Publish your own book

Posted on 8 Apr 2009 at 15:49

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Fonts, Margins and Bindings

Serious-looking serif fonts, such as Times New Roman, have been designed to be easier to read when there's a lot of text. Sans serif fonts, such as Helvetica, Arial and Tahoma, are generally more suitable for books that have plenty of pictures. Beware of using strange fonts that you've downloaded, as the POD service may not be able to reproduce them. If you're in doubt, read the part of your POD service's help section that deals with permissible fonts and stick to those, or you may be left with a lot of work re-formatting your manuscript. If you really want to use a special font for small pieces of text, such as chapter titles, you can use a graphics program to turn the words into an image and include this in the manuscript instead of text.

If you plan to include pictures in the book, decide whether they're going to be in colour or black and white. Colour printing is more expensive, so it pays to decide early on whether you can get away with black and white.

If you're trying to reduce your page count, reduce the point size of the text slightly rather than reducing the size of the margins. With smaller margins, readers may struggle to read the beginnings and ends of the lines near the book's spine. If in doubt, always leave at least half an inch of margin on the left and right to compensate. Leave around ?in if the book is particularly long, as the extra thickness may make it harder to open the pages completely.

Both the Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Writer word processors allow you to leave a larger margin on the spine side of a page and a smaller one on the other. In Word, go to the File menu and select Page Setup. The first tab lets you set the margins and the amount of space at the top and bottom of each page. Click on Mirror Margins and the preview area will become two pages, showing you how your margins will look. Make sure you set the 'Apply to' menu to Entire Document before pressing OK. You can do the same in Writer by selecting 'Page...' from the Format menu, going to the Page tab in the resulting window and selecting Mirrored from the associated Page Layout pull-down menu.

With your manuscript formatted, it's time to think about the type of binding you'd like. For paperbacks, POD services generally offer a choice of three: perfect-bound, saddle-stitched and coil-bound. With the perfect-bound option, the edges of the pages are glued into a block like a normal paperback. Saddle-stitched books are held together by staples and are more suitable for pamphlets and other short publications. Finally, coil-bound books have a metal or plastic coil along the length of the book's spine. This is ideal for manuals or cookbooks that need to lie flat while you read from them.

For hardback books, the only option is a 'casewrap' binding. This is the usual hard binding you find on any hardback book. However, you have the additional option of adding a dust jacket containing your text and graphics.

Generating the PDF

Most POD services require you to upload your manuscript as a PDF file. Luckily, you don't need expensive software to make a PDF file. In OpenOffice, you can simply export your document as a PDF. Open your manuscript in OpenOffice Writer, select Export to PDF from the File menu and give the file a name. A dialog box will open. Make sure you select lossless compression, rather than JPG, for your images or they may appear slightly blurred. Now press Export and, if you have Adobe Reader installed, double-click on the resulting file to check the formatting. Don't password-protect the file or the POD service won't be able to read it.