printed books

The Relief of Reading a Printed Book

I’m reading a printed book after weeks of reading ebooks with the Kindle app on my tablet.

Switching to print has been such a relief! I don’t have to turn the tablet back on if I’ve happened to leave it for a few minutes, or dart back to flip the page back to prevent the device shutting off while I’m making that sandwich. I don’t have to check the battery level or remember to plug it in.

Ebooks are compact and convenient, no question about that, but print books provide a less demanding reading experience. Open or closed, they sit there obligingly, waiting to be read. Several times since I switched back to print, I’ve returned to the book after getting a cup of coffee and experienced a pleasant surprise when I realized I didn’t have to turn on the reading device and key in a password in order to continue reading. (Okay, I know you can set up your tablet not to require a password, but I chose not to do that.)

One problem with printed books is disposing of those you no longer need, often after a single reading. (I’m trying to reduce the amount of surplus stuff in my house, even books.) There are many good ways to dispose of unwanted books — give them to friends, donate to the local library, contribute to community book sales, etc. But each of those options requires more effort than pressing a “delete” button.

This is where borrowing books from libraries is a great choice. Read it and return it. If I’m reluctant to part with a library book after I’ve read it, that’s a sign I should buy myself a copy.

Am I going to restrict myself to reading only in print? No. Many indie-published books are never going to show up at the library. The best way to experience them is via the ebook format, especially when trying out books by authors new to me. As with books from the library, if I find one I really love, I can always order a printed copy — if one is available.

Which tells me that for indie authors, it’s important to make their books available in both print and e-format. It’s even worth the agonizing effort of formatting a Word document to create a professional quality printed book. If you want to do that, this free resource created by fellow WordPress blogger Meeka may be helpful.

What about you, fellow indies? Are your books available in both print and ebook form? Do you read in both formats or do you prefer one or the other?

Printed Book DIY

Okay, authors are advised not to do this — design your own cover images, especially for the printed versions of your books. But I did it. Maybe it was the allure of the forbidden. Or maybe it was inevitable, because this whole writing and publishing adventure started with me telling myself, “Think of it as an exercise, not a commitment. Try it and see what happens.”

When I published my first ebooks, almost a decade ago, my home made cover images were indeed lame. After a couple of years I commissioned excellent professionally designed images, which still grace the four books of my Herbert West Series. They were not inexpensive. (“Good, fast, cheap — pick two!”)

A couple of years ago, I started using Canva, just to see whether it was as easy as some said. After some experimentation, I designed cover images for the four short spinoff stories from my main series, published in 2016. Since I intended to make them perma-free, it didn’t make any sense to pay for cover images, and I was happy with the results, although compared to the professional designs, their amateur origin is evident.

By the time my latest novel, She Who Comes Forth, was ready to come forth, I had designed more than half a dozen images for it. Fooling around with Canva is fun, and was a great way to do something related to my (then) work in progress when I didn’t feel like actually writing. After I finalized my final design, part of me could hardly wait to start on the challenge of incorporating it into a cover for the print version of the novel. This was while I was still waffling about publishing in print at all, and a bit apprehensive at the prospect of formatting the Word doc for POD.

So here we are, a couple of months later, and the print version of SWCF exists. I have ten copies right here, nine of which are still in the box with the Amazon smile. And all in all, I’m pleased with it. (I still have all my hair, too.)

The print book may be purchased at your preferred Amazon outlet. This one, for example. The ebook version of She Who Comes Forth will be available on November 7th, and may be pre-ordered now at a special price.

For those who might be ~~foolhardy~~ bold enough to attempt a similar project, here are a few things I learned that others may find helpful. One thing I’ve noticed about documentation, instructions and “help” pages — sometimes they omit tiny but crucial details. I don’t pretend to be an expert, and many of you may know all that stuff already, or have no desire to get into this type of project, so this is for the rest of you. FYI on DYI.

Word Document Formatting:

Amazon KDP provides a pretty good basic formatting guide. And you can usually find good help pages on the internet for most Word issues. This one, for example, tells you how to set up different headers and footers on odd and even pages.

Here are a few of my own personal tips:

First, find a trad-pubbed (or for that matter, indie-pubbed) book you like the looks of and use it as a model for interior design, preliminary pages, presence/absence of headers and page numbers, etc. Then all you have to do is figure out how to get those effects in your Word document.

Second, make sure your text is perfect (or as close as you can get) before you start formatting. Adding or deleting more than a character or two can mess things up once you’ve inserted Section Breaks, Headers, and Footers.

Third, add your preliminary pages (half-title, title page, epigraph and or dedication pages) and any “extras,” such as the moon glyphs I added to every one of the chapter titles. (They actually represent the moon phases in Luxor, Egypt in 1962 as the story progresses.) Decide on the trim size for your book (6×9 inches, for example), specify the paper size and set the margins. KDP’s “Build Your Book” guide has instructions for these steps, and even little videos you can view as many times as you need to.

Now for the ultimate challenge — Section Breaks, Headers, and Footers. Use the magic of “Save As” before you start, so you have a pristine copy of your document up to that point. If things go wrong, you can scrap the mess and start again without having to go through the process of adding the preliminary pages, setting margins, etc.

Really, once you’ve set up the headers and footers for Chapter 1 (or Prologue, if you have one), it’s a matter of selecting the right type of Section Break between chapters and breaking the link with the Header in the previous section when you want to do something different, like omitting the odd page header from the first page of the new chapter. (See why this can involve hair-tearing and profuse cursing?)

Actually, it seemed to me that the latest version of Word makes the process easier than previous versions. Or maybe it was just because I’d struggled through all this stuff before. Whatever the reason, I found I could rely on a specific sequence of checks and choices as I paged through the document, like a little mental flow chart. It was encouraging to be able to reproduce the desired pattern reliably as I went along.

The title page. I used Canva to create the picture in the middle (a separate little project). Then I inserted it into my Word doc.

Again, do NOT fiddle with anything that affects the space taken up by your text after you insert your Section Breaks, Headers, and Footers. That would be trim size, margins, font size, line spacing, adding or deleting more than a tiny amount of text. Get all that stuff finalized before you start on Section Breaks. If you really need to make any of those changes, return to your “before Section Breaks” document and make the changes there. Once you’re done, Save As, and start over. (Trust me, “Save As” is your friend.)

Finally, before you upload your document to KDP, save a copy in PDF form. That will show you exactly what your printed pages will look like. If there are problems (usually with headers and/or footers), you’ll spot them immediately and can return to your Word doc to fix them. Once everything looks good, you can actually upload your final, perfect PDF to KDP.

For a really thorough how-to guide on the entire print publishing process, I recommend How to Print Your Novel with Kindle Direct Publishing: a step-by-step guide for absolute beginners, by ACFlory. It takes you through the formatting process in detail, with screenshots. This ebook is available on Amazon.

Cover Design:

Anyone who’s comfortable with Canva (and designing images) can create a credible print book cover. You probably wouldn’t want to make this your first experience of Canva (unless you’re a really quick study). Experiment first, getting used to layering images, using transparency, adding text, and moving stuff around. Create some ebook cover images. If you don’t actually have an ebook that needs a cover image, make some for books you mean to write. (The exercise might inspire you.) Once you know you can construct attractive images with the degree of complexity you need, you’re ready to tackle a print book cover.

Before starting, you need an interior book file that’s complete, perfectly formatted, and ready to upload, so you know how many pages your book will have. That determines the width of the spine. Once you know that and have selected a trim size, download a print cover template from Amazon KDP. Go to Canva and start a new project, with customized dimensions exactly right for your cover. I found these instructions by Katherine Roberts very helpful, especially the calculations to set the custom size for your Canva project.

One of the cool things about Canva is that you can upload your own images to use in your designs. This is also where you upload your print cover template from KDP. By incorporating it into your design (temporarily), you can make sure to adhere to KDP’s specs for bleed and barcode placement.

If you use free images from a site like Pixabay for your cover design, remember to download the highest resolution versions. Images that don’t meet Amazon KDP’s fabled 300 dpi standard may cause your cover to be rejected. (This didn’t happen to me, I’m happy to say).

Select a background, and then layer the cover template over it. (My background is that textured ochre colour on the spine.) Then proceed as usual, adding whatever elements you need for your front and back covers. Set the transparency so you can see the cover template and its all-important red border lines. For my cover, the spine was the only place where the cover template was the topmost layer (well, just below the spine text). This was important, because after I was finished adding all the elements, including text, and was certain nothing important was on or outside the red lines, I easily deleted the template. Don’t forget to do that, and do NOT move any text or important image elements once the template is gone. You can change filters, transparency, or colours, but don’t change fonts at this point, because that might change the size of text areas. When you’re done, download the image as a printable PDF, and upload both it and your text PDF to Amazon KDP. And rejoice.

Slim and Trim: the “Compact Edition”

Those who haven’t abandoned their New Year’s resolutions to lose weight may actually have lost a few pounds by now, but I am thrilled to report that I have already achieved my goal, a 30% reduction in weight and… bulk. Well, not my personal weight, but that of the first book of my Herbert West Series, The Friendship of Mortals. It lost 168 pages and close to half a pound.

When I first published this book, in 2014, I set the line spacing too wide, resulting in a 554-page monster. It’s an impressive tome and is supremely readable, but because of that bulk, the price was unappealing. Now it’s a mere 386 pages, similar to Books 2 and 3 of the series.

Line spacing. See the difference? Book 1 is on the left, Book 2 on the right.

Reformatting the Word document and republishing was surprisingly easy. I did, however, have to pay my cover designer to adjust the spine width.

I don’t as yet have a copy of the “compact edition,” because I finalized it on CreateSpace just this afternoon. Now I’m in the throes of preparing Book 4 (Hunting the Phoenix) for print publication. Once that’s done, and I have all four books completed, I’ll take a picture of them, sort of like a family portrait. Until then, this picture makes it clear why I made this particular resolution. The size difference suggests that The Friendship of Mortals is much longer than the other two, when in reality the word counts aren’t that different.

Proofing!

The proofs of my next two print books have arrived from CreateSpace! And in record time, too — four days! I ordered them last Friday night. The next morning I got emails saying they had shipped. Really? The estimated arrival date was December 7th, so I was bowled over to see the parcel sitting on the table when I got home today. Impressive!

Now I have to read, or at least scan them for errors. In fact, I’ve already found a couple of instances of missing quotation marks. Aargh!

But not as much of an “aargh” as with the first book, where I omitted the physical proof copy step altogether, being in a big rush to have copies to give as Christmas presents. OK, the errors were minuscule, but irritating as no-see-um bites — a couple of typos and two part-title pages not bolded. More significantly, if I had been able to look at a physical copy I would have realized that my line spacing was too generous. It’s easier to read, perhaps, but the book ended up being a big, fat 554 pages and priced accordingly. Book 2 of the series has 6,000 more words, but is only 381 pages.

Quite a difference!

Make mistakes and learn from them.

In the meantime, I am delighted with the books. They look great. And it’s true — there’s something about hefting and paging through a physical, printed book that ebooks simply can deliver. It makes all the labour of formatting (and proofing) worthwhile.

Title page

The other title page

Formatting: Frustration, Fits and… Fun!

Last year I published my first book (The Friendship of Mortals) in print, after more than four years of being available only as an ebook. Even though I used CreateSpace, I didn’t use the supplied Word template, but did my own formatting from scratch. (Truth to tell, I was hazily aware of the template, but ignored it and just charged ahead). After formatting four books for ebook publication through Smashwords, I thought I was a whiz at that stuff.

Ha. There’s a reason for this post’s alliterative title featuring the letter F.

Among other things, I definitely learned the main difference between designing an ebook and a print book. An ebook is supposed to flow, like an electronic scroll, without impediments such as page or section breaks, headers or footers.

A print book, on the other hand, is a physical object made up of pieces of paper. Pieces of paper with two actual sides, some of which are blank. Formatting an electronic document (specifically, a Microsoft Word document) so it will turn into a book with page numbers, headers, footers, recto and verso pages — well, that’s an entirely different matter than getting a document through Smashwords’ fabled “Meatgrinder.”

(A word to those indies who haven’t done the print publication thing yet: if you tore your hair out over getting your book through the Meatgrinder without Autovetter errors, maybe you should get help if you decide to format for print. Or at least use the supplied CreateSpace template).

So now I’ve just finished formatting the next two books in the Herbert West Series: Islands of the Gulf Volume 1, The Journey and Islands of the Gulf Volume Two, The Treasure.

With all my hard-won experience on the first book, I thought it would be a snap. Or at least a near-snap.

I was almost right. While not 100% smooth, it was easier, and I now have a procedure that works. What follows isn’t meant to be a set of how-to-do-it instructions, just a bunch of observations as I emerge, rumpled but triumphant, from the formatting jungle.

The trickiest part by far is getting Section Breaks, Headers, Footers and Page Numbering to work together and look right. Fellow indie author and blogger Michelle Proulx recently wrote a good post about adding Headers, complete with screen shots of the current version of Word.

It helps a lot to start with a clean Word document. I used the ones I had created for ebook publication, reasoning that it’s easier to add breaks, headers and footers to a document that lacks them, than to wrestle with the quirks of existing ones.

It also helps to have an actual, properly-designed printed book to refer to as you go along, so you can see which pages need page numbers, headers, etc. That makes a huge difference when it comes to the professional look.

The first thing I did was make sure my documents were in tip-top shape. That meant fixing a bunch of small errors I had noted in a recent re-reading of the whole series. The “handwriting” feature in my ebook reader is great for noting these mistakes. I went through the notes it generated and made the corrections — mostly deleting the word “that.” Bonus: I can upload the corrected ebook versions, thus improving the ebooks and ensuring identical texts in ebook and print.

Then I made copies of the ebook documents and proceed to turn them into a print-ready ones. There are several steps to this process:

Make sure the Style in your document is appropriate for your print book. The Style I used for my books is: “Font Bookman Old Style, 10 pt, English (Canada), Indent: 1st 1 cm. Justified, Line spacing exactly 12 pt, Widow/orphan control.” Uncheck the “Automatically update” box in the Modify Style window, or bad things will happen.
Set the margins in Page Setup. Select Mirror Margins in the Margins tab. In the Paper Size tab, you need to enter the exact dimensions for the trim size you’re going to use, the margins and the gutter. For my 6 x 9 books, I went with page size 22.86 x 15.24 cm, margins 2 cm except the outer one, which is 1.5 cm, gutter is 0.4 cm. Headers and footers are 1.27 cm. from the edge. In the Layout tab, check “Different Odd and Even.” This results in a display of 2 pages per screen, sort of like a real book. (If you use the CreateSpace template, I’m sure all this stuff will be set up already).
Add front matter — half-title page, title page, dedication page, etc. Keep in mind that all these pages have versos, i.e. backsides, that can be used for things like lists of your other books, copyright information, etc. Refer to your model book for these details.
Once you have created all the front matter pages, insert an Odd Page Break at the end of the last page of front matter. Note: most of your page breaks will be Odd Page ones, because new stuff usually starts on an odd-numbered page. If something different happens to a header or footer on an even-numbered page, you insert an Even Page Break. Go through your document and insert all Section Breaks as needed. There must be a Section Break every time the presence/absence of a page number or header/footer changes.
Switch to Headers and Footers view and go through the document again, filling in header information and page numbers for each section. It works best to do this last. Something to remember: if you want your header info (your name on the even-numbered pages and the book’s title on the odd-numbered ones) to be on the outer corners of the pages, do this: enter them right-justified on odd-numbered pages and left-justified on the even-numbered ones. Same with page numbers. Trust me. (I have seen books where these items are on the inner sides of the pages, near the gutter, and to me that just looks wrong). A note on page numbers: I didn’t even consider putting them in the headers, which I thought would complicate things no end. I left them in solitary splendor in the footers.

An absolutely crucial detail with headers and footers is understanding “Same as previous” (in older versions of Word; in the current version it’s “Link to previous”). Every time you enter Header or Footer information for a specific Section, you have to figure out if it should be the same as in the preceding Section. Once you get this right, victory is near. See Michelle’s post (link above) for a clear explanation.

Something that drove me crazy was inexplicable inconsistencies between documents I thought were set up identically, and (even worse) things that didn’t work the same way in the same situation within a document. Word gremlins at work, obviously. Short words starting with F and S were uttered frequently until these issues were resolved, usually by studious comparison with other documents, trying different settings, or desperate searches of the Internet (which often yield helpful results).

Remember, if things look really hopeless, you can just scrap that document and start again with a new copy.

And where is the fun in all this, you ask? Well, once you figure out all that tedious stuff about section breaks, headers and page numbers, and get it all working, it is fun, or at least satisfying, to see real book-like features appearing as a result of your handiwork. Selecting fonts, adding little glyphs and other decorative elements (sparingly, I would advise) — can be fun. Then you upload your document to CreateSpace and use the interior checker, which shows you exactly what it will look like in print. Once you’re happy with that, and have assembled the package (cover, interior, metadata), you can order a proof copy for a final check. It’s a thrill finally to flip through real pages and see the results of your efforts — first writing the thing, then embodying it in an ink-on-paper artifact.