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Create a Document for Your Book Formatting

When formatting your paperback to self-publish on Kindle Direct Publishing, you'll first need to create a document on which you will format your manuscript. Presumably, you've already determined your book’s trim size. This article also assumes you're using Microsoft Word for your formatting.

Begin by making a copy of the manuscript you’ve been working on. Use the copy for your formatting. This way if the formatting somehow should could cause text to be deleted, you still will have the original.

You’ll want to work with a completely clean copy. You can do that by going to Review>Track Changes your manuscript. First, accept all changes and turn off Track Changes. Then delete all commentary. Lastly, go to Insert and delete all headers and footers.

Now you’re ready to set up the document so it matches your trim size. Go to Layout>Size. When the drop-down menu opens for Size, click “More Paper sizes” at the bottom. A pop-up window will come on your screen. At the top, enter the width and the height of your trim size. Click OK at the bottom. You’ll notice that on your screen the shape of the “paper” that you’re working with has changed.

Determine the Margins
Next, set the margins. The margins are the white frame that runs between the page’s text and the page’s edge.

To ensure that the words aren’t too close to the page edge where they could be cut off when the printer trims the paper, you want to ensue there’s enough white space. At the same time, the greater the white space, the more paper you’ll need for the book, potentially raising the printing cost and reducing profitability.

Margins are measured in inches by their distance from the text to the page edge. Imagine a line running across the very top of your text. Place the edge of your ruler there then measure to the page edge, and you have your margin size.

Determining margins for your book first requires that you know your book’s trim size. Generally, for any book whose trim size is 6 x 9 or smaller, use half-inch margins on all sides of the book except for the one nearest the binding. This is called the inside margin and needs to be slightly larger, usually three-quarters of an inch.

You want to have a larger inside margin because books curl near the spine. This means less light gets there, making words on that side of the page more difficult to read. A wider inside margin eliminates this issue.

Setting Margins
Not all printers and book designers will agree with these simple rules. For example, mainstream publishing houses typically print books with top margins that are narrower than then the bottom margins. They also typically include a running footer, such as a page number, in the bottom margin. Many who self-publish, especially those formatting their books in Microsoft Word, place the page number in the top margin because doing so requires less fussing around. You’ll have decide which approach to take, but know that in self-publishing equal top and bottom margins are quite common.

Sometimes the “rules” for margins have little to do with the page edge. The Chicago Manual of Style for example, recommends printing 65 to 70 characters (including spaces) on each line. This can be set if formatting Microsoft Word.

To set the margins in your book, go to Layout>Margin. In the drop down menu, click “Custom Margins” at its bottom.

For the left and the right margins, type 0.5. This will give you a half-inch margin on two sides of the book. Next, decide if you want your page numbers to appear on the top or the bottom of the page. If you want them on top, type 0.75 there and then 0.5 on the bottom. Swap those numbers if you want the page numbers on the bottom.

Gutter
You shouldn’t need to change the gutter and gutter position numbers. In larger books, you might split the text into two or even three columns. The white space between these columns is the gutter. Usually, the gutter is no more than a quarter-inch wide. When dividing books into columns, make sure each column is the same width. Also, if you have three columns that seem awfully thin, it’s always better to opt for two wide columns. We’ll presume you’ll have only one column on each page.

Make sure the Orientation is set to “Portrait” and that Multiple Pages is “Normal.” Lastly, make sure Apply to is set to “Whole document.” Hit “OK.” The text on the page on your screen should automatically adjust to the new margins.

With the page size and margins set, you’re ready to move on to your text. We’ll tackle that during the next several sections.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading is more real than the person standing beside us? – Cornelia Funke

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Where words leave off, music begins. ― Heinrich Heine

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

…revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done. – Stephen King

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Where do you get your ideas?’...the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra! – Neil Gaiman

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. – Stephen King

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

When you’re falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader’s heart and a writer’s. – Anthony Doerr

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

Should You Format Your Book While Writing It?

Formatting when writing to a small degree makes some sense. Many authors want to get a feel for what their book will look like in print. Or perhaps to get a “head start” while waiting for a proofreading to be completed, they start formatting.

Almost invariably, though, this actually creates more work.

Before formatting, you want to be absolutely done writing, fact-checking, editing and even proofreading the book. If you format in Microsoft Word and then make changes to the text, you’ll likely run into one or more of the following problems:
• Page numbers change – Book design traditionally places the first page of a chapter on the right-hand (odd-numbered) page. When text is added or deleted, this can alter the locations of headers and chapters, forcing you to add empty lines to the page or even entirely new blank pages.
• Table of contents and index change – Usually regenerating the table of contents is easy enough…but editing after page numbers have been set requires you to redo this step. With indexes, you may recheck every entry.
• Hyphenated words shift – To get wording to space properly across a line in MS Word, sometimes hyphens are manually added. Delete or add a single word, however, and usually those hyphens no longer appear at the end of a line but its middle.
• Page breaks shift – Especially with MS Word, you might place artificial breaks in the text to ensure it is justified on the page. Changing a word can result in an empty line of text or push text to the next page.
• Images and text boxes get cut off – Adding or deleting text also means that images and any text boxes (such as for drop caps or breakout boxes) will shift on the page. They may no longer appear next to an image or only parts of them may appear on the page.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t make changes to a formatted manuscript. If you notice a typo, by all means fix it. Usually a lone misspelling won’t cause major problems, as its impact on the formatted text is localized (such as throwing off hyphens within that paragraph). But the fewer typos you have to correct, the less likely corrections will mess up the formatting.

Of course, some minor formatting can begin the moment you start writing. Selecting the font, the font size, and the line spacing, as well as boldfacing the chapter titles and headers (presuming you want them boldface) makes perfect sense. But any formatting that might be impacted whenever you revise the text ought to wait.

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest. – Stephen King

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.

When you are describing a shape, or sound, or tint, don’t state the matter plainly, but put it in a hint. And learn to look at all things with a sort of mental squint. – Lewis Carroll

Professional Book Editor: Having your novel, short story or nonfiction manuscript proofread or edited before submitting it can prove invaluable. In an era where you face heavy competition, your writing needs a second eye to give you the edge. I can provide that second eye.