You will / may also want to add the author's name in to the header on top of the even (or odd) pages and the chapter title on the opposing page header. Reason being, in some of your document you will want to have page numbers in the footer (or header if you want to be trendy), but in other parts of the book, like the title and copyright pages, you won't want numbers. You will need to break your document into sections. Learn how to Section Break your document. Just go to Page layout on the Ribbon, select Margins and then, at the bottom of the options select Custom Margins. Luckily, Word does all of this for you in one simple dialogue box. The inner margin on the left-hand page and the inner margin on the right-hand page need to be the same, but the inner on the left is the right-hand margin and the inner on the right is the left-hand margin – get it? The ‘outer' margins are different to the inner, but have to be the same throughout. Depending on the size and critically, the number of pages and therefore the ‘thickness' of the book, your margins will vary.Īlso, they need to be offset and mirrored – as in, imagine having a book open in front of you. 2) Mastering MarginsĪ paperback is a strange beast when it comes to margins. But in case you don't have that, you need to know about margins too. Downloading a template is by far the preferred way to set your page size up as it will also set up your margins for you. So, I went on to Createspace and downloaded one of their Word templates for a book that was 8×5.25 and this document became my starting point. The resultant line within Ingram looks like this: B&W 5.25 x 8 in or 203 x 133mm Perfect Bound on Creme w/Matte Lam. My crime novels are B&W text on creme paper with a matt cover in an overall book size of 8.00 inches by 5.25 inches. So, if you want your book to be black and white type with no internal illustrations, printed on creme paper with a Matt cover, then go to CreateSpace and Ingram and check that they support those options in the size you want.įor me, I had it easy. Then, the ones that are can be limited in the type of paper colour and cover format that they can take. Ingram and Createspace both support a wide, wide range of sizes, but some, to badly paraphrase, ‘are more supported than others'.įirst off, not all formats that are industry standards (like Format A) are supported for Indie Authors. Measure it and set your page size in Word to be just that. Find a book on your bookshelf that you want your book to be like. So, if you want to format a Word document such that it sails through the approval process for both Amazon's Createspace and Ingram Spark's system, then read on… 1) Size Mattersįirst things first, decide upon the size you want your book to be. Sadly, so few even know these things exist, let alone how to use them. To format a document for print is a simple matter of using things that expert programmers have built into Word for us. We wouldn’t let a welder just weld, but we let an administrator just wield their way through Word. Now, in a former life, I was an accredited trainer of all things Microsoft®,and the biggest revelation to me was how poorly prepared people were when given a PC and expected to “get on with it”. Over to Ian…Īs I said in my previous post about using Word to format ebooks, I get that some of you are keyboard wizards and witches, warriors all, scurrying away with ‘fantastical' word processing programs, like Scrivener, but, there are quite a lot of us, mere two-finger mortals, still ploughing our lonely furrows with that bastion of word processing software, the mighty Microsoft® Word. As a former Microsoft trainer turned self-published author, he is able to speak from considerable relevant experience. Yes, you've guessed it – this time, he's explaining how to use Word to format print books. Word expert and indie author Ian Andrew is based in Australiaįor the many indie authors who still favor Microsoft ® Word for formatting their books, here's a companion piece to Ian Andrew's recent post about using Word to create ebook interiors.
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