So, you’ve finished writing your story. You found a bunch of people who would read it and give you feedback on which parts were confusing, which characters felt flat and which parts were exciting. Maybe you made some changes as a result of their feedback, maybe you didn’t. You tinkered, you rewrote, you nudged, you adjusted and you rewrote some more. Finally you were finished and you gave your manuscript to an Editor and paid them an arm and a leg to tighten and tone your prose.  Finally you paid a Proof Reader to go through and find all the typos and unmatched punctuation. Now you have a finished, polished and proofed manuscript. Now what?

Distribution

I’ve decided to go with two distributors: KDP for Kindle and paperbacks on Amazon, and IngramSpark for wide distribution for eBooks, paperbacks and hardbacks.

Formatting

The distributors require formatted documents to tell the printers what exactly you want printed. To do this they provide templates for you to use to populate the content into. Once you have selected the Trim Size (the dimensions of your book), you can download one of the freely available templates (https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834230 but try a google search and see what else you can come up with). I have taken one of these templates and am OK with the fonts used and styles, so its just a matter of slotting in your content chapter by chapter.

Why is it so hard?

You need to be comfortable with Styles in MS Word. In particular you need to get comfortable with using Sections. Here’s how it works:

With a new chapter you need to do a Section Break (Next Page) at the end of the page preceding to finish the previous chapter. This allows you to have the headers/footers to be different for the first page of the chapter. Because you don’t want the header or footer to appear on the first page of a chapter.  

You still want the headers to be different on the odd and even pages – odd for the name of the book, even for the author name (or whatever you decide for you). Keep “Link to Previous” selected. You will need a different Style for the odd and even headings – mainly just to Left and Right align those headings.

Keep a different style for the headings before your content because you don’t want those headings to appear in the table of contents. Likewise for any headings following your Epilogue. 

You should probably run a spell check over the word document. And look for any tab characters.

Go through and any paragraph starting a section (ie separated by a line break from the section before it, or the first paragraph of a chapter) should not be indented, while all other paragraphs should be indented. Have two styles: normal text and normal text (first paragraph of a section). Or maybe something with a snappier title. Anyway this allows you to alter the styling of the whole book with one modification. Yay styles.

Finally once you’re happy with how it looks, you’ll need to generate a pdf. Hit Print on the File menu. Make sure the Printer is Cute PDF Writer. Select Printer properties. change Paper source from Automatically Selected to “OnlyOne” and color to Black and White. Then click on Advanced. 

Change Paper Size to PostScript Custom Page Size Definition. and then change Width to 6″ and Height to 9″. Click on the OK button on the three dialog boxes to return to the Print screen. Then hit Print.

Give the file a name. Put the file in a folder with the pdf that your designer gave you of the cover art. Open Adobe Acrobat and open the file. Check and double check the page size by going to File->Properties. On the Description tab near the bottom will be the Page Size. If it isn’t 6″x9″ something has gone wrong and when you upload to IngramSpark it won’t look good and it will cost another bunch of money to replace it. Go back to the Print instructions and try again. Otherwise, you’re ready to go for the physical copies. Congrats. 

eBooks

Now the fun part. You need to take out all the Section Break (Next Page) and replace them with a Page Break. You need to take out all the Headers Footers/Page Numbers. You need to create an anchor tag (bookmark) on the Table of Contents Page. Then you need to change the Table of Contents to not have any page numbers. On each chapter title, add a link to the Table of Contents anchor tag. This allows you to navigate back and forwards between the content and the Table of Contents.

Don’t bother saving as a PDF, instead, load the file into a File Converter website, going from .docx to .epub.

Uploading

You should now have a PDF of the cover art, a large JPG of the cover art, a PDF of the interior of the physical book, a DOCX of the interior of the digital book and an EPUB of the interior of the digital book.

KDP

Sign into KDP.

Click on +Paperback in the Create a New Title section

Paperback Details

Make sure Language is English, complete the Book Title as you would expect. Likewise select the Categories and Keywords.

Paperback Content

Be sure to add in the ISBN, Clamp Ltd as the Imprint. Leave the Publication Date.

Make sure the Ink and Paper Type is Black & White interior with cream paper. Trim Size is 6″x9″, Bleed Settings are No Bleed, Paperback cover finish is Matte.

Upload the interior and exterior pdfs of the Manuscript and the Cover art. 

Finally have a look at the result by clicking on Launch Previewer. This might take a while. Amazon is pretty good at calling out any issues, but other things to watch out for are

• Misalignment of the cover art
• Chapter page numbers not matching with the Table of Contents
• First paragraphs being indented because they shouldn’t be
• Headers consistent with author name on one side, book name on the other and nothing on chapter pages
• Page numbers incrementing consistently

There might be difficulties around the cover art. Amazon might state that the expected size of the cover differs from what is expected. This might be due to the number of pages not matching what was designed for.  Try removing pages by reducing the font size, line spacing or blank pages. If you do this, be sure to update the Table of Contents, because altering anything except the number of pages pre and post content will shuffle the pages that the chapter start on.

Paperback Rights & Pricing

For Territories, select All Territories (worldwide rights)

Primary marketplace: Amazon.co.uk

Pricing, Royalty and distribution:

amazon.co.uk  9.99 or whatever is required to get £3 per copy

Once it’s available, get a Proof so that you can see how it looks in person. 

 

IngramSpark

(I’ll fill this in the next time I put a book up)