not just like getting to a new
spot on the page. There's more. We
will go over that. Now. Something that's
very important and that personally
drives me bananas. You will notice that every
chapter starts on an odd page. This is not an accident. This is one of those
industry standard things that you need to adhere to. Industry standard for
print books is that all chapters begin on
the right hand side. Now it will be very
jarring to your readers if they're reading
through and all of a sudden chapter
starts on the left. It is a stylistic choice, but it is something
that your reader is expecting as
well as reviewers, editors, anyone who's
looking to promo your book. This is something that will be noticeable and that
will show your cars is the first time chapter start on the right hand
side, the odd pages. You will also notice
that the header, which is typically
the author name, maybe on the author name on one side and the title
name on the other. Here on this side it says, my name on this side is
the title of the book. It says the title of the book on both sometimes says
the author on both. Not all books have headers
on the chapter title page. There is no header, it returns
on the following page. Now next we're going
to talk about stu.
7. Let's Talk Fonts!: Let's talk fonts. Such a font nerd, you're in here with a font nerd
teaching you here. The body of your
manuscript should be clear, readable font. This is not the place
to get crazy now. Most books are, the font
is in size 11 or 12. Books with main body font size 14 and above are considered
a large print book. Which is fine, great for
people who don't see that. Great for being inclusive. But it's going to need
to be listed as such. It's just something
to think about. You're probably
looking for a book with a font size of 11 or 12. Your story matters, so
do your font choices. Readers expect to clearly be able to read your words and not battle through a fun
font that you found. You will choose what's called a Sera font for printed word. Sara fonts are those set
standard yet decorative fonts with little extra strokes on
the end of the letter forms. Sera fonts are evocative. They convey a motion. They have a vibe, for lack of a better term. Examples include Garamond Times, New Roman, Baskerville, Georgia. All of which that I just listed
are free for public use. And probably already
installed on your computer, and they will also
be accepted by the Amazon bookbinding engines. I want to note here that I have beef with
Times New Roman. It's been my number
one villain in KDP formatting
errors. Not my fault. Kdp doesn't like this one bit, And I want to feel like KP, I didn't do this, I
downloaded your template. And they're like, we don't
care, we don't like it. If I am ever working with
a template for a new book, my first step is to
go through and change all the page numbers from times Rumen to my
beloved Garamond. I have noticed when I do that, the errors miraculously go away. Something to think about.
Times we have beef. If you notice fontana font
means without a seraph. Like I said, the cute
little details give it like a typewriter, old school vibe span. It's like aerial things that are simple and
elegant and easy to read. But those are more for ebooks. Paperback should
be the Seraphont, stylistically speaking, Be very careful
with formal script, even as an accent font. Just because you
can read it doesn't mean that you're
new readers can. They're pretty difficult. They can alienate
younger readers. And older readers.
Remember a lot of kids these days don't learn script. Yeah. It's just something
to be cognizant of because you're trying to create a book that
everyone can enjoy. You're not trying
to make a stand here a pay attention eyes on me. This is important. Okay? I'm going to reiterate
this if and when I make a book cover
design tutorial, because this is very
important, this is legal, this is money, this is
sewing and litigious things. Eyes on me. Pay
attention to Waka. It is your responsibility
to acquire the licensing for any fonts that you use inside and
outside of your book. Apart from the free use
fonts that I just listed, I want to tell you that ignorance
or I didn't know is not going to cover you legally just because a font
is available on like, I love fonts, you go to like Dafont.com or Acid Fonts
if that's still around. Just because you can download
a font for free does not mean that it's free for
use in your printed book, which presumably you are
going to make profit from. Okay, so most font
designers will include a read me file in the font text font zip
file that you download. So it's your responsibility
to read that file. Okay, When you download it, you're making an agreement
that you will read that file. The file will usually
say something to the effect of this font is free for public
use, business use. Prohibited or commercial
font license available here. So and so here's my pay pal. $15 suggested donation,
something like. If the font package
that you download from a free font website does not come with licensing information, it is still your responsibility to find it one way or the other. If you want to use the font, it is up to you to, to
Google, the font designer. To Google the font name. Just put in font and the name. It will probably pop up
somewhere. You'll recognize it. You can f, we're also good at Internet
stocking the day, right? You can follow the path to find a font designer.
Don't give me that. Oh, I couldn't find,
Don't use that font. Okay, it's not worth it. If you get caught with your
pants down legally, you've used, it's
like plagiarizing. Okay? So let's just respect
other people's work and make sure that you are
acquiring the licenses. If that scared you
good, it should. You are formatting
professional standards. You need to act
professionally in this manner if that scared you, and you'd rather
not be in charge of the person tracking
down a font designer. There are websites that you can go to and they've
done that for you, where they are assuming
that you are going to use a font for professional use. An excellent website, I'm
probably going to butcher this, is called Creative Fabrica. I will put a link below to that. It offers plenty of free fonts from designers who
are okay with you using it. Again, it's up to you to
read the description fully. But they also sell fonts
with licensing information. Some are more
expensive than others. Usually they're about 12 to $30 depending on how cool they are. Some fonts come from very
interesting font designing people with very strong thoughts on how their fonts should be used as much as you think
the script is so great. And I'm not even being
sarcastic because I felt like, oh, this is the perfect
fun. I love it. But the font costs $70 or they want to cut
my royalties for you. It is a font, It is
not worth it. Move on. There are other selections to don't let this be what brings your book down or makes
it a bad time for you. Okay, All right. Scary top over. Moving on, let's talk fonts
and chapter title pages. That's a fun spot where you can play around
a little bit with fonts. What I would suggest you can do a blocky font for the
chapter title itself. Maybe an accent font
is a little bit of a fun script that you
have the license to use. Some people add chapter art. It could be different
for every chapter, it could be the same
for every chapter. This is the chance to have a
try not to get carried away. Conversationally
speaking and font nerd extraordinary speaking to you and I think you
probably all know this. Do not use Comic Sands,
come on, seriously. I'm not even going to
tell you you should know why you should know
that seriously. But also try to avoid
any fonts that are used in like really popular TV
shows or movie titles, or like the Simpsons has a font, Harry Potter has a font, book title and plant choices are not the place for
jokey references. You could do that
on social media if you want to be
like silly to Pm, but your actual book, you
should be taking seriously. Just a note on very popular
font selection these days, especially for romance
and fantasy books. I would avoid it's
getting a little tired. I think we're going
to start seeing a trend to people getting
a little sick of that one. While something might
look really appealing, look around a little
bit your comp titles and see what other
people are doing. Make sure you're staying in the same variety but mixing it up a little bit.
You want to stand out? No. Another important note here is something called
font embedding. This is likely another
error that might get your manuscript kick back to you through the
Amazon KDP engines. It's a very common error. You will get an alert that says something like fonts are
not properly embedded. It won't let you move forward. You will not be able to publish your book until you've fixed it. Luckily, it's pretty easy
to fix, so don't be scared. We're going to talk about
it to embed your fonts. And this includes all
the whatever fun, fancy weirdo script that you picked out and you
got your license for. You're going to go to file, then you're going to go down to Options in the left column. Select the Save tab. At the bottom, it says under Preserve Fidelity when
sharing this presentation, embed fonts in the file. And choose Okay. Now that should clear up whatever errors the Amazon KDP engine is going
to kick back to you. If it doesn't, the
font you're using. If you downloaded
some cool crazy font, you got the license for it. It might not be embeddable. All true type fonts, there's different kinds,
there's open type, true type, We're
usually looking at true type fonts for all fonts. You can explain it
better than I can. But not all true type fonts are embeddable to see if it is and if that's
what your problem is, you can go into
your control panel and find your font file. If you click that at the bottom, it will show you the
metrics of that font. It will show you font
embeddability status on there. If it's not embeddable, move on. It's just a font. There
are so many amazing, beautiful, evocative
emotive fonts out there. You'll find something that
will give you an easier time. Don't fall on your sword
for a single font. Okay, this is why I should
really think about it for over $30 for a license,
which I've done before. Totally worth it, because
look how beautiful.
8. Prepping Your Original Manuscript: Prepping your
original manuscript. So let's get your manuscript
into this template. Hurray. You should have your
original manuscript open behind the template
that we're working with. Do yourself a favor, highlight all of your text in your original manuscript and set the font type that
you have selected. The Sarah font,
that's going to be for the main body of your text. Set it to the type
font that you want, and set it to the size that
you want in your final book. Again, it should be 11 or 12. We can play around
this a little bit, but this is going to
save you some time. While it is still highlighted, choose paragraph from the hover. The top option alignment
might show justified, just as you probably know, means words are forced
to be spaced in a paragraph so that the edge is more or
less a straight line. Right, looks clean
on both sides. The terms is used in literary formatting to describe when the body or text
is aligned left, then at the right end, it's not the straight line,
it's like the leftover, it's a little bumpy, it's
like raggedy regs, right? A ragged edge on the side of the paragraph is created
when it's justified. You're telling the
program, that's okay, that the words are
broken with hyphen for that cleaner look, here's my unpopular opinion. This is probably the
only time I'll tell you go against
industry standard. I don't like justified text. I love it for author bios or
even for acknowledgments. It's a personal preference. I am here to share
industry standards. And not my own puny,
diminutive opinion, but I think it looks
better left aligned. But just so you know,
that's just me, industry standard is
generally justified. The two other important sections
in the paragraph options are paragraph spacing before
and after, and line spacing. Line spacing has an enormous
impact on the appearance, readability, and final
length of your book. I've found in the books
that I've edited that 1.5 line space is ideal
for most fiction. Single space is crowded. It might work for
a super long book, or if you're writing
a crazy fantasy with a ton of world building
and you're getting to like 700 pages, single spaced, leave
it single space because no one's buying
1,400 page book. You've written a
series, just own that. You've written a series
and split that baby up. Okay. Double spacing. Oh oh my gosh. I have such big feels about double spacing, in my opinion. That should be left behind in high school term papers or the children's book section for little kids who are
learning how to read. I just really think
that looks amateurish. Double spacing is not
appropriate for modern fiction. Paragraph spacing is
a little trickier. Paragraph spacing is referring to the space between paragraphs. Okay, so you'll
notice it's a little more then in between the lines
of the body of the text. My default setting that
I usually work with is a 0.4 and six point after just gives a little more
of a space when the font is set to size 12 and you set the six point spacing
after a paragraph. It's a visual cue for
like a beat of pause. Okay, continuing onto
the next paragraph. You might prefer zero point and just follow the regular
flow of everything. Again, that's
personal preference. There is no industry
standard for that. Please note that
changing these factors before you shift any of your text into the
template we're working on, will the formatting process that we're working through so
much smoother down the road. I highly recommend pre formatting your text before
we move it to our template.
9. Chapter Title Pages: Chapter. Title design chapters can
have titles or just numbers. You might add subtle chapter art or you might have a grand plan
for art for each chapter. Let's do, here's what
I like to do first. It's a secret hack, but this will just keep it
really simple from the get go. I'm not constantly
scrolling back through my pages to make sure all
my title pages match. Okay, If I'm looking at this
template, follow me here. I'm going to go through
and delete all but one paragraph of
each chapter. Okay? So I'm going to pause. I'm
going to let you do that. Well, I'm going to keep going. You pause, you go do that,
and then come back here. We're going to move
forward, Okay? Now, now that I have deleted all but one
paragraph of each chapter, when I zoom out to view multiple pages here
in Microsoft Word, I can see each page in my
work area side by side. Okay. I'm a writer, I wrote more than ten chapters. Not a problem at all. Here's how we're
going to do it, okay? We're going to add new chapters. Do not just press the space
bar a bunch of times. Okay. We need to go in and
tell Microsoft Word, hey, knock this next page is
a break in the document. This is going to
be a new chapter. Okay? Click the
side to the right, right next to you at the end of the final word of
the chapter, okay? Then go up in the layout tab at the top and choose Next page. Okay, Then you will see that a new page without a
header will be created. Then highlight, copy and paste. Okay, so go ahead and
repeat that action. Click on the end of
the very last word, and then create a new page for as many chapters
as you need total. Okay, so we're going
to have a bunch of chapters, one paragraph. Okay? Pause do that.
Have you done that? You could. Okay. Once you have a title page for each
of your plan chapters, we can have a little fun. Before we get into
the nitty gritty, let's decide the look
of your chapter titles. We talked a little bit
about funds and licensing. Presumably you settled on the idea of your
chapter headings. Okay, maybe you can
take some time now. Pause this tutorial and figure out how you want your
chapters to look. You can edit these
later. But like I said, doing them all at once is going to help them
all look the same. It's going to give you
continuity throughout your book. Continuity is huge for
looking like a professional, polished PDF piece, okay? Once you like the look
and feel of one chapter, mess around with chapter one,
say okay, you know what, I like this, this is going to
be my chapter style, okay? Copy and paste everything
from the top of the page down through like a couple words into the
main body of the text. Then you're going
to say those are all highlighted. And then copy. Okay, then go and just highlight and
paste. Take your time. Go through each chapter and replace the name of the chapter, the number, whatever you're doing to denote the new chapter. Whatever your chapter title
page looks like here. I would copy from up
here through here. We'll worry about caps and
some options down here. Once we have your
actual book in there. Right now, we're really just focusing on your
chapter title page. Next we're going to talk about importing your actual book.
10. Importing Your Writing: Importing your book chapters. It's very exciting stuff
we're getting into, okay? At this point, before we import the rest of your
book, we have two options. And they both had to do
with the first line of each chapter underneath the chapter
titles that we just created. Okay? Highlight the
first paragraph of the first chapter in
your manuscript to copy, go back to the template, highlight the first paragraph of the first chapter and paste. Okay, now you don't
have to do anything. It can just look
like that. You can, It'll be in the
font that you want. You don't have to do anything,
that's totally fine. But a little razzle, dazzle as a special
test, don't you think? Okay, now you have some options. The industry standard options for the first line
of a new chapter include drop caps or all caps. Okay, I personally almost always use drop caps
from new chapters. I just always like that look. I remember when I first
saw my first book formatted and they
had put in drop caps, I was like, oh, oh,
that looks so cool. That looks so professional.
And maybe it's just like that stuck with me so much that I'm just like in love with
drop caps and that's how you start and
I just thought it really made it look
strikingly different from all of the rough drafts that that book had gone through. Bless me, a drop cap is
like a larger first letter, usually dips down
three to five lines into the text of your chapter. What we're going to
do, we are going to try your manuscript with
a drop cap here. Okay? So you can see how
you feel and make your choice for you and not
just based on my nostalgia. Okay, so go in, Highlight only the first letter from the first paragraph that
you have just imported. Okay, now go into the
Insert tab at the top and select Drop Cap
over on the right there. And then drop cap options, okay for position,
choose dropped. You can then see if you look
back at your manuscript, that the first letter spans the first three
rows of text bomb. Boo. Okay. You can also
highlight the letter and change the font of
just that drop cap. I often do this, I usually match it to the title or
the chapter title. Okay, Again, you don't have to just keep in mind
for some fonts. Even since that we were
just talking about that really popular
font for romance and fantasy books, the
Sinsle decorative. Sometimes there will be a font with the word
decorative after Amina. It has all these flourishes. And whatever, it
looks really cool. Even if in your PDF
you can see the, say it's an R and it has
like a squirrel at the top. When you go to import it
into the KDP engines, it might cut that off. While it looks cool, you don't want it to be
like really extravagant, because it will probably
not print the entire thing. This may just be a
function of Amazon KDP, but that is my experience over several books and several
chapters and font trials. Just something to be
aware of, honestly. Sometimes just a really
large regular Sera font blown up a little
bit looks really cool and can be
really complimentary. Okay, but just remember that readability should
always be paramount. Keep your readers in mind, they're not really going to even register what font
that you used. They should be so engrossed in your story and not be like, oh, since good font choice
like it should just be something that enhances
their experience and doesn't really detract
or really distract. Another note about drop caps. It's funny when you get into
these esoteric learning, the skill sets you never
realize things you would have opinions on.
Here's one of them. What if your chapter
starts with a quote? Okay, they often do. I've edited writing from so many authors and I've come across
many a chapter that has started with a always. Like I said, I usually
use drop caps. I'm like, oh no,
what do I do now? The Chicago Manual of Style, which is my preferred
formatting authority, and what most
fiction authors use, and what most fiction
paperbacks are formatted by, is to leave the first
quotation out entirely. It looks very strange with a blown up quotation mark before the letter
in the drop cap, because the font size is so big. Literally, I have
the quote here. The Chicago Manual style says that if the first
quotation mark is included, it should appear the
same size and widths, the same vertical alignment
as the regular text. Meaning, it should be small, like the body of the text. I think that looks awful. Remember when I was
talking about how font designers are
creative spirits and they consider typography and art because it is one of those things where
your reader is just, it's going to enhance
their experience, right? It's a subjective area where
we use a discerning eye. It's something we can
choose what looks best for our book. I leave it out and readers
blow right past it. If some reader ever came
to me and were like, you left the quotation out, I'm following the Chicago
Manual of Style. Sorry. It's a defendable choice. I feel good about that. You do. Boo I would suggest leaving out the first
quotation. Okay. Okay. Moving on. Your other option, if
you don't like drop cap, that's not really
doing it for you. Let's just check out the
all caps option instead. Okay, Just to see if
you prefer that I find all caps is often
used in E books. I think the last two E
books are, I'm like, oh, look all caps for the
opener is by the way, this is something you're
going to start noticing. Now every time you read, you're going to see
these little things. Now it's going to be
funny for you hit control to undo all the drop cap options
we just tried out. Or you can highlight and just clear the drop cap for
the menu manually. Just undo what you just did. Okay, so then go ahead and highlight the first
line of text, not the first sentence. If it dips down
into the next line, you want the first
physical line. Okay, now from the
menu that pops up. Once that's all
highlighted, choose style. Okay, then subtle reference. Okay, now when you choose this part of that selection moves
down to the next line. You need to highlight that
and remove it from that page. Just be the first line
of first sentence, the first line, okay? Only the first physical row
should have the effect, okay? So see how that looks. See how drop cap looks. Think about how nothing looks, and you choose what
you want to do. Okay, So set that and then at this point to move forward
in our formatting process, you can either do what we just
did for all the chapters. You can copy and paste each
first paragraph from each of your chapters from your
original draft manuscript and plot them in
to the template. And then fix drop
cap or all caps. Or you can go through
at the very end of formatting and change all of
your chapter openers, okay? So you can make this choice. Now that we've discussed it, you figured out what you
wanted to do for your book. You can import all of
your stuff and do it now, or you can go back
and do it at the end. Okay, just remember to go back through that
final walk through, which I will walk you
through the walk through. Just remember to go
back through and set that consistent pattern
and choose one. Don't bounce back and
forth between styles. Pick drop cap or Okay. And just to note
also we're going to talk about this a little bit more. I'll mention it again. You can use drop cap or all caps after a page divider in the same chapter, like in
the middle of a chapter. If you have a page divider
and you're beginning a fresh, it's appropriate to use the same denotation there, if that's
something you want to do. Again, you don't
have to, but that's another spot that you can
use the style if you like. Okay, It's time to import
your chapters, okay? This is a really cool part, one of my favorite parts of the formatting process
because it's exciting. You get to see your
manuscript and how it's going to look as a real book with the choices you've made. You get an idea of
your page numbers, how long your book
is going to be. It's super exciting, also because of the excitement and
there's a lot of movement, a big chunks of text, it's when a lot of
errors can sneak in. I'm just going to reiterate, if you haven't yet, go back, fix grammatical and
punctuation errors in your rough draft
before you've imported any more into your final
working manuscript. Because once we've
done the step, we're only going to work
with this template. Okay? We're not going to be working on big
changes in your story line. It would behoove
you to fix those. Now you posit here, I'll be here, okay? Okay. So carefully staying organized and taking your time. We're going to highlight
each chapter in your original manuscript
one at a time. Okay? We're going to
start at the second chapter because we've already highlighted and
moved one over when we were messing with the
first paragraph, right? We're going to move it over and we're going to
complete each chapter. Boom, boom, boom. Okay. Until your manuscript is completely moved over
to the new template. Yeah, big moment. Big moment. Okay, so this is a good time to save your original rough draft. Once you've done all that, once you moved everything over, save your original rough aft, give it a big hub, they
have fun in the cloud. Okay, We're going
to send it off, send it somewhere, put
it on a flash drive. Send it to your Google, some external storage device, because you do not
want to lose that. Okay, that would be
really, really sad, sad. But now you want to save your template
with a memorable name. It's going to be a new file, not PDF yet. We're
still working in. Okay, this is what we're
going to work with from now on. Getting closer.
11. Decorative Page Dividers: Decorative page dividers,
it's its own section. All right, sometimes a
chapter will need more of a significant beat of a moment's pause
between paragraphs. Maybe it's indicate a passage of time or maybe there was a
big moment that happened. Maybe you're changing
points of view. Sometimes there's
dueling story lines, you're bouncing back and
forth between a few. You can add a page break, whatever it is, page
dividers, breaks. This is not the same as the page break found
under the layouts tab. Okay, while we're working
on our rough drafts, a lot of us use like an asterisk
or a bunch of dashes or maybe just a literal big
we press space bar a bunch times just to denote like
where a page break should be, but once you move to a professionally
formatted manuscript, don't asterisks,
that's not cool. Usually you can use
a simple line or a repeated small image
as a page divider. This is going to come back to acquiring the licenses
that we did for the fonts. You can't just go
to Google Images and choose something
that looks cool. You may not have
the rights to it. You don't want to infringe upon anyone else's
creative rights. That's not cool legally, and it's just not cool
as a fellow creative. Right. What I like to do is I
go to Raw Pixels.com They have a great selection of free images that
require no licenses, a lot of page dividers there. Just be careful what you pick. It doesn't need
to be too flashy. But again, it's your
responsibility to just make sure that you're allowed to use the image that you've selected. Okay. And again, like I said, after the page
divider is put in, it's appropriate if you want to use the
drop cap or the all caps treatment to restart the next paragraph
if you want to, okay? But this is optional.
12. Front Matter & ISBN: Front matter now that
you're writing is imported. Yeah. For you. Let's scroll back to the beginning
of our template, which is now your
new manuscript. Let's just go through each
piece page by page, okay. All the way back at the
beginning of the title page. It's as simple as it sounds. Just some things to
keep in mind is that your interior title
page does not have to match the font you
used on the cover. Or your cover designer
though you can, if you have a ping file
or just your title, text is easy to
transfer like you have the font, you can do that. It doesn't have to show. For example, this is the
cover of 12 Months of St. Sorry if you're
not a smart lover, but this is what I
have handy external. This is the interior. They don't match, but
they're complimentary. Then these fonts I use throughout somewhere in
the rest of the book, that's an option for
your title page. Okay, moving on. Copyright, and this is technically
the front matter page. The template centers this text. You can left align
it if you prefer. Most paperbacks published by big, traditional
publishing companies. Copyright information is in much smaller text than given
to you in the template here, and it's also left aligned. I've always done that.
I'll highlight that, make it smaller, and
shoot it on the left. Okay, we need to
talk about ISBN. It's a big conversation and
it's a little bigger than a formatting tutorial
should cover. But I want you to be aware, because I'm here
to help you learn how to tackle what you're doing. Okay? So SBM is super important, so let's talk about that
a little bit, okay? So an ISPN number is something that you are
going to need to secure, meaning your book has
to have an ISBN number, especially if you
want to sell it. Okay. There's a reason
I use Amazon KDP. If you use Amazon KDP, you will have the option
to let Amazon assign your manuscript a free ISBN before you upload your document. I'll cover that more in
the tutorial that I do specifically about self
publishing through Amazon KDP. However, if you want to publish your book elsewhere and you
don't want to use Amazon KDP, you need to think seriously
about your ISBN choice. Okay, again, this is a lesson
for a different tutorial, but you need to think
about this at the formatting stage, so
it's appropriate. I'm going to include a
complimentary PDF file with this coursework
so you can get eyes on this because there's
a lot to consider here. There's pros and cons of getting and using.
Amazon's free. Ispm for reference is the official website of the
United States ISPN agency. Your books ISPM number is an easy unique identifier and
of published works, right? There could be ten books
with your book title. If you're set on
something like that, you put in your ISBN. It should only be your
book that pops up. Obviously, one of the
benefits of using the Amazon KDP provided ISBN
is that it's free. Okay. A lot of self
published and first time authors are not making a lot of money
off their books. Money is of the essence. We need to make a lot of choices based on how much things cost. That's not always
the most fun thing, but it's the most
pragmatic thing and it's the most
responsible thing. When you publish
using the Amazon KDP, it will say it will automatically register as
independently published. Okay, You cannot put in a
different publishing company. It will say that on there. So that's something
to think about. Self publishing isn't as
stigmatized as it used to be, but it is still a little bit, some festivals don't allow self published authors to participate, so on and so forth. Amazon, if you use
their free IBM, they will register
your book for you. You don't have to
do anything else. And let me tell you,
when you're doing everything from writing,
to cover design, to format, to editing, to formatting, to maintain
the listing, to promoting. It's really nice when
someone will go, I'll handle this part,
you're like, okay, Ok, I'll do all the other
million things I need to do, not for nothing, that is nice. Okay, on the flip side, just a brief chat here. If you secure your own ISBN, which you can do online, you can register
through it through Pk or a local ISBN agency. You have to pay for it, you'll have to pay for it,
you'll have to register. It's more details
that you have to do. It's a choice you have
to make if you want to use Amazon, DP's free. Isbn. That's something
to think about if you do decide to go
with Amazon's free. Isbn. See how many more times I can say that
drive you insane. You need to go back into
your document and enter the ISBN number
onto this page in the copyright front matter
after you've secured it. Once you set your listing, the book will not pass the Amazon KDP
inspection engines unless this number matches the ISBN assigned to your
book in your listing. Okay. In terms of
copyright on this page, there's some lingo and just some things I want to
just clarify real quick. I'm not a lawyer, I'm not
here to give legal advice, but I'm going to give
you just an overview of general understandings
of what copyright means. Okay? In terms of copyright, you technically
own the copyright to your work as soon
as you write it. Okay? I, however, technically
registering your book with the copyright office earns you legal protection
for your work. Okay. So copyright registration
costs anywhere from $65 to 125 depending
on where you live. All right. Just another note about copyright registration. Register your book in your
name if you wrote it. Okay. You're not using your If you establish a small
publishing company like Dark Village Publications. It's the publishing company
I co founded with a friend. Okay. We would never register in Dark Village even
for our own work. If you are creating
an anthology or working on formatting or registering copyright
for someone else's work, you have to put their
name in, not yours, even though you're the one doing the registering that day. Okay. That's very important. That is, again, just respecting
your fellow creatives. Okay. All right. On this page. Yeah. Most authors and
publishers just will include some legal disclosures,
legal disclaimers, most things to the effect of, I'm going to read this
here in this book, or any portion thereof may
not be reduced or used in any maner whatsoever without the remission of the publisher, except for the use of brief
quotations in a book review. All rights reserved. You might
add something like this. This is the work of fiction,
names, characters, bysesses, events and incidents are the products of the
author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual
persons of your dead or actual location is
purely coincidental. You're covering
your legal tissue. Okay. And it is appropriate on this page to credit
your cover designer. Okay. By either company or name, contact information, so
on and so forth. Okay? If you have written
other published books, it's appropriate to list them above the copyright material. This template, the
way it's set up, it will move the text
up the page as you type the way they
set everything's up. If you want to add
other works by author, place your cursor before
the word copy right there. And other works by
this author underneath And put other titles that you've written
in italics, please. If you're part of anthology, it's appropriate to put a
parentheses and just say an anthology beside the title so that you're acknowledging that you didn't write
the whole thing. Okay. Moving on. Something else you
can include in your front matter
is something called content or trigger
warnings, okay? Everyone has a different opinion on content warnings, okay? But they're really
popular these days. Sometimes an author can get into social hot water with the online book community
if he or she ignores them. Especially for the
romance genre. We all know how important promo and the book community is, especially for
independent authors. It's something I would
take very seriously. Some things to consider.
If your book or story contains any
scenes that would be triggering to someone
with severe trauma, you can note them on
a front matter page. There's no hard and fast rule. Some authors have
concerns that it gives away the plot or a twist, that the trigger list is too extensive and might scare
away some potential readers. But on the other hand, you
don't want to be responsible for really surprising
a reader with some serious issues of
something that they would rather not revisit. Some readers won't be happy
no matter what you do. My rule of thumb, This is something you can Google
and seek other advice on, but my rule of thumb
is my story line has rape or violence,
death of a loved one. That one is tricky
because if you're maintaining shock value,
I think carefully, but if the book has a lot
of grief centric storyline, anything involving harm
to children or animals, I know it, content warnings
are very subjective. Like I said, you can Google, They have some extensive
lists and opinions and best practices for nowadays. But for the purposes
of this tutorial, you can put a
content warning page in front matter if you want it. And that's where
I'll draw the line. On Conversation Dedication page. Yeah, this is pretty
straightforward. Please note the
difference between dedication and acknowledgments. Dedication is a very brief one, two sentence, no to
who the book is for. It can be in honor of someone. It can be for a group of
people, your ideal reader. It can be someone you know.
Someone you don't know. Someone who's inspired to
you, a different author. Really me, Just kidding. That just occurred to me.
Be fun. Save the longer. Thank you for the
late nights and the Taco runs on Tuesdays. When I was pulling my hair
out, writing my book, that stuff can go in the
acknowledgments in the back. Speaking of which, Mr.
Template from KDP. Like I said, I usually at this point will just
highlight, delete, and then put a page
in the back of the book after the final
page of the last chapter, but before the author biography. Okay, so let's do
that now because I just feel like that's
where that should go and I'm assuming that
you think so too. So highlight the text that reads acknowledgments
and a little paragraph. Hit backspace and delete. Scroll down to the very end of your book after the final
word of the last chapter. Okay, so we're going to
go to the layout tab and then breaks and
then next page. Okay? Because we're telling
the document this is a new section and we're not just going to press
the Space bar Bush times. We have new skills
that we've learned. We know that there are more professional ways
to do that, right? And then fill this
out as desired. Take your time with this one. It's usually my favorite
page in the whole book. I know I'm not here to offer writing advice in this
particular tutorial, but I will say that try not to leave anyone out
based on dumb stuff. If you're going to thank
specific family members, think of who else you
might give a nod to. When your book comes out. You don't want to
cringe or be like, I hope, blah, blah, blah, didn't see, blah, blah, blah. You want it to be a
positive experience. This isn't like a
vengeance moment. Okay? That's all I'm
going to say about that. You do whatever the
heck you want for your acknowledgments. That's
all I'm going to say. Okay, let's return to the front matter.
Pay attention here. You'll notice that now, even
though chapter one will say page one and the page
numbers at the bottom, if you look at how the
pages are laid out, chapter one is now set to
start on the left side page. No, no industry standard. You know better by now, right? We learned already. So we need to delete one
more page to correct the chapter page
locations because chapter start on the right side. I'm so proud of
you. Good for you. Okay. Choose the
blank page after the table of contents and
hit delete once more, ensuring that chapter one moves up the page and
still has no header. Okay, now when it comes to table of contents for a fiction novel, you
may not want one. I usually it's up to you. If you don't want one, highlight the whole table and back
space, it's deleted. Okay. You're going to need to
hit delete one more time to again ensure chapter one
starts on a right side page. Okay. If you do want a
table of contents, it's a big deal that your page numbers
are accurate. Right? So what I would suggest doing is saving that for
your final walk through. You're seeing how important the final walk
through is, right? I would finish all of
your formatting and then enter page numbers for
each chapter at the very end, right before you're
hitting published. Okay? Because simple
changes that you make as we go through and correct little things can totally
change page numbers. And I am really not a
fan of rework. Okay. All of us have, we're
using whatever spoons, whatever energy levels
we've got and rework. We just who has time for that, let's do that at the very end for a final walk through. Okay.
13. Headers & Footers: Headers and footers. This is pretty self explanatory, but we're still
going to go over it because this template presents innate issues with this category footers
in a formatted book, as you guessed it, sometimes you can put the page
number in the header, but usually there on the
bottom, they're in the footer. Just a quick note,
this is taken care of in the template
that we downloaded, but a fiction book should
not start until chapter one. Chapter one will be page one. Everything else,
sometimes a man numerals Xl stuff in the entirety
of my learning. Formatting page numbers have
been the biggest pain in my, the, for some reason, like I noted before when
I was talking about fonts and beef with
Times New Roman. The template that
you downloaded from KDP has all the page numbers
and Times New Roman. If you don't change them, the Amazon KDP engines get
very mad at you the heck. Someone smarter
than me knows why. I don't. It doesn't matter
because I know how to fix it. I have always just gone in, highlighted the page numbers and changed it to
Garamond or another. Whatever Seraphont I'm
using for the body text. I usually use Garamond. Something that you will notice, hopefully right
away when you start messing with page numbers in the template is that if you change one, it'll
change all of them. You can't go in and just
write the number one. It'll say number one
on all of the pages. If you get rid of
the dreaded times in Roman on the first page, it'll get rid of it in
all of that full section to get a better
visual explanation of what the heck I mean by that. If you go ahead
find chapter one, page one, and double click
the page one number. You should see right behind it, It should say first page
footer, section eight. For chapter one it says
section eight because each of the pages leading up to that have been a different
section on the page. Report should say
section seven, six feet, scroll back through if you didn't get rid of
the table of contents. If you did, those numbers
will be a little different, but you get the
general idea here. While we still have page one, number one highlighted, let's go in there,
highlight that. And then go up to your bar under the header and footer bar, which should pop up once you're in header and footer territory. If you go to where
it says page number, it will be a third
little icon over. Click that. Then in
the Herman you go to format page numbers
and a window pop up. Let's say number format. You can change that if you want, but 123 works for
most of us, right? Chapter number, you can do
that, most people don't. At the bottom says page
numbering for chapter one. Page one, it should say
start at one, right? But you have the option
to continue from previous section. Don't do that. Leave that alone. That's where you start creating
issues for yourself, where the document doesn't
know where page one is. But this way, the way
that they're all set up, each page is being treated
as a different section. You're telling
Microsoft Word that, hey, this page one is actually where I
want page one to be. Okay, don't mess with
that now, just for kicks. You know what you're
looking at? Go over to the blank page before chapter one and get your mouse, your
cursor over there. Let's go right back into format. Page numbers will be just and you'll see that that one is let. This is continue from
previous section. Okay? That's because all of the sections in the
front matter are blank, so it's okay if they're
all the same. Okay? And it'll even say they see a little gray head is
the same as previous. Just if you change
something in any of those, all of the footers for
this will be the same for all the front matter
until chapter one begins. If you want to move something from front matter and make
it a back matter page, I do not suggest
highlighting and copying because
that will also grab the page number
formatting and then you get all screwed
up in the beginning. At the end, it'll suddenly
put the page numbers that are formatted for front matter
and stick it in the end. With the skills that
you've learned about, insert in the page break, next page, do that,
just type it manually. Don't just copy
and paste because then you get into trouble
with page numbers and stuff. One more thing to note about page numbers is in regards to
margin, the bottom margin. Sometimes I will increase that number just a
little bit so there's a little more space between the page number and the
line of text just above it. Again, that's just messing with margins and something
you can do. Go up. My computer
will let me scroll. Let's select the header, which obviously
on the first page your chapter should be blank. Double click in the general
area, it should let you in. There you go. Double click in like the header area and
I'll show you everything. The headers for all the chapter title pages
should be blank. There shouldn't be
anything there. But past any of the first
pages of your chapters, there will be a little
header that pops up. I think I mentioned this before. On the left side, it's
often the author name, and on the right side
it's book title. You can put the book
title on both sides. It's really whatever
you're comfortable with. Like I said, some people put the page numbers in
head, the footer. You don't have to have
anything in your head, but it does add like a nice
professional note to it. If you're printing in black
and white through Amazon, KDP, or wherever you're
printing your book, I found that if you lower the saturation a
little bit on your coloring, meaning choose like
a gray instead of the black from the
text color option. I'm just assuming you
know where that is. The header will compete
less with the body of text. It's less distracting, especially if your
margins are super close. You don't, you don't want
the title of the book to read like it's part of your
text of that chapter, right? Also the header section
is usually all caps. You can highlight that text and there'll be a little
style section that pops up and choose
subtle reference or you can get to
the all caps from. That is usually the
style of the heaters. It's an all caps
section. All right.
14. Back Matter & Author Biography: All right, let's talk about back matter and the author bio. Okay, this tutorial is meant for paperback
fiction, right? The back matter in paperback
fiction pretty simple. Usually just the acknowledgments
and the authobiography. Other words, by author
section is sometimes tucked into the back matter instead of above the copyright
information. But that's usually only if the
author is really prolific. If there's like a lot of titles, if you're working on a Kindle or making an book, the other works. But authors will usually be
at the end because you can literally put a link
to your next book. Hopefully someone
finishes your work, they love you so much. Oh, they click, and they get the next one and they just continue. Right. But in a paperback, I think it's more
appropriate to put it at the front if you want your book, your story line has a
lot of deeper themes. You can consider putting discussion questions in a
back section. It's tricky. I've considered
doing that before, but I was a little concerned
that it would come across as pretentious instead of adding the discussion
questions at the back. I have decided here and there to make like
blog posts to have a more colloquial
casual conversation with my readers
via social media. But that's a call you can make, but if you want to include
discussion questions, you could put that here too. Nonfiction again, we're
talking about fiction here. Nonfiction back matter
requires a lot more, usually requires a
bibliography with citations more backup for
things that you said, quoted information you've
gathered your research. Nonfiction might have an
afterward there to back matter. And E books, like I
said, in addition to other works by author usually gets a little more complicated
than in a fiction book. What I think is super fun
is the author biography. I do have opinions on this and you're going
to listen to them. I've read, written, and edited a lot of
author biographies. I have some opinions on this. I'm going to share with you
the authobiography section. That should feel
personal to you, but please remember that this is your professional introduction
to a lot of people. Okay? So think of
this as your brand. This isn't social
media blurb that you can change willy nilly. It's not a place to be flippant. You're not trying to isolate
anyone in this section. You want to put a lot
of thought toward it, but you really want to be like, this is why you should
read more of my stuff. I would absolutely include a nod to any published writing
that's under your belt, including articles, blog posts you've written for
any big websites, other books, anthologies
you've been in. Even the ones that you've just listed in your other works, but authors mentioned them. Again, as a self
published author, you're going to have to get
used to promoting yourself a. It's okay. That's
what we all do. We all do, It's fine. Do you want to mention
your education, general geography
of where you live? People are weird. Don't
get too specific. I always say I live about an
hour outside Philadelphia. I just, I'm from
Philadelphia. Okay. No one needs to know
more than that, but that they get a
sense of where I am, get to know me a little bit. You can mention appropriate
contact information, that's a big one. Like your social media stuff. I wouldn't put an e
mail address in there. A lot of authors do. That
seems a little personal to me. Just remember whatever
contact information you put in has a staying power. For a few years, at least you can put all this
professional stuff, add a little bit of
personal flavor, a hint of something
interesting about yourself. Maybe you have an unusual hobby. Maybe a writer and
a ghost hunter also know it's totally weird, but it catches your attention. Maybe you have a favorite
food or you really like cooking one
style something, add a dash of color. But again, this
isn't social media. This is a professional
manuscript book that you are putting
out into the world. This may be people's first
introduction to you. Think about your
brand. Think about who you want to be seen as, especially if you
want to write more. The benefit of self
publishing is a theory. You could change this part of your manuscript and
update it later. But just try to think
in terms of longevity. You don't really want
to be dipping back in and poking around too much. Poke the beast. You might move something and then years later you're like, oh no, Why are all my chapter starting up on the left page. What would Mallory say? She yelled at you If
you choose a photo, again, you don't have
to, but make sure it shows your face
clearly and possible. Don't use a selfie.
Don't use a filter. You've just written a book, you've now also just
formatted that book. And presumably if
someone is seeing it, you've also published
and sold that book. Okay, don't hide
behind a filter. We want to see you. You should be very proud of who you are. And I swear the days, I mean, I use filters too, Not right now. Sorry. If you're that
uncomfortable, you do not have to include a photo. But people I like to
see who wrote my book, I like to connect a
face to the name. Don't shy away from
that. Don't hide your beautiful face in filter. You're a beautiful creative
creature in the world and you've accomplished
something and I'm proud of you. Show your real face, Okay? All right, who's ready for
the final walk through?
15. Final Walkthrough: The final walk through. Holy Molly, you've
done so much work. Are you so proud
of yourself? I am. I'm proud of you for
sticking through with this. This is a lot to
learn. This can be overwhelming. It's good for you. It's six. Yeah. Okay. When I'm comfortable with
all of my sections, I get up dance a little jig, take a shot of
Fireball. Just kidding. I like to o in my document. I do a final scan of everything. Okay. Before I upload it to KDP. I know full well that KDP has almost always
kicked it back to me. And they're like, hey, you need to fix this
and this and this. But I'd like to just take a final look before
I even get to that point. Here are some things
I look for and do in my final walk through when I'm finishing formatting a book. Remember those opening chapter
paragraphs when we said we'd go back and make
sure they are all drop caps or all caps
or whoever we chose. It's time. Do it now. Okay. Go back and just
ensure consistency of style along each chapter page. Okay? Did you choose all caps? Drop caps, neither. Go back through and make sure they all match stylistically. And then whatever you did with the page dividers,
check that there too. Okay. They can be sneaky. You know how you write best. What is a really good practice? I have found and saved me
a few times and I'm like, oh man, I almost missed that. Use control for the find option. Whatever you usually use
to denote a page divider, Before you've formatted
it, I'll use dashes. I'll usually use
like three hyphens. I'll put two hyphens
into the find. Inevitably, it'll be
like boom right here. And I'm like, oh
my gosh, I didn't, I didn't replace that with
my decorative page divider. So that's a good
way and just make sure that you've found
them all to do that. Okay? All right.
Here's a weird one. I don't know who came
up with these terms, but they're pretty good.
Orphans and widows. Okay. What these mildly
frightening terms and formatting in regards to
sentence fragments, okay? Now, due to margins and font size and all
the little changes that you made while
you were working, your sentences and words
might get split and create like an ugly
separation, okay? Sometimes this involves
a single word on the next line, which
is called a widow. Okay? Or a single word. This is a bad one that moves all the way to a brand new
page that's called an orphan. So your whole chapter ends. And then I think it's like
that, that's the orphan. It's like what? It's
not a good look. I have more problems with
orphans than I do with widows. Talking about formatting people, widows don't always bother me, but you have to fix
an orphan, okay? Typically, a super easy
solution to fixing widows and orphans is very slightly
adjusting margin sizes. Remember how we
went? And we checked all our margin sizes. We
know how to find them. We played around the stuff, I would literally go
in and just change by 0.01 until you get rid of all those little
orphans and widows. What's annoying, here's one of those annoying
things about formatting is the more you
mess that to get rid of one, you might create another
one over in chapter seven. Typically, when you change
something at the end, you're only going to affect the chapters
that come after it. Say you have an issue in chapter two with spacing
and you fix that. That might create an
issue in chapter 12. Start at the beginning
and work that way. And hopefully changing
the margin sizes helps with your
orphans and rows. Okay? If that doesn't work or you're getting into
like weird spacing issues, your gutters get messy, you're not liking how close
it is, the edge of the page. You can put those back
and then you can play a little bit of the
paragraph spacing where it's like
0.6 point messing with the spacing a
little bit might be enough to make room
for an orphan. Again, I'm going to just real quick mention right
side chapter pages. Okay? All these edits and shifts
that you're making from beginning to end might be
enough to shift things around. Especially if you have a really long chapter that goes right to the end of a page. And then you change something, the whole paragraph moves, you didn't quite catch
it, just go back, double check that all
your chapters start on the page will usually be an
odd number of pages, okay? Odd number of page, okay? Once you have done
all of these things that you have right
side chapters and orphans and widows
and page dividers and chapter titles
and everything. Now it is time to go
into your table of contents and put in the
appropriate page numbers. Yeah. Okay. Just keep in mind
that if you make changes once Amazon spits
it out and tells you have some errors to correct,
you may need to do that. Do not release your book
with incorrect page numbers. Oh, that would be so sad. That would be
heartbreaking, don't you? Okay. All right, team. If you're exhausted and your
eyes hurt and you're sick of reading your
own book and you hate everything and you don't
want to look at it anymore, congratulations you
formatted your book and that's how you should feel. Because man, it takes a lot longer than you
expected, right? Okay, so all cutting aside is at this time that you can save your PDF, right,
In Microsoft Word. Okay, so go up to
File and save As. No, real quick. Save
your document first. Okay, just so you have the freshest thing,
then go back in, choose File, save As, and from the pull down menu of file types, choose PDF, okay? And then save your document. Depending on your
computer settings, it might automatically open up so you can see your document. Open it up, look at it, look what you've done. It
doesn't look so nice. Looks real. I'm excited for you. I can't even see it and
I'm excited for you. Okay. At this point,
you have your PDF. It's time to upload it to Amazon KDP and see what
this thing looks like. Okay. You'll need a cover
image two to move forward, that's going to be
a separate PDF. You may be able to do
that yourself or not, but as far as this tutorial
you have completed, you have learned an
entire new skill set. Time to actually practice
what you've learned. You have a new document
in front of you that should be formatted to
industry standards. That is a lot of
work that is super exciting and you are so much
closer to getting published. But for now, you have
just about completed this tutorial and I am so
stinking proud of you.
16. Conclusion: In conclusion, congratulations. You've learned so much, you have added to
your skill set. You have dipped a pinky
toe into what it is to format your manuscript from a
sloppy Microsoft Word file, probably in some San Sera font, you're spacing all over the place to a
beautiful, polished, attractive looking,
stylistically streamlined PDF. Now, if you want, it's time to move forward to Amazon KDP. Open that listing
and then you can find my next tutorial and we
can work on that together. There's no need to be nervous
because in all likelihood, your listing is
going to kick back some errors and some changes
that you need to make. And you can go back in
and you can fix those. You can revisit the part of this tutorial that you need
a little refresher on. Like, what did she
say about embedding fonts or what's a
gutter Stuff like that. Okay, If you're
using Amazon KDP, I will literally not literally figuratively
be right there with you. Okay? You could
follow my tutorial about how to take
what we just finished and move it right into Amazon KDP and just continue
this together, okay? Even if I'm not there or
you do this on your own, the Amazon KDP listing has a previewer that will literally pop up and show you what
changes you need to make. It'll show you your manuscript as it would look when
it printed, Okay? And it's really cool and you can go in and make
changes and re, upload all that good stuff. Okay, congratulations. Awesome job. You listen to me. Am I hope you learn some
stuff And I hope to see you on my tutorial about how to self publish
on Amazon KDP. All right, congratulations.
Mallory Cywinski, Author, Publisher, & Your Cheerleader
