Formatting a Book

Formatting a book can be very time consuming. It can also be insanely frustrating, if you are not familiar with the program you are using. Let’s just say there is a steep learning curve. However, once you understand what needs to be done and how to do it. It will only take about a quarter of the time to do it.

So how do you learn what needs to be done to format your book? There are a couple of ways to figure this out. First, you can get a bunch of books from the genre you are writing in and delve in and look at every detail of the formatting. This can be difficult because much of formatting is things you don’t notice, which is good formatting. You don’t want people to notice little things. That said, formatting is also very important because you don’t want your book to look drastically different from other published books in your genre.

The second option to hire someone to format your book. As indie authors, money is tight and it is often more appealing to learn how to do something on our own. It can be very time consuming initially but in the long run, if it’s something you have to do for every book you publish, it may be worth the time investment.

Third is to get on YouTube and search for book formatting. It is a little difficult to find specific information, at least that I could find. But what this searching did provide was another resource. http://www.dyibookformats.com. Derek Murphy is the creator of this site and the templates that are available there. He has a free template you can download and he also has YouTube videos about how to use it and how to format. You can also pay a very minimal amount to get all of his tutorials about formatting.

Ideally, you will set up your formatting from the beginning rather than writing the entire first draft and then go back to format. You can do it either way. It’s up to you. If you haven’t formatted from the beginning, you will have to go in chapter by chapter section by section and format. In Microsoft word you can set up Styles and this is how you make sure every heading, font and spacing are the same throughout your book.

Check out dyibookformats.com