Tag Archives: formatting

Prepping for Print on Demand – Interior

Posted on by under Indie Publishing, Publishing

Because I’ve learned a lot by preparing the Jewels of Kinfairlie for republication in Print on Demand editions, I thought I’d share that with you here. Today, we’ll talk about the file for the interior of the book. On Wednesday, we’ll talk about covers. (Tomorrow I have a guest blogger!)

What you have to do for the interior of your book is format the text on the page, just the way a typesetter does. You might choose to hire someone to do the job, but it’s not that hard. I think you’ll be surprised how much you already know about typesetting, just from using Word for word processing.

The point here is to create a file for the book interior that will appear precisely the same way to every person who views it. It will also print precisely the same way, no matter which POD order fulfillment center gets the order.

I used Createspace for my POD editions. This company is owned by Amazon. There are a bunch of cool things about Createspace, but they’re not the only POD people in existence. No matter which POD company you use – or even if you have your book printed in quantity – there will be common issues in creating that file.

Createspace offers Word templates for book interiors. This saves a ton of time in terms of laying out the pages, ensuring that the trims are correct, and that allowances for the gutters are adequate. Essentially, you download the template, open it in Word, paste in your wonderful clean text file (the one we talked about last week) and save it as the first version of your book interior. (On a PC, you might not be able to paste. I’m not sure. Maybe you have to import.) Then you go through the book, one page at a time, and pick nits.

The first and most obvious thing you can change in the book interior is the font. There are literally thousands of fonts available, some of which will already be loaded on your computer. Some are more legible than others, because they’re designed to be used as “body text” – that’s the actual story part of the book. Others are more playful and are called “display fonts” – these are used more sparingly, in titles or chapter headings. Some can be used either way.

There are two main categories of fonts: serif and sans-serif. Serif fonts are the ones with the little tails on the ends of the letters – this post appears in a serif font. Sans-serif fonts are the ones without the little tails (sans being French for without) – the type Alive & Knitting in the banner of this page is a sans-serif font. Serif fonts have a more traditional feel, while sans-serif fonts convey a more modern tone. Some people believe you shouldn’t mix them together in the same work, while others say “go for it.” It’s a personal choice.

The best way to choose a font is to look through the printed books you have and set aside those with typesetting that you find attractive. Even better, go through the books you have which are in the same genre or subgenre as the book you’re formatting, and see which ones you prefer. Trade paperback books and hardcovers will often note the font used for the book – it tends to be on the copyright page, or at the very end of the book. I use Times Roman in my books, because I like serif fonts and because it’s very legible. It was, in fact, designed for the articles in the New York Times newspaper. (And yes, Times New Roman is  another variant of the font. Check the Wiki link for nitpickitiness about the differences, if you’re so inclined.)

When you look at your book displayed in the template, you may notice some things about it. You might have only whole paragraphs displayed on each page, which makes the bottoms irregular. You might not have hyphenation activated on your file, which means only whole words are printed – this means the right margin is more ragged. You may want to go into the Format menu and choose Paragraph, then look at the layout options available to ensure that the book looks the way you want it. “Widows and orphans”, btw, are words left all alone on the line, at the top of a page or at the end of paragraph. Those are the only kind of widows and orphans that Word lets you control.

Headers and footers are navigational tools that you’ll need in your printed book. You’ll want to have some consistency in terms of size and font – and position – for your headers and footers. You can also divide your book into sections – check the Help topic on Word – in order to number different parts separately. You might, for example, not want to start numbering the pages until the first page of the actual book. By using sections, you can number the front matter with Roman numerals or not at all, plus you can suppress page numbers on first pages. You can make different headers for odd and even pages – for example, you might want to put your author name on even pages and the book title on odd-numbered pages.

Dingbats are those little symbols that often appear in books to indicate scene breaks. They’re sometimes called printers’ ornaments. There might be one after every scene, or maybe only when the scene ends at the base of the page – because then the extra line space is lost to the reader’s eye. You might want to choose a dingbat that is evocative of the story or the genre of your book. (This is how typesetters have fun.)

There are, of course, buckets of other flashy typesetter things that you can do in the interior of your book – like dropped caps. When the first letter of a chapter is much larger than the body text, even standing four of five lines tall – and compelling the body text to flow around it – that’s a dropped cap. Illuminated caps are the fancy caps in boxes, which are also used as dropped caps but are more elaborate. (Here are some coloured ones, for websites.) Some of them look like woodcuts, with faces and illustrations twined around the letter. I personally lust after dropped caps at the beginning of a chapter and may do some in future editions. If you are a type fan, check out Joel Friedlander’s blog, The Book Designer, for tons of tips about interior book layout, even about choosing fonts to pair together in the interior.

When your file is all done and pretty, and you’ve marched through it so many times that you’re sure you have it memorized, you need to export it to a PDF file. You also want to make sure that whoever opens the file sees it exactly as you did, which means the fonts need to be embedded in the file – packing them along with the book file ensures that everyone who opens the file has the correct fonts. You might think that you’re good to go because you used a common font, but there are differences in fonts supplied by different type houses – there’s a long story! – and the upshot is that the text could flow differently and the pages could break differently if an alternate font is uses.

Embed your fonts.

Apparently, on a PC, there is a menu option for doing this in Word. This menu option does not exist in Word for Mac. Exporting the file to PDF – which you do on the Print menu, which makes no sense, but there you go – will automatically embed the fonts. That’s good. The bad thing is that Word for Mac does not pass the page size to Acrobat. I’m not sure why this occurs, but it must be a bug. So – for example – your templated 5.5″ by 8.5″ page will be centered on a standard 8.5″ by 11″ page. You can only fix this if you buy Adobe Acrobat. (Adobe Acrobat Reader is the one you can get for free. In order to create or modify files, you need the full software package.)

The good news is that Createspace has an Interior Reviewer, which lets you examine every single page of the book file that you’ve uploaded. Once you upload the file and their software reviews it, Createspace will warn you that you’ve uploaded a file with pages of a different size than you selected for your book. Launch the Interior Reviewer and check each page for position. Mine were perfect – their software put my pages right where they had to be.

Wednesday, we’ll talk about covers for POD. Tomorrow, as mentioned, we have a guest blogger – Virginia is going to talk about making period costumes, which is really cool.

Prepping for Digital Editions – Text Formatting

Posted on by under Indie Publishing, Publishing

One of the challenges facing authors who choose to self-publish their books digitally is that of formatting the files. I thought we’d talk a bit about that today, in preparation for the upcoming discussion about taking books to Print on Demand editions.

Once upon a time, I was a typesetter, and later, I did desktop publishing. Both of these tasks involve arranging type into specific formats. I was used to choosing the font, the size, the justification and the spacing, all to ensure that the result was pleasing. What’s important to note about typesetting is that the process ensures that everyone sees exactly the same result.

Digital text is different. It flows. Websites designed in HTML flowed – originally all sites were HTML-based and many still are. The website designer could designate a family of fonts in the HTML code, and choose from an array of sizes (like Normal, Bigger and Smaller). The site could appear differently on every computer and with every browser, depending how the user had set up his or her preferences. (As you might imagine, this lack of control over the look of the finished site drove former typesetters like me bananas!)

Digital books follow this model, that of a text stream. On digital platforms – like eReaders – the individual looking at the text can make it bigger or smaller. They might be able to change the font. The point is that a digital book formatter doesn’t have as much control over the look of the book for every user as a typesetter does.

A couple of things fall out of this. One is that the first thing you need to do before creating different formats of your book is to create a clean text stream. This means that the file of your book has the content (of the book) with only a minimum of formatting. That ensures that the book looks as good as it can in as many formats as possible.

The best guide for this I’ve found is the Style Guide written by Mark Coker for Smashwords – and even better, it’s free. Go download it and follow all the steps. Open it and open your book manuscript file, and work through the entire process, one step at a time. This will probably take you a couple of hours – especially the first time – but will give you a nice, clean text file as a starting point. (I’m assuming that you’ve done all the copy editing, line editing, spell checking and grammar checking ahead of time.) Aim for a beautiful file, in Microsoft Word, and use it as the cornerstone of every additional format you generate.

Once you have your beautiful file, call it V1.0. Version control is really important with all digital files, both so that you know which version you’re opening and/or working with, and also so that remote servers know what you’re uploading. If you upload MyBook.doc then discover that there is a typo in the file, fix it but don’t change the name of the file, the server might not accept a new upload of MyBook.doc. Or if it does, it might mix them up. MyBook1.doc will keep everything clear for everyone.

It is true that you can hire someone to format your digital file, but I think it’s a good plan to do at least this much on your own. There may be some judgement calls to be made, and you’re the one best qualified to make them. Once you have your beautiful clean file, you can either format it yourself for different platforms, or hire someone to do that formatting for you. It’s not that hard, just requires patience and a bit of time, so you might want to learn to do it yourself.

For Kindle, Mac users can upload a Word file to the Kindle Digital Program. This actually creates an issue if you have short paragraphs (and sadly, I do). The utility at Amazon’s end that converts Word files to Kindle books gets confused by short paragraphs – it indents those lines as if they were an excerpt. The way to avoid this is to create an htm file and upload that. If you have graphics, you’ll have to zip the subsidiary files in their folder together with the htm file and upload that. If you don’t have graphics in your book file, you can click the box on the KDP book details page to have the cover you’ve uploaded for display inserted into the Kindle book.

For Smashwords, everyone can upload a Word file.

My Kindle and SW files are essentially identical. One says “Digital Edition” and one says “Smashwords Edition” on the copyright page. (Smashwords requires that detail.) My Smashwords files have the covers embedded into the files (Mark Coker’s book tells you how to do that) while my Amazon ones don’t. My Smashwords files are uploaded in Word; my Amazon files are uploaded in htm. Their respective conversion engines convert the book file to their formats.

You can also create a PDF edition from your Word file, by choosing Save as PDF from the Print menu. That format can be uploaded to All Romance eBooks. All Romance eBooks lets you offer a number of formats, so you will need a software utility to convert your book into those formats. Note that downloading the Smashwords EPUB, for example, and uploading it as the EPUB to ARe is a violation of the Smashwords Terms of Service. They created that file and have ownership of it. I use Calibre because it’s free. It likes htm files for importing, then lets you set a bunch of metadata before exporting the file to different formats. Those formats can then be uploaded to ARe and other online retailers. ARe says, btw, that its bestselling formats are PDF, EPUB and MOBI, and suggests that you offer those three as a minimum for any title available on their site.

If there’s going to be a print on demand edition of the book, I use my lovely clean Word file to create the interior of that book. More on POD next week!

Yup, tomorrow, I’m going to show you some knitting…