Formatting for Print

After you're finished writing and editing your book, and it's finally perfect–or as close as anything can get to perfect–what's the next step? Printing it, right? 

Not quite. First, you'll have to do the work of formatting your manuscript to make it into a book that's properly print-ready. Alas, preparing your manuscript for print is not as simple as just converting it into a PDF and sending it on its way. Taking the time to format your book for print is a deceptively simple task, but it makes all the difference in the way your book will look and feel to readers. 

Setting up the Page

Making sure the page itself looks right is just as important as ensuring the words on the page are oriented correctly. Here are a few rules of formatting the pages of your books.

• Use black text on a white background. This high contrast choice is easy to read, and it's the standard in the publishing world. 

• Justify your text, so that it runs flush up against the left and right margins on the page. Oftentimes, you'll be writing with your text aligned to the left margin, but if you take a look inside any book, you'll notice that the block of text fills the entire page from left to right. 

• Choose a page size of either 5x8” or 6x9”. Depending on your page size, your margins will be different. For 5x8”, the margins should be ⅝”, and for 6x9” they should be ¾”. 

• Take care to leave a “gutter” on the inside margin of your page–this is extra white space on the page to account for the way binding the book will eat up some of the inside margin.  

  
  

Formatting the Text

Once your page formatting is settled, it's time to focus on the words themselves. This is perhaps the most noticeable aspect of your formatting for the average reader, and so it's very important to make sure everything looks right. Here are a few tips for formatting the text of your manuscript. 

• Prepare your front matter (title page, copyright page, dedication, preface, table of contents) and back matter (acknowledgments, about the author, index, etc.). These should follow the conventions of your genre. 

• Use a readable font which is attractive, but won't cause eyestrain.

  • Some suggested fonts are Garamond and Times New Roman.

• Font size should be 11 or 12pt. You should have about 10-15 words per line on the page in your font of choice. 

• Number your pages using the same font and size as the rest of your text. 

  • The page numbers should be at the bottom of the page, created using a footer, either centered or right-aligned.

  • Your page numbers should start on the first page of chapter 1. Front and back matter like title page, table of contents, acknowledgments,  etc. are not numbered this way.

• Use headers to separate your chapters, and subheadings to further separate them into sections, if applicable.  

  • Your chapter titles should be formatted consistently (font, size, location), and each chapter should start on a new page. 

• Paragraphs should be indented, with no space in between paragraphs. 

• Use just one space after periods. 

• Mark scene breaks. 

  • Some authors use just a simple blank space between paragraphs to mark scene breaks, while others use a line on the page to demarcate the shift. 

• Make sure any visual elements (photos, tables, charts, etc.) are high resolution and placed properly. 

• Check for widows and orphans–these are lone lines separated from the rest of their paragraph by a page break. Try to eliminate these where possible. 

Formatting Your Book as an Ebook

The process for getting your manuscript ready to be published as an ebook is different in a few crucial ways. For one, margins and leaving room for binding is much less of a concern. Instead, an ebook is a much more inconsistent and constantly changing kind of book, since each individual reader can change the settings on their e-reader to suit their preferences. With that in mind, here are some tips for formatting your book as an ebook:

• Use an EPUB file, not a PDF. EPUB files are more flexible and make it possible for the reader to change aspects of their experience. Additionally, EPUB is the most widely used document format among ebook publishers. 

  • Some publishers, like Amazon, may also accept MOBI documents, but this is less common. 

• It's important to have a table of contents you can click on, which will redirect you to the correct chapter.

• Images should be high resolution and optimized for digital viewing. 

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About the author: Marianna LoRusso is an English creative writing major and German minor at Smith College. She's a contemporary fiction, fantasy, and science fiction writer with a growing love for horror and an obsession with fiction podcasts. Her favorite stories have worldbuilding you can get lost in, well-developed relationships (platonic or romantic), and something worth laughing about.