Typesetting Basics For Pod

TYPESETTING BASICS FOR POD I’ve had an opportunity to learn a bunch of self-revealed books lately, and not e-books however precise paper books made attainable by the magic of print-on-demand (POD). This technology is helping to fuel the new indie, self-pub, and micro-press “increase” and it’s a powerful software even for main, established publishing houses. Services like CreateSpace and Lulu make it nearly as quick, easy, and low-cost as publishing an e-book. But there is something you need to keep in mind earlier than you launch that indie POD version. E-books are usually pretty format-agnostic. The e-book resellers have a strict set of tips and since your readers may have the power to zoom out and in, etc., the formatting rarely makes any difference. E-books are all about the text (or almost all, anyway), but if you go the POD route you actually have to grasp tips on how to format textual content that appears skilled and is readable and alluring for your potential audience. Why look skilled? I hope I don’t actually have to answer that. Authors, by now ought to know that once you make the choice to self-publish you’re including “writer” to your record of job duties and also you owe it to yourself, your e-book, and your readers to place out as professional a product as humanly potential. Tough love right here, individuals: Crappy formatting doesn't lend your indie guide “allure” it simply says, “I don't know what I’m doing here,” and that’s not charming it’s really disrespectful to your viewers, a lot much less to centuries of the artwork and craft of constructing books. That having been stated, my greatest advice is to rent a typesetter. There are freelancers on the market, good ones, who can do it for you. This makes your POD e-book a bit more of an funding, but you also needs to be paying an editor, a proofreader, and a canopy designer, too, so anybody who thinks that self-publishing is “free” is simply self-publishing badly. There is way less enduran ce today for badly-produced indie books. You’re now competing with “the big canine” and the bar is set high. Now, I get it. I don’t have unlimited resources myself, so there are some stuff you’re going to have to determine the way to do by yourself, but that means you have to determine tips on how to do it on your own, not simply not do it. No one ever said this was going to be simple (besides perhaps Amazon, Lulu, B&N . . .). Yes, you'll be able to “typeset” your POD book in Word. I would advocate learning InDesign, however even shopping for that software is an actual investment, so okay, go ahead and use Word, but should you’re going to do that, for the love of all that’s holy, a minimum of follow these few easy ideas: No areas between paragraphs. Find any guide by any main writerâ€"any novel that isâ€"and take a look at the paragraphs. There are no areas between the paragraphs in that novel. You shouldn’t even have those areas in your manuscript. Your paragrap hs ought to finish with a paragraph mark, not a handbook line break (turn on your invisibles to see the distinction), and should start with an . . . Indent of affordable proportions. Your primary formatting will wish to set your indents at 0.5”, which is ok for a manuscript, however way, way too deep for a book. I assume 0.2” is pretty good. Again, evaluate what you have to what professionals are doing and fiddle with it till they give the impression of being the identical. Headers and footers are HARD. There are methods to suppress headers and footers (together with web page numbers) so please, please, please work out how to do this. There ought to by no means be a header, footer, or web page quantity on a clean web page, or a header on a chapter opening web page, ever. There ought to never be page numbers in your front matter. For the record, front matter is every little thing that comes before the actual story begins: a title web page, a legal/copyright web page, perhaps a de dication, and so forth. You can set the page numbers to begin at 1 on the primary textual content web page, or go Old School and let the story begin on, say, page 7. I don’t really care either way, just no page numbers in the front matter, ever. Likewise, no web page numbers on any clean pages or additional stuff in the back, except excerpts, which may both start renumbering at the start of the excerpt or not, up to you, however anyway no less than change the header to determine the brand new book. No header, footer, or page quantity with stuff like the author bio, acknowledgements, and so on. within the back. No script, no sans serif. Nothing moves me to angry, almost violent mood suits like an entire 90,000 word novel set in Arial or Helvetica. If I needed to read this on the internet, I would, but sans serif fonts are hard to learn in giant blocks of textual content and nothing, however nothing, screams “rank newbie in the hizzy” louder than sans serif text. If you have pas sages you wish to set apart that come from diary entries, etc., you may be tempted to set that in some fancy script font like Lucinda Calligraphy. For the love of God, you must do everything in your power to withstand that temptation. Leave that, and different script fonts, on your wedding invites. The folks you ship these to will know how to contact you to confirm all that information they will’t learn. Back to front matter. If you attempt to sell me your next guide in the entrance of the guide I’m reading now I will hate you forever. Ads within the back, only in the again, and by no means anywhere else but the again. That says, “Hey, thanks for reading all the way through, here’s the following one!” Putting it up entrance says, “You are holding in your hands a catalog.” I don’t learn catalogs cover to cowl. Do you? A collection record is ok, by the way, just hold it as stripped down as attainable. Before I let you know a story, Mr. Bond. How a lot background do you really need on a novel before you start studying it? Answer: None. A lot of individuals put brief acknowledgements up entrance and that’s fineâ€"thank a number of key individuals and get on with it. If you’re certain you want an in depth introduction to explain your setting, your writing process, your profession as a whatever-it-is-the-protagonist-does-for-a-residing, or something other than “Thanks Mom, editor, and cover designer, and this book is dedicated to my spouse,” then you need to seriously think about whether or not or not your novel actually stands by itself. A Tale of Two Punctuation Marks. This is an em-dashâ€"and this isn't â€" neither is this â€" -. Notice that the em-dash (which comes from old-college typesettingâ€"a splash as extensive as the lowercase m in that font) has no spaces earlier than or after it. Straight quotes are bad. Set your good quotes so that opening quotes “appear to be that and closing quotes seem like this.” For the uncommon instanc e of single quotes, that is an apostrophe’ and ‘that was a gap single quote. See the difference? And wow, there are more. Stay tuned . . . â€"Philip Athans About Philip Athans Thank you!!! Yes, sure, sure. I simply completed formatting a e-book for a shopper fro CreateSpace. While she had already formatted the e-book variations, she was burned out and couldn’t face the POD. I formatted the POD according to the requirements you mentioned (I might need screwed up on the primary line indents!) plus moreâ€"starting chapters on the odd web page, etc. She was thrilled with the “professionalism” when she saw the final product. I was discussing with a writing friend the joy of understanding it will look “like an actual book” when somebody buys it. She mentioned she not often buys self-pubbed books for that cause. She likes the texture of a bodily e-book however can’t stand studying a badly formatted one. How many authors are affected by this status of POD generally? I’ve been considering self-publishing, e-book or print, if I can’t discover an agent for my novel, so that is actually good to know. I heard that I ought to rent an editor and a cover d esigner, but didn’t know I additionally needed a typesetter and a proofreader. Damn. Do you could have an estimate or an example of how a lot all 4 companies will price? It would be nice to know what kind of budget I must be working with. Those charges can range and I’ve seen editors cost as little as a couple hundred bucks up to mid-4-figures. There are numerous organizations that can assist you to discover an editor/proofreader. I belong to the Northwest Independent Editors Guild. You can discover them at: Some editors can do the typesetting for you, too, or a minimum of the e-e-book formatting, so inquire about that service at the similar time. Be prepared to pay by the word, web page, or hour, so very very long epic fantasies, for instance, can run you $one thousand or so, simply. Heh, heh, heh! Anywhere from a couple of hundred to your left arm. Each printer has providers for rent and those figures can provide you a ballpark. Freelancers may be more or less however you may get more customized service and better, extra timely communicationâ€"I would expect both. It varies by project, too. Some are by length, some are by project. Realisticaly, the whole thing will run from $500 (an actual discount) on up. I paid $225 for a general edit for story, voice, and so on. but didn’t know the editor actually most well-liked non-fiction. A very costly workshop (about $2K) was worth ten times the worth and so they only appeared on the first fifty pages. The distinction in information I received was staggering. Yes, the workshop taught a lot of principles and wasn’t directed at my work particularly, but the feedback I acquired from the 5 staff members was priceless. I’m going to be self-publishing soon myself. My question refers back to the Mr. Bond a part of this submit. I’ve been listening to some people say recently that ‘MOST’ people do not learn prologues. Is this what you imply in that statement? I’ve questioned lots of readers and over ninety% of them (no less than 40 folks) say they read everything the writer has to say, prologue, story and epilogue, even prefaces. Some folks argue what’s the point if it’s not in the main story. What is your tackle this? For me, prologues are one thing that not describe a world, but extra of a warming the reader up type of thing. For instance in a single story I was engaged on I began the e-book with the principle character’s dying breaths, and then it jumps back in time to inform the story from the start. A professor highly criticized me for doing this. I completely DID NOT imply you need to cut your prologue. People who say that nobody reads the prologue are nuts, that’s part of your storyâ€"a part of your textual content. What you’re describing is a terrific set-up/prologue. Leave that, simply don’t step out of the story and describe how you wrote the guide, the analysis you probably did, and so forth. Okay thanks. I one hundred% agree with you.