The idea for this series was actually spawned by a friend who is about to self-publish her memoir (I will give a shout out when it’s ready, but if you’re interested in a memoir about mental health struggles and gender identity, keep an eye out), who has requested my help for the whole self-publishing journey. It got me thinking: if she would benefit from a complete run-down, I’m sure others would as well.
Now, I don’t claim to be an expert, far from it! But the next few “stand-alone” articles are going to cover how I got Salt and Ice out there in the big, wide world.
This mini-series will be split into three parts:
Formatting & ISBNs — how to format your manuscript for paperback and ebook, and all about ISBNs.
Sales — where to sell your book and things to consider
After Publication — things to consider after publication (or in the lead up to publication)
This series will assume you have a book ready to go. You’ve edited it, you’re happy with it. You have a cover either made yourself or purchased from a designer. I also won’t be covering sending it to ARC readers, partially because this series is already so long and my fingers hurt from typing it, but also because my own ARC attempts with Salt and Ice were only marginally successful, so I don’t feel qualified to give advice when following my own advice didn’t work out fantastically.
Want to make sure you get the whole series direct to your inbox? Don’t worry, it’s all completely free!
Formatting
To get a book ready for publishing, it needs to be formatted correctly. I won’t go into all of the options available, that’ll be an entire book, but I’ll share what worked for me. I used Libre Office and Kindle Create; they are both simple and free. There are other, more robust options that are paid (namely Vellum for Mac users and Atticus for PC users), but if keeping costs down is important, these worked fine for me.
You can also hire someone to do all the formatting for you. If you’re not technologically minded (and aren’t willing to learn) and you have the budget, then this can definitely be worth it to save you the headache. But if you’re cutting costs wherever you can, learning how to do it yourself will be beneficial in the long run.
We start in Libre Office (Microsoft Word and Google Docs also work for this, but where the settings are located might be different). The first step is formatting your paperback.
If you’re only planning on releasing an Ebook, you only need to add the front and back matter, and set your chapter headings up with styles so that Kindle Create knows where the new chapters are.
Front and Back Matter
First, add your beginning and end material. That includes a title page, a copyright page, other information for a reader to know before going in (optional, can be a map, an author note, trigger warnings, song lists, etc) and at the end, at least include an About the Author page, sign up information for your newsletter if you have one, and things like a glossery or other published works where appropriate.
The best way to know what these look like is to just pick up a recently published book from your shelf, preferably one published in your home country, and copy what they have (making edits for your specific book, of course).
Chapter Titles
Next, format your chapters. Each chapter title should use Heading 1, and each chapter should end with a page break. You don’t have to name each chapter if you don’t want to; Chapter 1, Chapter 2, or even just 1, 2, etc., work just fine. But whatever you decide on, these need to be Heading 1 style.
Page Settings
Then set up your page settings.
Format > Page Style > Page.
These settings are for a 5 x 8 inch book (12.7 x 20.32cm), which is the standard smaller book size for fiction. If I don’t mention a setting, it means I left it as the default.
Width: 12.70 cm
Height: 20.30 cm
Orientation: Portrait
Margins
Inner: 1.27cm
Outer: 1.27cm
Top: 1.27cm
Bottom: 1.27cm
Gutter: 1.27cm
Layout Settings
Page Layout: Mirrored
Gutter position: Left
Page Numbers
Format > Page Style > Footer (or header if you want page numbers at the top of the page)
Check Footer On
Uncheck Same content on left and right pages
The rest should be checked by default, leave them as they are.
Click into the footer of a right, or even numbered page, change the alignment to be Right Justified, and Insert > Field > Page number.
Click into the footer of a left, or odd numbered page, ensure the alignment is Left Justified, and Insert > Field > Page number.
Paragraphs
Format > Paragraph > Indents & Spacing.
Before text: 0cm
After text: 0cm
First line: 0.5cm
Line spacing
1.15 lines
Format > Paragraph > Alignment.
Justified (all other settings default)
Format > Paragraph > Text Flow.
Hyphenation
Uncheck Automatically (that should grey out a lot of options, but I personally don’t like hyphenation. If you prefer hyphenation with justified text, that’s your prerogative).
Split options
Uncheck Keep with next paragraph
Check Allow to split paragraph
Uncheck No split at beginning of paragraph
Uncheck No split at end of paragraph
(This manages odd breaks at the end of the page, which can look like one page has fewer lines than another)
Change the default Styles
Styles > Edit Styles
This is where you can change styles to edit the whole document across each section, so all text is edited at once and all headings are edited at once. To tell you the truth, I actually hate using styles as I can never get them to work as I want them to, so I manually changed all the settings throughout the whole document. It was way more time-consuming, true, but less of a headache for me. But you do you, if you’re used to working with styles, this is where you can change them.
Font settings
I used Garamond, size 12, for the chapter content of my book (size 20 for the chapter headings) because I like the look of it. Text messages used Calibri, size 11, to differentiate them. I would have liked to include text bubble images, but that would have been impossible to get working with the ebook, so I just used a font change.
Paperback is finished
Save as docx and export it as PDF (you can also do a print preview to make sure the formats look right). This is your paperback completely formatted.
Kindle Create
Now for the ebook, install Kindle Create (it’s free), double-click Create New and select Reflowable and Continue. Enter the book details, and click Choose File. Select your newly saved docx file, and the app will now import it. This may take a while, depending on how large your file is.
It will give the option of automatically selecting chapter titles. Click OK and then go through the list of chapter titles it detected. This should just be your headings, but feel free to unselect things that it may have mistakenly believed were chapter headings. Now it’s just a matter of going through your book in this program and making sure it all looks right.
Things to keep in mind
Ebook readers don’t have a set size or font like a paperback does. The user sets this themselves on their ereader. This means that they could have a lot of words on one page, or very limited words, depending on their font choices, and things could look strange. Your job is to make things look as good as possible.
I found a personalised dinkus (the little image used as a scene break) didn’t convert well, and neither did lists. I also couldn’t get the scene breaks options that are included in Kindle Create to display properly (or rather, they looked like they displayed properly on the app, but when I opened the epub on my e-reader, they didn’t appear).
Consequently, I recommend going through and manually adding a simple * * * to your scene breaks, and if you have lists in your book, manually retype them directly into the app.
Every now and then, the app will give you a red banner at the top of the screen prompting you to save. If you’re in the middle of touch typing something, this will immediately prevent you from continuing. It’s annoying, but just click save and continue. Even if I didn’t have it crash on me, better safe than sorry.
Once you’re happy with the results, click the Preview button in the top right. This will give you a preview of what it will look like on a Kindle, phone, or tablet, and in portrait or landscape. I recommend having a quick browse through all options just to make sure it looks fine.
Finally, click Export and select KPF and EPub — KPF is the best file choice for uploading to Amazon, and EPub is for everywhere else, so it’s best to have both options. The app will now export your project as a readable file for both Kindles and other e-readers.
Whew! Formatting is complete! Now we have a product that’s ready to sell!
If you want to try different products, there are three that I know of:
Vellum for Mac only, which costs US$249
Atticus for PC only, which costs US$147
Lacuna for PC and Mac, which costs US$139
I am personally most interested in Lacuna, since it is offline, whereas Atticus is web-based and requires an internet connection to work seamlessly. As soon as I learned that, I lost interest in it. Lacuna looks like a great alternative, offline, and I can try it first without paying a thing.
The catch is Lacuna’s license limits how many devices it can be installed on. I’ve reached out to their customer support to ask what happens if my laptop dies and got a reply in less than an hour (take that Ingram customer service!). Currently, if it’s a planned move (ie, you’re upgrading intentionally) you can deactivate it on the current machine and reactivate it on your new one. If it breaks unexpectedly, customer service will deactivate it for you. However, they are currently working on a way for you to deactivate it yourself without needing to wait on customer service, which is fantastic (though honestly, they were so fast in responding, I don’t think it would be too much of an issue). I’ll definitely be giving it a try and doing a write-up on my findings.
If you’re interested in that, be sure to subscribe to not miss out!
ISBNs
The next consideration is whether to get your own ISBN or use a freely provided one. An ISBN is required to sell a book, but many stores, including Amazon, provide you with a free one. The problem is, the free ones are tied to the store that issued them. So if you have your book available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, if someone tries to search for your book with the ISBN, there will be two different ISBN’s attached to it depending on the store. This also means that reviews and other metadata are not tied to a specific ISBN.
What I recommend is buying your own ISBN’s. In some countries, it’s free (lucky you!), but Australia isn’t so lucky, even if we’re still significantly cheaper than the US. This means you own the ISBN and can use it in whatever store you want, and if someone searches for your book via the ISBN, they will see everywhere it’s listed.
In Australia, we buy ISBNs from Thorpe-Bowker (https://www.myidentifiers.com.au/). When you open your account, you will be charged a setup fee of $55. This is a one-off and, once you have your account, you won’t need to repay it.
From there, you need to decide how many ISBNs you want. One ISBN costs $44, a pack of 10 costs $88 (so $8.80 per ISBN), or a pack of 100 costs $480 (so $4.80 per ISBN). You can also purchase a pack of 1,000, but that’s only really feasible for small presses.
Every version of a book requires its own ISBN. So if you decide to sell a paperback, hardback, audiobook, and e-book, you will need 4 different ISBN’s. With that, it’s best to buy a 10 or a 100 pack. I personally purchased a 10 pack because $88 was a lot easier to afford at once than $480, even if I will need to buy more in the future. If you are publishing in 3 or more formats, or intend to continue writing and publishing books, buying a pack is the most economical option, but if you just have one version of a book and don’t intend to publish in other formats or write any more, then buying a single one is fine.
The ISBN needs to be included in the copyright page, with a unique one for each format (so you may need to edit and re-export your files). I recommend keeping a text file in the same folder with each ISBN and what format it’s used for, so you can easily keep it straight without needing to open your large documents to check. You will need to have them ready to access when uploading to stores.
For example, the text file for Salt and Ice has the following:
978-1-7643415-0-9 - Salt and Ice ebook
978-1-7643415-1-6 - Salt and Ice paperback
978-1-7643415-2-3 - Salt and Ice large print
That way, I can just copy paste the code for whatever version as I need it.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully this is a useful introduction to getting your book out there. I know it’s not fully comprehensive, and maybe one day I’ll write a full non-fiction book on the subject, but for now at least, this is what I did to bring Salt and Ice to market.
Next Sunday is my Enneagram series, then part two on where to actually sell your book and how to go about that will go live on the 24th May.
How did you go about formatting your book? Any tips or tricks to share? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!
Thanks for the post (though I'm far off this step to use it). But I rarely see Australia-specific ways this all works so I always pay attention then 😆 One thing I never see as well is the business/tax side of things too, not sure if that's something you've covered before or planning to, to report any income, and the deductions--like claiming the ISBN purchase?