Joanna again, still on self-publishing…
In my last blog, I explored the pros and cons of publishing print books with Amazon KDP, or Ingram Spark, or Draft2Digital. And it wasn’t all that straightforward as you may have seen. This blog is about preparing text for publishing in print. (A future blog may be about covers for print, since there isn’t space here.)
Self-publishing in print isn’t difficult, especially if you’ve already written your text using Styles, as I recommend. But it does involve more steps than ebook publishing and will require attention to detail if you want to produce a really professional-looking paperback.
But we writers can all do attention to detail, can’t we? Without that, our plot and character continuity would be shot. So, if you’re a writer, you can do this 😉
Print preparation : automatic formatting or do-it-yourself?
You’ve probably finished and, possibly, published your ebook. So you have your text, in reflowable format. It doesn’t have page numbers, or even pages. But you do have front and back matter, don’t you? And your text has been proofread, which means you can assume it’s fine to go ahead. (If you haven’t got to that stage, get there first before you consider going for print because it’s much easier, and cheaper, to correct mistakes in ebooks than in print.)
The print preparation issue is formatting the print book interior.
You have choices here. If you go with D2D for your print book, their clever software can format your print book for you, using the ebook file you previously uploaded or a docx file you upload now. The results are excellent. You have the choice of trim size but D2D chooses font, font size and margins for you. And as with D2D ebooks, it will also do parts of your front and back matter for you, if you choose those options.
If you want to go with Amazon KDP or Ingram Spark, or if you want to choose your own font size etc with D2D, you need to format a pdf of your text and upload that instead. D2D gives you the pdf option as well as the ebook formatting option. As I understand it, Ingram is pdf only and Amazon prefers and recommends pdf. It may be that their tools for book creation allow you to upload text rather than a pdf. I haven’t used either of those tools and can’t get into them, so I don’t know. If you do know, please tell us.
Automatic formatting by D2D : is it any good?
I had my first D2D print book formatted automatically from the ebook text. Here’s an example of how my proof copy looked. I was really impressed. D2D had done the running headers, and the page numbers, plus scene breaks and left-justified text for opening paragraphs.
Did I publish that version? No.
Why not? It looks great, doesn’t it?
If you look at the top left of the image, you’ll see that it comes out at 334 pages. That’s a potential problem because the number of pages largely determines the print cost and, hence, the selling price.
D2D gives retailers a standard 55% discount. You have no choice there. D2D provides a handy print copy calculator and you can see on this screenshot that, at a price of up to $13.34, I would make no royalties at all. If I sold at $13.99, I’d make a whole 30 cents.
To make print sales worthwhile, I reckoned I’d need to price at $15.99 when I’d get $1.20. That isn’t much considering I’ve done all the work, is it?  😉 Anyway, I decided that, beautiful as the print proof was, I had to reduce the page count because $15.99 was too steep a price for the book to have much chance of selling.
DIY formatting
Getting the page count down meant formatting the text myself and uploading a pdf. More about uploading later in this blog.
Meanwhile, here is an image of what my final text looked like. Note that it has been reduced to a mere 258 pages which meant that I could price it at $13.99 (£11.99 in UK) and still make a half-decent royalty. It’s not as attractive in the hand as the longer version, I admit, but what choice did I have? I’m not in the business of producing a beautiful book that readers can’t afford.
For shorter books—my Regency historicals tend to be about 90,000 words—the D2D conversion from ebook might be fine. And they do look lovely, I admit. I shall treasure the first proof copy of The Mystery Mistletoe Bride. It’s 334 pages and very handsome. But I can sell the shorter, 258-page version. I don’t think I could sell the 334-page version.
Formatting: Print trim size, layout, margins for uploaded text
Like me, you may choose to upload a pdf to D2D. If you go with Ingram or Amazon KDP, I think you have to do the formatting yourself and upload a fully-formatted pdf of your book’s interior. In order to do that, you need to decide on the trim size, font, font size and margins. That’s not something I’ve covered in my previous blogs about formatting.
First of all, you need to set the page size in your document to the trim size you have chosen. You do that via Layout/Size and it’s possibly a custom size. This is a crucial change to make. If you leave page size at A4 and then upload your document as a pdf, the proof copy will be all over the place. (Been there. Got the t-shirt. But only once.)
Then you need to specify margins and headers/footers. In case it’s helpful, these are the settings I use for a (fairly standard) trim size of 5×8 inches (127×203 mm). I normally use metric, but D2D is a US company that works in inches for its trim sizes, so I had to change back for this book. [Click to enlarge if you need to.]
Note the need to mirror margins to allow for the gutter. Note also the selections for header and footer. I work with standard running headers of author name on even pages and book title on odd pages (as you’ll have seen above). I have page numbers centred in the footer. You might prefer to have page numbers in the header. Your choice. When you do your own formatting, the world is your publishing oyster. Want to print in comic sans? You could, though I’d certainly advise against doing so.
The standard font is Times New Roman. Boring, yes, but that’s the font I’ve chosen to stick with.
I’ve also discovered, through trial and error and extra print proofs, that my ideal font is TNR 10.5 point. A lot of publishers use 10.5 point, I’ve noticed. And Word offers it as standard, too. So it must have something going for it.
Formatting: Making headers work in your uploaded text…
This is where it’s going to get tedious. To look professional, a print book should have no header on the first page of a chapter. The D2D conversion from ebook does that automatically. If you do your own formatted pdf to upload—to D2D, or Amazon, or Ingram—you are the one who has to make that function work. And it’s a bit of a fiddle. Here’s what one of my chapter openings looks like. You’ll note that the book title doesn’t appear on the right-hand page. (And, doing my own formatting, I’ve reduced the page count to 242, which is a win on the price front.)
I make the headers work by inserting a section break (next page) at the end of every chapter. Since I chose different first page header in layout (shown in previous section), I can make a first page header that is blank. Following pages are same as previous and will show author/title as appropriate. I want the page numbering to be continuous, so the footer is always same as previous.
It’s a tedious process because you have to go through the whole MS and do the section break and first page header for every chapter. And, while you’re at it, it looks great if you capitalise the first few words of the chapter. You can do that easily with Shift+F3, hitting the combination until you get the result you want. (That’s another thing that D2D does for you, if you let it convert your ebook text.)
…or ditch the headers?
If you can’t face the faff of creating separate sections for each of your chapters, but you do want to format your own text for print, you have the option of leaving out running headers altogether. Quite a few commercial publishers now print that way, so you wouldn’t be alone. It’s not what I do, but it’s a choice you have.
With no running headers, all you’d have to do would be to create a header or footer for the page numbers and start them from Chapter One. That does mean (sorry) that you have to insert a section break before your first chapter, but that’s OK, isn’t it? For the First Chapter, I’d suggest section break (odd page) because your first chapter should start on a right-hand page. †[See late PS at end of blog]
Uploading your text for print
You do all of this formatting (and your front and back matter) in your word processing software—Word, or equivalent. Before you upload it, I recommend that you save/export it as a pdf. Ingram requires the upload file to be pdf. Amazon will accept other formats such as docx, but recommends pdf. With D2D, you can also upload your formatted docx file but the results are unpredictable.
You can see that from these examples. I’d created a final formatted docx file of my text. I converted that file to pdf. I uploaded each in turn. But the results in D2D were not the same. The docx version was all over the place and it hadn’t kept my 10.5 point size which would have made the finished book about 20% longer. PDF is the way to go.
I intended that puff for the next book to be on a single page, but uploading the docx version to D2D didn’t give me that. If you know exactly the formatting you want, uploading a pdf is the answer every time. With D2D, it’s easy. You just save or export as pdf in Word.
Ingram and Amazon are pickier. Ingram specifies a particular version of pdf which (last time I tried) you couldn’t get from Word. So I had to go onto the Adobe website and convert my docx into a pdf there, ensuring I got the version right. It was PDF/X-1a, then, with embedded fonts. That may have changed since I last published in print with Ingram but it seems to be the current Amazon requirement. You need to check exactly what Ingram and Amazon KDP require if you’re going to use either of them.
Checking your text in print
You should be able to get a proof from any of the publishing sites. With Ingram, you get an eproof. With D2D and Amazon KDP, you have the choice of eproof or print proof. Whichever way you go, you must check the proof thoroughly.
- Make sure you check every single page because blank pages can easily creep in and may not show in a downloaded pdf. I’ve been caught twice on that.
- Make sure all the headers are where you want them. Again, check every page.
- Check chapter headings and all-caps at start of chapters (if you’ve opted to do that).
- Check scene breaks and left-justified text after them.
- Look for widows/orphans mistakes. If there’s a single hanging line at the end of a chapter, you can add extra spaces further back so that the hanging line becomes, perhaps, 3 lines. It looks much better in the final print.
I’ve always opted for print proof, even though you have to pay for it and it takes a week or so to arrive. So far, I have always found mistakes on the print proof that, somehow, I didn’t notice when I checked the eproof. So I reckon it’s worth the time and money. But it’s your choice, of course.
Warning: changing a print file once it’s been published will probably cost you money—D2D charges $25 for the first 3 months, but provides free change coupons after that.
It’s best to get it right before you press the Publish button. And a print proof helps, I’d say.
My progress with D2D in print
I have now finished publishing my Harlequin/Mills & Boon backlist with D2D. They are all available as ebooks and in print. You can find them via my Books2Read.com/JoannaMaitland link.
The ebooks are all at the bargain price of 99p/99c so I hope you will grab them. I’m glad to say they seem to be selling well.
What surprised me, though, is that the print books are also selling well, even though I had to price them at £11.99/$13.99. I thought my readers would all go for ebooks but it does seem that some readers prefer print and are prepared to pay for it. To them, I say a big thank you.
For those who are addicted to their Kindles—and I still read a lot on mine, so you’re not alone 😉 —I’d like to remind you that you don’t have to buy from Amazon. You can download epub versions of ebooks from Kobo and others and email them to your Kindle’s email address.
For those who read free on Kindle Unlimited, I can announce that my Aikenhead Honours series (of 4 novels) is already available in a single volume on KU. There will be more soon: I’m planning to offer the Feuding Families series (of 3 novels) and the Unsuitable Matches series (also 3 novels) on KU as soon as I can get them uploaded.
Here are the planned covers of all 3 Kindle Unlimited boxsets. Only Aikenhead Honours is available right now [click to see on Amazon] but the others will arrive soon.
I hope KU readers enjoy them.
I’ll do a future blog about creating covers for print books, focusing on using D2D, since it’s much easier than the others (and cheaper) where print books are concerned.
But my general advice is that it’s all much easier than you think. Why not have a go?
You might be really pleased with the results you can create.
†PS (late addition): working on another book since I published this blog, I’ve discovered that Word sometimes decides to be helpful by changing section break (odd page) or section break (even page) to section break (next page). A total pain, and if you don’t notice what Word has done, you may find your careful formatting has been upset. If you find Word is doing that, you may need—belt and braces—to use more than one section break (next page) instead of one odd or even page break. After much hair tearing today (Monday), that’s what I did. Maybe Word was having an off day? It didn’t seem to happen before. But do check, just in case.
I have a book that needs work before I can get a new paperback edition out. This is going to be so useful. Thank you, Joanna.
If it’s useful to anyone, I’m very glad, Liz. Don’t want others to make the mistakes that I made 😉