Chapter 2: Book Design and Formatting (Part One)

Welcome to Broke Author!

Come along with me as I revise and post an updated edition of my book, Self-Publishing for the Broke Author, one chapter at a time. You’ll also find extra advice on editing, book design and production, self-publishing and book marketing, with a view towards getting it all done without going broke.

Click here for the Introduction.

Click here for Chapter 1.

Once upon a time, book formatting was a big deal. Back in the day, Word docs didn’t convert to ebooks very well, so if you wanted a professional-looking ebook, it needed to be compiled and formatted manually. The book writing and organization app Scrivener was decent at this, but for best results, ebooks needed to be hand-coded, which necessitated knowing HTML.

Fortunately, the technology has improved vastly over the years, and these days all you need to do to produce a functional and professional-looking text-based ebook is upload your Word doc to your publishing platform. DIY formatting couldn’t be easier.

Where you might need help in terms of ebook formatting is with image-heavy books such as graphic novels, cook books or illustrated children’s books. This is not my area of expertise, but from what I understand, this is essentially just a matter of converting a PDF version of your book to an Epub file prior to uploading it. With all manner of file conversion apps available, both free and paid (and we’ll cover some of those later), this is also no longer something you’ll typically need to spend money on.

Formatting paperback and hardback interiors, on the other hand, can be a little tricky, depending largely on your word processing software. This is one area where, if you’re doing the work yourself, you’ve got to know what you’re doing. And if you don’t, savvy readers will be able to tell instantly from the moment they open your book that it’s self-published.

Before we go through the steps involved in creating and formatting electronic and physical books, let’s first look at the parts of a book and talk a little bit about book design.

Typically, a book is made up of three basic parts:

• Front matter — As the name implies, this is the content making up the pages you typically see at the front of a book, before the story or the book proper begins. At a minimum, it usually includes the title page with the publisher’s imprint, the copyright page, the table of contents, and the dedication.

• The main content — This is your actual book, the contents of the manuscript you devoted weeks, months or years to lovingly crafting and polishing. Or the part you hammered out in a mad dash over a few days, paid a ghost writer to write, or prompted an AI to write for you, depending on the type of author you are. No judgement here.

• Back matter — This is the material that goes in the back of the book, after THE END. It usually includes things like acknowledgements, an author bio, and a list of all your other books, if you have other books. In an ebook, this can also include links to your newsletter or website, and where readers can go and buy your other books (this last should be to a landing page with shop links. Many booksellers will reject your book from their online store if you include direct links to their competition).

In an ebook, you may want to move your front matter to the back of the book (except for the table of contents), in order to make the most of the real estate allotted to the sample that prospective readers are allowed to download on Amazon and some other bookseller websites. More on that when we get to marketing your book.

Design is simply how your book looks. You don’t have a lot of design options when it comes to ebooks. This is because things like font choice and line and paragraph spacing are controlled in the e-reader device or app on the user side. But you can add some custom elements, such as illustrations and flourishes like drop caps or special symbols between scenes. It helps to know HTML, but there are other ways to get this done that don’t require you to learn any markup.

With physical books, on the other hand, you can determine and control every aspect of the book’s appearance, from the fonts and typesetting to text size and spacing to design flourishes and illustrations.

Unfortunately, a lot of indie author-publishers put a great deal of effort into those little flourishes that make a physical book special, but they fail to follow basic book formatting procedures, which ends up making their book look unprofessional and clues a reader in right away to the fact that they’ve picked up a self-published book.

Here are the book design and layout elements you need to be mindful of when formatting your paperback book, if you want your book to look like it was done by a pro:

• Indentation and spacing. In a professional book, the first line of a paragraph is indented, lines are typically single spaced, and there are no extra spaces between paragraphs.

  Blocks of text with no indentation, or hard returns that leave gaps between paragraphs, make your text look like it was formatted to be read online. This is a major indicator that a book is self-published.

• Running headers. These are the headers at the top of the pages in paperbacks and hardbacks that remind you what you’re reading and who wrote it. Commonly, the book’s title goes on the left-hand page, and the author’s name goes on the right, although if your chapters have their own titles, this may go there instead.

  Running headers may be centered or aligned to the outside text of the corresponding page — in other words, the right headers are all the way to the right and the left ones are all the way to the left. In contemporary books, they’re usually printed in the same font as the main text, but in either all caps or drop caps.

  Most importantly — running headers don’t appear on the first page of a new chapter or section. Having a header appear on every single page is a common rookie mistake.

• Justified text. Another common mistake new indie publishers make is leaving their text left-justified, creating a neat left edge of text and a ragged right edge. But look inside any professionally published book, and you’ll see paragraphs that are fully justified to create a clean, even edge on both sides of the page.

• Widows, orphans and paragraph flow. Generally, you want to disable widow and orphan control, and turn off any settings to keep paragraphs together on the same page. Enabling these will cause your chapter pages to break off in strange places. With the exception of the last page of a chapter, the first and last line of each page within a chapter (or scene) should line up with the first and last line of the opposite page.

  Of course, sometimes this results in a last chapter page with just one or two words. When this happens, you can either change the settings for just that paragraph until you get the result you want, or you can edit the last line or paragraph to remove extra words and make everything line up smoothly.

• Hyphenated text. Related to the above, you want to enable any settings that allow long words at the end of a line to be broken and hyphenated. This will help keep the justified text from looking unevenly spaced throughout your book.

• Page numbers. You would think this element would be pretty straightforward, but that depends. Your primary page numbering beings on the first page of the first chapter. Front matter typically doesn’t get numbered. But to make things confusing, if you’ve got any material that goes before the start of the book proper that’s included in the table of contents, such as a forward, introduction, or author’s note, that should get numbered separately with lower-case roman numerals. The first page of the book itself is always page one.

  Where to place your page numbers is another matter, but you’ve got flexibility here. I like to place mine in the running headers, at the far edge of each page. But this means that the first page of each chapter or section won’t be numbered. Some publishers get around this by moving the page number to the footer on pages with no running headers. But generally, readers aren’t going to get lost if your chapter heading pages aren’t numbered.

  That said, the simplest option is to place the page number centered in a footer on every page.

My best advice for anyone doing their own paperback or hardback formatting is to keep a similar type of book from Big Publishing on your desk to use as a reference as you go. Even after doing this for fifteen years, I still need to look at a published book from time to time as I work to make sure my formatting is correct.

Most word processing applications nowadays, both paid and free, can do all of these things, although some users find these formatting options tricky to figure out, which is why they may want to hire this task out. But with an abundance of tutorials on YouTube for just about anything under the sun, anyone who’s determined to do it without paying someone can learn how, and fairly quickly.

But if this is something you struggle with, I’ll highlight a few tools that might help later on in the chapter.

Thanks for reading!

I’m rewriting large chunks of this chapter from scratch, so it’s taking a bit longer than I’d anticipated. In Part Two, I’ll cover both free and budget tools and resources for designing and formatting both ebooks and paperbacks. Stay tuned!

And if you’re in need of a budget-friendly editor, look no further. I offer editing and proofreading services at affordable rates and I’m happy to do partial critiques and edits and work with you at a pace that suits your available budget.

Have your own tips for low- or no-cost ways to get your book edited? Share them in the comments.

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