BOOK FORMATTING IN WORD | Setting up your book's pages and margins

[Music] hi everybody welcome and thank you so much for checking out my channel my name is tammy and i'm an independent author and somebody who just really loves great stories so on this channel i talk about writing books i've enjoyed and lessons i've learned on my publishing journey one of the skills that i've picked up as an indie author is book formatting and that is something that i've actually come to really enjoy especially for print books and it's something that honestly i think i've gotten pretty good at over the years i will pop up some images on the screen so you can see what some of my books look like on the inside i have done the print formatting myself for all of these books and i plan to continue doing that for any books that i self-publish in the future i've gotten several questions and comments about my book formatting and people are usually pretty surprised to learn that i do my formatting in microsoft word i realize that microsoft word is not the best formatting software out there but it is something that a lot of writers have access to already and you can actually do a lot with it if you know how to in this video series i am sharing some tips and tricks that i've learned that hopefully you can use to format your own books if you decide that you want to do that as well so today i'm going to be showing you guys how to set up your book's interior file and get all the margins and the bleeds set up and make sure it's the right trim size the first thing that we need to do is go on to kdp and try to calculate what our trim size needs to be and i'll show you guys how to do that they have a good explanation of what everything is starting right here the trim size which is what we're going to be doing first is just the printed books width and height the most common size is that six by nine inch size and that's what we're going to be using for this book setup if we scroll down this section right here sometimes you want your images to extend all the way out to the edge of the page i do that a lot for my chapter headers i do have like full page images that i want to go all the way across and so in order to do that you want to make sure that you have just a little bit of extra room on the edges so that when the book is cut you're not having like any blank white space or anything on the edge and the image does extend fully out so that's the kind of book that we're going to be creating today which means that we need to pay attention to this right here anytime that you create a book with bleed you want to make sure that you're adding that little bit of extra space we are going to be adding 0.125 inches to all the different sides of the book except for this inner page that does not need to have any extra space added to it so what it ends up being is that for the height of the book you're actually adding 0.25 inches so instead of having just a 9 inch height we're going to have this 9.25 inches and then for the width of the book you're just adding that 0.125 because we only need it for this outside edge we do not need it for the inside edge so the outside edge is going to be for our book this 6.125 so we're gonna go in here to microsoft word and i actually already have this set up with the correct sizes but the way that i did that was i went over here to this layout tab and then you're going to click on page setup and pop out this window and you want to go over to the paper tab right here and this is on this top one you don't want to pick any of these you just want to go all the way down to the bottom where it says custom size and then you want to type in the size that you want again we want that 6.125 is what i had it set at and usually it will end up just rounding it out to 6.13 and that's fine i've never had any issues with that and then the height again we want to add that .125 on both the top and the bottom and so it ends up being a whole extra quarter inch and so it's 9.25 inches you want to go over and apply this to the whole document and that will change all of the pages i usually just have my documents typed up in microsoft word and so i when i get to the point where i'm ready to like finalize the book and it's a final draft and i'm ready to format everything i'll just make a copy of that manuscript and then i will just go right in and change the pages and and start working on my formatting directly from that document so i will apply those pages to the entire document we'll push okay nothing changed because i already had done that before now we want to look at our margins so i again i already have these set up but i'll show you what you're trying to do with the margins really quick we're going to go back over to that page on kdp where it talks about margins we're going to scroll to the bottom and this section right here will tell us about our margins the size of your margins are going to depend on the number of pages in your book i will usually set the size of the book first in microsoft word and then i will look at the bottom and it'll tell me how many pages i have and i will probably add maybe you know 10 pages or so just to accommodate for like the back matter the title pages anything else that i might want to include in the book 10 to 15 pages is probably a good guess of how many how much that will take just depending on different things and so once i've got that figured out then i will have like an accurate a fairly accurate word count again this gives you a pretty wide margin right like this is the 150 pages of wiggle room that you have we're going to say that our book is going to end up being 301 to 500 pages i feel like that's a pretty good size for a fiction book so we're going to go with that the inside margins are going to be the same regardless of whether you have bleed or not so you want to make sure that your inside margins are at least this size this .625 inches the outside margins it's going to vary depending on whether you have bleed or not so if you have bleed which we do for this book we want to make sure that those outside margins are at least 0.37 inches so we're gonna go back over to word and we are going to again go to page setup and you can pop out that window and this time instead of going to the paper tab we are going to go to the margins you want to make sure that you have this mirror margin selected on one side it looks one way and then on the other side it's like the opposite so our inside margin needs to be 0.625 so let's take a look at that i have mine set to 0.9 but let's see what it looks like with 0.625 and i'll kind of show you maybe why i made mine a little bigger and then again the outside needs to be at least 0.375 and that's going to be the same as well on the top and the bottom because those are outside margins again this is like the minimal size that you can have for your margins and rather than messing with this gutter margin i will just typically leave that alone and not touch it and leave it at zero and just adjust the gutter margin as like an inside margin and we're going to again apply to the whole document and i'm probably gonna undo this as soon as we do it because i'm gonna show you what it looks like to me those margins are like way too far to the outside i just don't really like how that looks um especially on these outer edges here and in the inside too like that's very close to the inside and i feel like that's gonna get kind of hard to read so the sizes that kdp gives you again those are just a minimum but you can make the margins bigger if you want to which is what i ended up doing with this particular book so i just undid that and we're just gonna go back to what we had before if you're curious about what size that is i'll pull this up really quick again the top is point seven the bottom is point seven and the outside is point seven and then for the inside i did leave a little bit of extra room when the book opens it's harder to read along the inside edge a little bit so i like to give a little extra space in there so those are at 0.9 but that is how you set up your paper size and your margins in future videos in this series i will be showing you how to do other things with your manuscript formatting in word including these um chapter header images that we have and setting up like the headers and footers with the page number and everything so stay tuned and i will post some more videos like that in the future just to give you guys a quick simple tutorial of different things that i do with my formatting and i hope that's helpful if you look at the description box down below i have linked a sample word document that you can download and play around with some of this formatting yourself it's a document that has already been formatted it looks just like the one that i just showed you in the video if this video was useful to you please hit that like button and be sure to leave a comment down below to let me know what you think or to let me know if there's other things that you want me to cover in this video series be sure to subscribe and ring the bell if you want to be notified as soon as i post more videos thank you guys so much for watching and i hope you have a fantastic day bye [Music] you

Channel: T. A. Hernandez

Views: 25,710

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Id: EAxAFmZm3b4

Length: 9min 15sec (555 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 15 2022