How to Format a Book for Publishing with Libby Murphy

Full video transcript

Thank you so much for being here today. I’m so excited to be here and thank you so much for having me. What I’m going to do is just do kind of a quick presentation. I want to go over some of the 101 overview concepts of what you need to do to prepare your book for formatting, and how you can refine your book for print and ebook, all the different formats. One of the big things that really motivates me with formatting, design, all of that, is branding and marketing your books, so it’s very, very important. I love that I can do that for people and help guide people when it comes to the brand of their book, and you know, how they’re presented and get sales.

So first things first, it’s so important that your book is formatted correctly before you start formatting it. Reason being, it can create a lot of issues down the road, a lot of headaches. I am a big fan of keeping your energy where it needs to be and not stressing out too much. 101: is your book fully, thoroughly edited? Yeah, we hope so, because the last thing you want to do is format your book and then go back and make a bunch of edits to it. So make sure it’s as good as it possibly can be at this point before you even get started. You want to make sure you’ve turned off all your track changes, comments, all that good stuff. Microsoft Word for PC has a really good tool for that, it strips it all out, it’s great. Reason I say this, I have seen books from self-published authors that still have red lines under them from their track changes, so just be sure those are all taken care of.

Hyperlinks need to be properly formatted, make sure they go to the right links. Ideally you want your cover to be in process or complete, and a lot of this does have to do with the branding aspect of it, because you want the interior of your book to be just consistent with the exterior of the book. So if you at least have a really good concept of what you want on the exterior, it can get you started on the interior. ISBN: I recommend going through Bowker, they’re like the ISBN seller of the world basically, so you can buy a pack of 10 or 100 or a thousand or whatever you need, but you do want separate ISBN numbers for the different formats of your book — hardcover, paperback, spiral, epub, whatever you’re doing, use different ISBNs for that.

So you want to have a dedication put together, this can be — and this is an optional thing, but it is a really nice thing to have when you open up the book. A foreword is optional, most suited for non-fiction. Acknowledgements, author bio, about the author with a headshot — the image is optional, the photo just really helps to establish rapport with people. Your copyright page, this is absolutely required. I wouldn’t say that there’s a set format for that, but what I would recommend is looking at other books in your genre and see what they’re including in their copyright, because they can vary between fiction and non-fiction and textbooks and other things like that. Table of contents, so that is definitely more of a non-fiction type of thing, but you will need to have a digital table of contents in an epub, and that’s easy to build. Every book sells another book — you need to promote future books, past books, if you’re collabing with someone promote their books, but find ways that you can sell your book with this book. People should have no question where they can find you online and where they can find more updates from you as you put out more books.

So I talked a little bit about branding your book, this is just so important. Your book, your series, all the marketing should have a unified brand so that you’re easily recognized. The interior of your book should very, very closely match the exterior of your book. Sometimes it’s not always possible to use the same fonts on the cover and chapter heads and things like that, but just do the best that you can, and you may come up with like a series logo that you put across a series of books, or maybe you use it for all of your books, just do what makes the most sense for the type of book that you’re publishing. And you may change colors across the books, make sure they’re complementary, they follow a nice palette, because I’ve read authors who have seven or eight books in a series and things change a lot, their branding does change a lot, and for a purist like me I like to have my books match on the shelves, but it also really, really helps with that brand recognition, so it’s very important. I recommend knocking out a day or two studying comps in your genre so that you know where and how you fit in, and then how you can stand out and differentiate yourself from the rest of the other authors and books.

Study font palettes to determine which font sets go together. Titles and headers, they can be a bit fancy, I like using more of your branded fonts for that. Your body text should be serif, and I know serif is — it’s not sexy, it’s not fun, but it is so easy on the eyes, and actually sans serif, when you’re reading a book, it can be tiring on the eyes and make people put your book down earlier than you would want them to. So be sure that you’re paying attention to the reader experience.

So, formatting programs — this is going to be something that it’s really down to what is your technical skill, what is your preference, what’s your budget. You can start small and you can work your way up, it really depends on how much you want to invest in it, how many books you think you’re going to be writing, and how much you want to learn. So I use InDesign, I love InDesign, it’s an Adobe program, it’s the gold standard, I’ve used it in book publishing, magazine publishing, and basically everything I’ve ever done that goes to print, except sometimes I use Canva, but I would not use that for book publishing — just take an InDesign class and dive in.

Word and Google Docs, they’re great for writing in, they’re great for editing, they’re not really great type-setting tools, but they do work. I would just recommend that if you do decide to use Word and/or Google Docs for formatting your book, that you really dive into tutorials or guides on how you can use them specifically for books, because they do like to put in a lot of excess code and clutter and things like that, that can create some problems down the road, and they don’t quite have all the same options that you would have with a pro design program.

Vellum is — it’s super easy to use, it’s beautiful, it’s built just for people who all they need to do is format a book. It is expensive, I’ve seen it for a couple hundred dollars, but if you don’t want a subscription like you would have to do with InDesign or Word, it’s a great option, it does beautiful work. Scrivener is — it’s personally my favorite writing program, especially if you’re laying out chapters and sections, and it’s my favorite program for writing. It is a little bit more complicated when it comes to formatting your book, but people love Scrivener so much, it has a cult following, and there’s so many tutorials out there that show you how to use it for your best advantage when it comes to formatting your book.

So these initial book setups, these are all about laying out and designing, you are going to have to do some final formatting work, so you’re going to want to look at some of these programs. Adobe Acrobat, so if you’re publishing a book for print, and sometimes maybe you’re offering a digital download, Adobe Acrobat is an absolute must. Calibre, that’s what I use, every single book that I put out as a digital book I run it through Calibre, and this is pretty much the most popular formatting software out there, it’s free, it’s open source, what I love about it is that it finalizes everything, it cleans up excess CSS code, helps you format your table of contents, your cover, it embeds all the metadata in your book that’s going to make it more searchable and publishing ready, so absolutely, 100 percent, get Calibre.

Kindle Create, so if you’re publishing a book on Kindle, what this does is it walks you through a very quick wizard and it helps you format your book just for Kindle, and it generates multiple file types for the different types of uploads that you’re going to use, and then you want to check it in Kindle Previewer — Kindle Previewer is just a reading tool, it’s going to allow you to see how the book is set up, exactly how it’s going to go out on Kindle, and you can go through that, go back and make any tweaks if you need to. And then if you’re doing picture books or children’s books, Kindle Kids’ Book Creator is fantastic, I’ve used that for some picture books before and it just makes really beautiful work, and it helps you set up your book exactly how you want it to look. Apple Books, of course, that’s a great epub reader, I think it makes everything look really clean, but it’s also nice to run it through there just so you can have that extra layer of double check when it comes to how everything looks in the end.

So my advice: keep it simple, go with the program that works best with your level of skill, time, and budget. I use InDesign, but people also format books in Word that look great, and nobody would ever be able to tell the difference, it’s just preference, so don’t worry about it. I would rather you get into your zone of genius so that you can get this out, have it look great, and not get stuck up in the minutiae, because that’s just going to waste time, it’s going to push your publishing out, it’s not worth it.

All right, so where to publish. Print: you can do Amazon, BookPatch, Apple, Barnes & Noble, IngramSpark, all of these are fantastic options. And ebook, obviously we have kind of the same, Smashwords and Kobo, they’re okay to publish on, a lot of self-pub authors go there, do your research. Every single book publishing platform has their own royalty structure, the way they structure their contracts, all that, and payment processes. I would say cover your bases, make sure you’re publishing on the right platforms, because quality over quantity is always the best. When you publish your book in a bunch of different places, if you ever have to make changes to that book down the road, you could have potentially 10 or 12 different places that you’re going to have to update your book, and it’s a huge pain, so don’t feel like you have to spread yourself too thin, it’s not worth it. When you publish on retail platforms you don’t have to provide customer service if there’s an issue with a technical issue or a printing issue or something like that, Amazon will take care of that for you. A lot of people do like to publish on their own sites, maybe set up a Shopify store or something like that, and that can just create more work for you because you’re going to have to be your own customer service agent.

Cleaning up your manuscript — see this little formatting marks guide, that is going to be your best friend when you’re cleaning up your manuscript. Turn this on and you’re going to see everything. Tabs is such an important one, because a lot of times our instinct is to hit tab at the beginning of our paragraph, don’t do that, just set a hanging indent in your global document feature. Now, the first paragraph in a chapter should have no hanging indent, and whether you choose to use a drop cap or not, that’s totally a stylistic preference, do what you want to do there. Use actual page breaks, it makes me want to cry every time I see someone hitting return 30 times just to get their words on the next page, so try to avoid that. Ellipses, so that’s the three dots at the end of a sentence, make sure you’re using this special character for that, you can set that up in Word or InDesign, whatever you’re using, make sure it’s actually an ellipsis because it spaces it out nicer than just three periods. And then smart and curly quotes, it’s just a readability thing, it looks better, make sure you’ve got that set, and that’s another global document setting, super easy, hit a button and you’re good.

Now one thing that’s really important, zoom out, you’re going to see so much from this aerial view that looks wrong, and you’re going to be able to catch a lot that you’re not going to be able to see when you’re zoomed in and looking at the nitty gritty details. So always, as you’re going through multiple times in the process, zoom out. Reader experience is so much more important than being fancy, make sure the reader experience is good, make sure everything is just so easy to read. Sometimes we have to dial back our aesthetic and artistic preferences a little bit, that’s okay, I would rather somebody finish my book than have to put it down because they can’t read a super cool font.

All right, so now we’re going to look at the initial design setup. Create styles, create a style for every single kind of text, and this is going to be a universal style, so that when you select that text and hit the button for the type of style you want, it’s going to make it exactly the same and consistent across the board, it’s awesome. The cool thing is if you decide you need to change something globally, it’ll update everything else for you, so make sure every bit of text you have in your book is styled. You can always slightly tweak some of these things later on to fit the page or a line, or whatever, the big thing is again zoom out and make sure it doesn’t look too different. This seems so ironic considering we’re talking about designing a book, but the last thing you want people to really notice is the design, you want it just to be a complementary type of thing, you don’t want them to take notice of the design as they’re reading.

I mentioned the Adobe type kit earlier, you can look at other things like Canva, there’s so many palette guides out there for fonts, but make sure you use no more than two to three fonts in the whole book, otherwise it’s just going to look crazy, so you want to make sure that everything just complements each other and doesn’t get too complex. Also, you’re going to want to design your page number layouts, you can put your page numbers at the center of the bottom of the page, on the outer corners, some people put it at the top, put it where it works for you and where the page looks most balanced design-wise. Some people like to set those characters apart a little bit, whether they make it a lighter shade or they italicize it, I make it smaller than the text itself, typically just because I don’t want it to compete with the text. You can put your author name, your title on the top or bottom of each page, again stylistic, look at other books in your genre and see what you like. Some people even add a little ornament, this is very fancy, do it if you really know what you’re doing and if you can do it without making it compete a lot. Ornaments are actually kind of cool too, like if you have a scene break in a book but you’re not going to start a new chapter, those are kind of just a nice visual cue, make sure it fits with the brand of your book.

Create a style guide for your book, this is separate from what you put in your program, make a paper guide, type it out, put what every single style is in the book, make sure that everything is written down and documented somehow, so that if you do have a catastrophic event and you’re ready to put out your next book in this series, you’re ready to go and you know exactly what it was, this is going to save you a lot of headache later, again especially important for a series. Making sure that you have licenses and proof of everything, you cannot over-organize when it comes to designing your book. It’s stressful, like don’t get me wrong, everything I’m telling you here is going to seem like a lot of work up front, but I promise you it’s going to save you so much heartache in the future, and it’s going to make subsequent books that you put out go much quicker, so invest that time now.

All right, so we’re going to get a little bit more granular. Look for hyphenated words that are cut off between pages, I recommend turning all hyphenation off in the document, just because you can have a page that has like a wall of hyphenated words on one side, especially when you’re working in Word or something that’s not designed for type-setting and design — other programs are a little bit more mindful of that — but there’s no reason to really have it, but there are actually hyphenated words like “goodbye” or a contraction that can cut off between pages, so every single page you’re going to want to scan it and be on the lookout for hyphenated words that get cut off between the bottom of this page and the top of this page. You’re going to want to look for headers, like H2 and H3 headers, that fall at the end of the page with no paragraph underneath them, just go ahead and bump that to the next page. Widows and orphans are very important to keep an eye out for, typically you want to have two to three sentences or lines in a paragraph, because it can look a little wonky, and the last thing you want is like one word from a sentence on the next page, it just interrupts the experience. And then walls of text, so if you see a page in your book that has just a massive wall of text with no paragraph or line breaks, anything like that, see if and how you can break it up, because it’s very tiring to the reader’s eyes. You can tweak little things like I’ve tweaked font sizes, line spacing, things like that on a page or two, to get widows and orphans and things like that to line up right, you can do like a tenth of an inch, it’s crazy how much you can go in there, but make sure it’s not obvious, like you might know it but the reader shouldn’t be able to tell.

So I always recommend start with the print version of your book, it’s so much easier to take off page numbers, things like that. Another pro tip, make sure you clearly label each file type with dates, versions, things like that, because you may think that you’re going to go back and it’s going to make sense, but I promise you it won’t, because our brains are full and we’re doing so much with these, so make sure you clearly label everything. And then one of the last steps, when you’re really happy with your book, when you think it looks amazing, print it out on paper or put it on a different type of reader, whether it’s an iPad or a Kindle or something like that, you want to trick your brain, because your brain is so used to seeing the book on your screen that you need to trick it into looking at it in a completely different way, and you’re going to catch a lot that way too. Make changes, read it again, and then convert it to your publishing platform specs, and make sure that you’ve taken into account everything that publisher requires, because the last thing you want to do is upload your book and get margin errors, bleed errors, all that good stuff. After you know your final page count, then you go to your print cover and you adjust the spine size, because they’ll know the paper weight, number of pages, things like that, so that’s kind of the last step there. And then order proofs of your book and read it again, and I promise you that you’re going to hate your book by this time, but I fully have embraced like the Palpatine aspect of it, let it flow through you, go with it, hate it, and it’s going to be even better. But before we go any further into your digital version, is your book final, is it really final? It’s so much easier to spot and fix typos and errors now than to catch them later and then have to go update a bunch of different files, so make sure it’s good now, and if you’re good to go, let’s go.

So when you format for ebook, it’s not quite as easy as hitting a button to convert, you do have to format it for each type of digital platform that you’re going to put it on, whether it’s epub or Kindle or Barnes and Noble, whatever you have, each has their own set of rules and quirks. If you’ve cleaned up your document before, you’re going to be good here, aside from some things that you’re going to want to run through. But go ahead, and if you’re going to do a book with reflowable text, which just means you can adjust the size and spacing and things like that based on your e-reader, get rid of the page numbers, the ornaments, things like that that you put on the print book. Be sure you check hyperlinks, both manually by clicking on them and doing preflight checks, Calibre does that for you, it’s awesome. And then add the front cover, this is where you’re going to want just the front cover, in a high resolution JPEG format, RGB, which is optimized for screen, and you’re going to put that on the first page of the book, just like you would for your print, so delete any blank pages. Run it through Calibre, and like I said, just go through the tutorials on that and see all the steps, because there are quite a few, but they’re really thorough and helpful, and you’re going to understand why. And then do your final formatting on Kindle or other appropriate platforms.

I am always a fan of hitting the easy button, please, please, please be patient with yourself. I don’t want you to add more stuff to your workload because you’re excited and you want to try a lot of cool things, trust me, I totally get it, I would rather have you have an easy, awesome book than something that’s fancy and you’re not super stressed out. When you upload, don’t be surprised or bummed out if you get errors that come back when you upload to the platforms, it happens, it happens for me, it happens for people who do this professionally all the time, it just happens, don’t worry about it. If you come up with specific error codes, run them through communities, there’s so many wonderful people out there who can help you. Take notes of what worked great, what made you want to burn down your house, what can you do to eliminate stress down the road, keep notes of that and that way you can be mindful of it for future books. And then of course be organized, there’s no such thing as too much organization. One thing that I recommend is upload all of your fonts, images, logos, brand assets, put it in Canva in your brand kit, so that when you’re doing social media, website, any other design and marketing work you have down the road, it’s all right there for you. Back it up, just do it, make sure it’s all synced, make sure it’s good, because again, catastrophe, it’s awful, and I probably say this too much, but I feel like I can’t say it too much — pretty design is icing on the cake, you want functionality, readability, good user experience, and you got this, you totally do, you’re going to do great, it’s intimidating at first, I know, but you’re going to be fine, just go with it, be patient with yourself, don’t try to rush it.

Thank you so much, Libby, that was great. If people want to use you or get in touch with you, how do they do that? You can go to my website, it’s Let’s Get Radiant dot com, it is a little bit more on the marketing side, but you can still contact me through that. If you want more of the bespoke, very hands-on editing and design experience all in one, I work with Danielle from Double Vision Editorial, she is phenomenal, she just knows so much, she’s got great experience, great connections, so I recommend going through her, and she offers multiple levels of editing for you too, if all you need is a proofread or whatever, you can use her. And she’s DoubleVisionEditorial.com.

Cool, we’ll go ahead and wrap up there, thank you so much again, Libby, it was a real pleasure having you on, thank you, cheers y’all, so good luck, you guys. Thanks for having me.