The Dark Corner of the Mind: Print Preview

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Print Preview: Formatting for CreateSpace 3. Font Choice, Font Size, Line Spacing and Sparkle

So forgetting my mysterious and untimely disappearance, here's where we left off.

You may notice that I've decided to replace the Author Bio with the "other titles by this author" list. The title page should stay on the same page as before.

Now we get to make this baby look like a book!

Go to each of your chapter titles and make them 36pt. Garamond. Also centre them and check that they don't have any automated indents (which you would see in the ruler at the top of the screen).

To get the spacing to look like the one in Chapter Two, click at the end of the chapter title and then press Enter. If there are extra spaces or blank lines, hit delete until the first line begins at your new position.

Now select the main body text chapter by chapter, and do these things:

1. Ensure that the text is "justified". To do this, you might want to click align left, and then click justify again. The buttons are found above the "paragraph" tab.

2. Now select the whole document (ctrl-A). Click on the little box on the right side of the "paragraph" tab and fill out the information to look like this:
(you shouldn't have to change much)

3. Check for areas you wanted spaces that may have been removed when you checked "don't add spaces between paragraphs of the same style", which is a totally useless way of saying "don't add spaces between paragraphs automatically".

4. Select each chapter's individual body of text (in other words, don't select the chapter titles) and make 11pt. Garamond. You can do them one at a time, or you can select multiple bodies of text by holding ctrl.

5. While that text is still selected, go to the ruler at the top of the page and move the top slider to where I've positioned it. (You may want more or less indent than I've given.)

6. Click within the first paragraph of each chapter and remove the indent by moving the slider we just moved back to it's neutral position.

7. Check the last paragraph of every chapter. Sometimes the last line has only two words spaced out evenly across the line. My only solution for this is unfortunately to make that one paragraph aligned left.

8. If your headers are looking cramped like this:

Click inside the headers, put your cursor at the end of the title, name or number (whichever is farthest to the right) and press Enter.

9. While you're there, check that your headers and page numbers are also in Garamond. Make the page numbers 11pt and the name and title 10pt in all caps.

Ahh, this is all looking very nice. But wait, something is amiss!

Why are there extra spaces on the first page?

Press ctrl A to select your entire document. Now go to the "paragraph" menu and click the "lines and breaks" tab.

Make sure "widow/orphan control" is deselected as shown below.

Which will make your lines look like this:

Yay! Much neater. And much more bookier . . . ier.

Nearly done. Now it's time for . . .

SPARKLE!

Select the first letter of every first paragraph of every chapter of the book . . . of . . . of . . .

And under Insert, select "Drop Cap" > "Dropped" from the right side of the ribbon.

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That's it, that's all the pearls of wisdom I have to offer. Hopefully by now you know the system well enough to make your own decisions about how you want to format your work, but I think what I've given you is a nice, clean, pleasing format if that's all you want.

If you've followed this, you should now have a fully formatted book.

This concludes the Print Preview series on formatting for CreateSpace.

I covered a lot here and throughout the series, so if anything wasn't clear enough, please leave a comment so I can help.

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Print Preview: Formatting for CreateSpace 2. Front Matter, Section Breaks, Headers and Page Numbers

Order of Front Matter

To form my front matter I'm going to take my example from my copy of A Game of Thrones.

(Note that when you view two pages together in Word, the right pages are on the left and the left pages are on the right -- this is opposite to a book because when you open a book, the first page is on the right.)

Don't start creating the front matter pages until you've read up to the end of the third paragraph after this list to make your life a little easier.

The order goes thus:

1. Author Bio or Commendations - will be on the right side in the physical copy
(1.) (Alternatively, you might like to put the "by the same author" page here instead)

2. by the same author (could also be a blank page) - left side

3. Title Page - right side

4. Copyright - left side

5. Dedication or Quote - right side

6. Map pt. 1 (or could be blank)

7. Map pt. 2

8. Blank page
__________

9. Start Chapter One

Hopefully you understand the above well enough to form your front matter to suit your book (if you don't, let me know and I will clarify and edit this post with the clarification), but try to closely imitate the presentation of a traditionally published book.

As far as the copyright pages and all, apart from actually acquiring copyright, which I know nothing about, again, try to imitate what you see in a traditionally published book.

Before you create all the above, you need to know about Section Breaks. What's a Section Break? No one cares, all we care about is what they do. They are related to the presentation of page numbers and headers so it's important that you get it right.

Section Breaks

Section breaks will allow you to withold the header, footer and page number on the first page of every "section", and to have different odd and even pages (author name on one side, book title on the other).

Monkey see, monkey do. Be the monkey.

I'm using justified 11pt Garamond as my main text. Please don't use Times New Roman, as it's never used in traditionally published books (and remember to select the text position "justify"). Garamond is used in Harry Potter. You can do a Google search for fonts used in books.

Here is your awesome Author Bio on the first page:

(My "About the Author" is 20pt if you're interested)

Now select Page Layout > Breaks > Next Page

And when you click that, your page should look like this:

Now type in your stuff for this page, or if you want to leave it blank, just click "Next Page" again and type in the stuff for the next page . . . and then hit "Next Page" again, and continue until you've reached your Chapter One page.

. . .
. . .
. . .

Phew! That took a while! Here's what mine looks like at a glance.

For this next bit I suggest you paste in your first two chapters. This will help you see what's changing as you make these alterations. Please save your document right now because this can get pretty dicey.

Headers

Please just ignore my double-spaced Times New Roman font for now. That's incredibly easy to change. You want to get your headers and page numbers right.

Go to your Chapter One page and double click in the space at the top of the page to make the header menu appear.

Under the Design menu which is now open, tick "Different First page" and "Different Odd and Even pages".

Now select the header of the next page and go into Insert > Header > Blank (Three Columns)

Select the centre and type in your author name. This should apply to every second header following. This should be in your "even page header", and it should say which header it is below it.

Now select the adjacent "Odd Page Header" and enter the same three column header using the same method as before.

Insert > Header > Blank (Three Columns)

Page Numbers

Now click your way onto an even-numbered page. Even page numbers must always be on the left (that is, in the published copy), so check this afterwards.

Select the left column in the even-numbered header and then select Insert > Page Number > Current Position > Plain Number

Delete the other [Type text] box and it should look like this:

Now select the Odd Page Header, select the right text box and repeat the process.

You've nearly finished with the trickiest bit of the whole process!

You'll notice that Chapter One and none of the front matter have headers on them, which is exactly what we want. This is thanks to all the "next page" breaks we put in earlier, and because we selected "different first page". All of them are considered "first pages", and thus the changes we made to the headers didn't affect them.

But have a look at Chapter Two.

It still has a header, because we haven't made it a first page yet by adding a "next page" break before it.

Depending on how you moved Chapter Two to the next page originally (if you hit Enter a bunch of times or if you used a page break), you will have to undo that. Just click your cursor right in front of Chapter Two and hit Backspace until you reach the last period/full stop of the last chapter.

Now enter your "next page" break and Chapter Two will move to the next page and be recognised as a "first page" without a header or page number.

When doing your final copy, you should repeat this Chapter Two process with any other chapters that have headers where they shouldn't. Also, if you want any back matter, you'll be able to simply keep hitting "next page".

______________________________

Ignore the font choice, font size, and line spacing of the prose for now. We'll get to that next time. You've just solved the most brain-wracking puzzle of the budget formatter!

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Print Preview: Formatting for CreateSpace 1. Page Size and Margins

(Note: This walkthrough will be done in Word 2007 only. If you have another version, you may be able to find the corresponding menus and still follow these steps.)

Page Size

1. Go here to see a list of page sizes available for CreateSpace and choose one. (You might want to take a ruler and see how these compare with the books on your shelf.)
2. Open your Word Document and save it as [Title] - Formatted or whatever you wish. (Always keep this document separate from your manuscript.)

Your page should look like this:

3. Open the "Page Layout" menu.
4. Under "Size", select "More Paper Sizes".

5. Enter your desired paper size, chosen from the list back in step 1. (My Australian system defaults to cm, so I just type in "[x] in" and the system automatically changes the length (in) to the cm equivalent.)
I've chosen the 5x8 inches option.

It should now look like this:

Margins

1. Go here and read the useful information about margins. From the table on the right of that page, select the best margin for your book. (Since my book is more than 151 pages and less than 400, I'll be using ".75 in" margins all around, just to keep it simple.)
2. Select "Page Layout" > "Margins" > "Custom Margins"

If later on you find you don't like how the margins look with the text, you can change them. Try to keep within Amazon's specifications, though.
____________________

The next post will involve front matter and section breaks.

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Print Preview: Formatting for CreateSpace A Step-by-Step Guide

The aim with this series of posts will be to provide you all with a step-by-step guide for how to get from this:

to something like this:

I used this as a guide, but it took a lot of fiddling around to work it out. Go ahead and jump straight into Jenyfer Matthews's guide if you want to get into the nitty gritty right now. Otherwise, I'll be showing you the step-by-step process I followed that resulted in the above.

The series will include:
- Margins
- Front matter
- Section breaks
- Page numbers
- Headers
- Font choice
- Dropped caps

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Print Preview: A Look into Book Formatting

Below I'm going to provide some screenshots of the document I've been formatting for Aundes Aura. I've omitted the copyright, dedication and acknowledgements pages, as I haven't written anything for them yet.

These images pertain to the print version, which I intend to publish through Createspace.

If people are interested, I'll consider doing a tutorial for the result I've come out with.

Reading over this stuff has made me glad that I don't go back while I'm still working on the first draft. It's a glaring fact that your writing develops over the course of a novel, but you have to resist and even it all out at the end, after you've done the content revisions.

I'll list a few things I've learnt through this process, the basic stuff.

1. Times New Roman is not a standard font used in books! I'm going with Garamond; apparently that was the one used in Harry Potter.

2. You can easily make those big fancy first letters of chapters by selecting the letter you want to change, going to Insert and clicking "drop cap". You can even select the size from there. This doesn't screw up the lines as simply changing the size of the letter does.

3. (I already did this but it's useful to know if you're not already doing it) Use indents not by putting spaces in, nor by hitting tab, but by selecting the top grey part of the ruler and sliding it to your desired point. I'm going with 0.5 inches because that's what I seem to be finding in the books I read.
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I will update on the Habituals front tonight when I've finished writing.

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