How I Format My Novels for Print for KDP

hello it's me welcome to the video today we're gonna be talking about one of the things that i get questions on the most which is how i format my books specifically novels for this video uh for kdp and up until now i felt like i didn't have enough knowledge on this subject to be able to give you guys like real advice and stuff but i realized i've published three books through kdp one of them was create space before it was kdp but they work the same way and they're doing my best to answer your guys's questions that you have i've come to realize that i do know a lot and i've been doing this while and i think it's okay to give you advice so i guess that's my little disclaimer for you guys that i'm not an expert um i'm still learning every single time i need to format a new book i learned something new something to make my life easier something to make the process easier so as of right now i'm just gonna lay out what i know so far and hope that it helps you in some way and i feel like it's also safe to say that before you even start the process of actually sitting down and formatting your manuscript it would be very beneficial to look at other books first pull books off of your own bookshelf the bookstore the library anywhere you can and get a feel of what you kind of want your book to emulate i have done this with every single one of my books um i've written two novels and a book of poetry ow my finger just cracked okay and i guess one of my books is technically a novella but it worked the same way you know i looked for shorter books i looked at novels i held books in my hand i walked around with a ruler and measured them out and was like okay like i like how this feels i like the color of these pages i like the spacing of the lines on this page and i just you know gathered as much sort of little bits of information as i could before i sat down so that way i would have something to go off of because going into this with no clue of what you want your final product to kind of look like is just gonna make things harder i think also before you get started at all go to the kdp website i'm gonna link it down below the build your book page it is so incredibly helpful and this is where i refer to through every single book this is where i send people when they have a question that i can't answer go to that page open it up bookmark it and refer to it as much as you need because it is very very very helpful can't stress that enough and also for the sake of this video since we're going to be going from like start to finish i'm going to time stamp the different sort of things that i'm going to talk about down below in the description so if there's something in particular that you really are struggling with or that you need help with the most and you don't need to watch the whole video you can just jump to whatever it is that you need and with that all being said uh we're gonna go ahead and jump into the portion of the video where i do my best to teach you what i know okay so the very first thing you need to decide is your trim size trim size refers to the size of your book we are on the kdp build your book page literally on the very first thing that they tell you that you should do um and that is setting your page size and margins kdp thinks and i don't know why the most common trim size for paperbacks in the us is six by nine i don't know where that fact has come from i absolutely loathe big books like that i think it doesn't make any sense for a paperback to be that size i get hardcover books fine whatever i don't think i've ever read a paperback that large before in my entire life so i have never used that trim size it just it infuriates me actually so um on this page the trim size i go to other options this little link right here and it gives you all of the sizes that kdp offers along with this there's also certain trim size eligibility requirements and this refers to different book sizes being able to be used for expanded distribution so like if a bookstore wanted to pick up your book or the library you know wanted to pick up your book certain sizes aren't eligible for that so to get a list of that if you click on that link the trim size eligibility requirements it talks about um expanded distribution and then down here it gives a list of all the trim sizes as well as if it is eligible for expanded distribution as well as the different kinds of paper because kdp currently offers white paper and cream paper novels typically use cream paper it's easier on the eyes for my poetry book i used white paper just because that was the vibe i was going for but my novels have both been in cream and for reference so for thickest blood this is my first novel um this trim size i used 5.25 by 8. now if we look here 5.25 by 8 is eligible for the expanded distribution if you use black ink and cream paper as well as black inking white paper this was a really good size for me i felt comfortable holding in my hand and i base this off of a couple other novels that i like already had now if we move to the scum at the end of the road this is my novella um the trim size that i use for this is five point i i have my notes here so if you see me looking down i have like a whole list of things that i know i need to talk about in this video but anyway so um the trim size for scum at the end of the road was 5.06 by 7.81 and this is basically the smallest size that kdp currently offers so i also used this size for notes from a wicked child which is a poetry book poetry books they weren't a little bit smaller and novellas i feel like are just easier to handle when they are in a smaller size i would have liked to go smaller for this but this is just what kdp had however if you look blank ink and cream paper is not eligible for expanded distribution which means this book would not be able to get into bookstores and libraries and that kind of stuff don't ask me why that's just how it is so before you decide on a trim size you should take a look at this and decide what it is that you ultimately want your book to be able to be sold through so for the purposes of this video i'm going to be taking a short story that i recently completed and am going to be turning that into a novel i didn't want to take the project i'm currently working on because i don't want to give anything away and i don't want to grab something off of the internet for like weird copyright reasons so i'm just gonna be taking this short story it's only 1100 words and i'm just gonna be copying and pasting it a whole bunch of times to make it super long if you actually want to read the story it is on my website so um i can link them below if you're interested what i have here is i just pulled up the document that i submitted because i did write this for a class the very first thing that i want you to do is to save your manuscript in a whole new file so you're gonna have the manuscript that you actually typed out and then you're gonna have the one that we're gonna format this is in case something happens and you need to go back to your original so you know it's a good idea to save multiple different files as you go so if you do screw something up you can always go back and you don't have to worry about editing on the original document i'm just going to go ahead and take all of this since i'll copy and then i have a new document opened up no formatting at all on this thing no page numbers no nothing and then control v and then i am using microsoft word 2020 some people ask why my word looks different it's one of the themes um it's like dark theme or something like that so that's why it's not like blue so don't freak out and then here i'm just gonna hit ctrl all let's see let's remove the space after paragraphs let's say i typed uh one and then the title i'm just gonna bump to the left or yeah we'll just bump it to the left all right so now i have this here control all ctrl c which is copy and then ctrl v which is paste all these random spaces we're gonna work on so i'll just bump mine up to 30 000 words just so we can get the general idea of what this guy is looking like and we are going to save as and we're just going to save it as the partitioner formatted and then i like to just date my um documents so i'll just do 10 what 15th or 16th it is today that i'm filming yeah not that it matters so i'm just gonna say practitioner formatted 1016 save so i know that this is a formatted version it is not my original i can do whatever i want to this and still have my original and everything will be hunky dory one of the very first things that i like to do and this is one of the things where it's kind of about personal preference i just like the way this looks um i enjoy having a book where there's the same amount of lines on every single page except for you know when you're about to break for a new chapter or something so hit control all to select everything paragraph and then widow orphan control we're gonna click this so it's off completely and then we're gonna hit okay another thing that i found to be really really helpful uh in the long run is to get rid of tabs we hate tabs tabs are the worst can't stand them let's just get rid of them all the thing about tabs that i have found they can be really finicky when it comes to formatting large documents so what i like to do is remove my tabs and edit the style of my body text so that way the first line of every paragraph is indented by a certain amount and this also makes it easier later on because if you notice in novels and stuff like that the indentations on every page are not half an inch tabs by default are like half an inch and when you're formatting for a novel because the pages are so small you do not need a half an inch indentation with tabs it can be really annoying to change this if you have tabs then you should take this step if you don't have tabs and you already do first line indentation then you don't need to worry about it but what you can do is go to control a or command a again we're going to go to the paragraph pop out we're going to go down to tabs and we are going to hit where is it clear all so this clears all the tabs hit okay and because this document i didn't have tabs nothing changed but if you did tabs then all of your paragraphs will be um all like left aligned so in order to edit the style of the body we're going to go back to the pop-out paragraph indent and spacing here in indentation we're going to do special first line so the first line of every paragraph and then here you can change it so right now it's at 0.5 that's a regular tab i'm going to go 0.3 this is where you can play around with you know 0.35 0.25 just play around with whatever um is comfortable for you but i like to kind of start at point 3 just to get my bearings hit okay and then all of my indentations are now 0.3 inches or whatever which i think they were before so nothing changed for me but hopefully things change for you now's a good time to actually go through your document and make sure that all the tabs are replaced in the past when i've switched from tabs to first line indentation not all of my tabs change so i had to go in and mess with whole chunks of my document line by line to fix this now when i write i just automatically go to first line indentation don't even worry about the tabs and stop a problem before it even starts that's just a little trick that i picked up so now that we have this guy all squared away we're looking pretty plain pretty average what you want to do is finalize your font type and size because everything from here on out is relevant to your page count we want to make sure that the size is kind of what we want and you can always tweak this play around with this it's no problem it just creates a little bit more work later on but that's totally fine you know i've spent hours and hours and hours formatting books to get it just how i wanted so don't rush this part for the purposes of this video we're going to use perpetua 12 for reference thick as blood i use perpetua 12 1.3 spacing for me with the page size that was comfortable so actually let's just do that so i'm going to hit control all we're going to paragraph pop out and we're going to go to line and page breaks nope we're going to go to we have the indentation to do spacing so we're going to hit line spacing multiple at 1.3 again this is something play around with see what fits for you but i'm gonna hit okay so yeah we got a little bit bigger i've got a little bit thicker and now for my absolute favorite part this is the page size part so this is where your little research and creeping on other books comes in handy this is also a good time to go ahead and reference the build your book page again look at the different trim sizes decide what will work for you for the purposes of this video we're going to go ahead and make this book the same trim size as thick as blood just because i personally feel like that's a really good book size especially for paperback and in order to change the size of your paper you're going to go up to layout page set up hit the little pop out menu go to paper and we're going to do 5.25 by eight and look at that cute little preview oh this is the best because it's like seeing your manuscript go from like eight and a half by eleven to like book size it's just so satisfying to see how many pages your book is gonna be and like all that good stuff so okay we're gonna hit okay and oh look at that oh ah there we go so cool okay another thing i want to mention before we go any further is to be careful with your fonts uh make sure you are using for commercial use fonts or that you paid for your font and know that anything you pull from the internet you have to do your research to make sure that it is like you are able to use it you are able to produce it in print that's especially important and to make sure that you're not you know stealing other people's work and not paying them or you know giving credit if they ask for credit that kind of stuff so be careful with your fonts as always and always be careful with your images this is just like a quick like psa to be mindful and respectful of other people's work now we're going to play around with the margins of the book and the gutter so if you don't know the gutter of a book refers to the amount of space of the page that is not readable so you know when you open up a book you have you know your pages here but there's a good portion of the pages that get sucked into the spine that you won't be able to read now admittedly looking at thick as blood if i were to ever go back and do like another edition of this or you know change something the gutter would probably be one thing i would change i think i used kdp's like minimum requirement or something like that and it just wasn't like enough for me so that's another thing just to watch out for but thick as blood i did one inch margins all the way around and then in the gutter i think i use like a point eight or something like that if we jump back to the build your book here we have the page number and the inside gutter um like absolute minimum so my book right now keeping in mind that i have the font that i'm going to use i have not added my front matter or my back matter yet so i'm going to add maybe like five to eight pages in my calculations to account for that but right now i'm sitting at 172 pages so if we go back here 151 to 300 is a 0.5 gutter absolute bare minimum and that does not include the margin so that only includes like the inside part not the margin part between like your text and like the edge or what i'm saying like over here this is when you might need to use a little math i'm sorry and then it also talks about the the outside too so um the outside margins without bleed and width bleed is 0.25 and 0.75 bleed and no bleed refers to if you have images that you want to go to the very edge of the page and like spill off of the page versus you know typical novels just have text if we go back here and we go to page setup and we go to margins this is where you can control all that so right now my top my bottom my right and my left which is um the left margin is like the inner margin where your gutters gonna be is all set to one which is fine and dandy um one is a good place to start again mess around with it see what works for you but what i i like to do is to combine my left margin and my gutter into one like measurement so i don't have to like add the two and sometimes kdp when it goes through its screening process of your pdf sometimes i feel like it confuses the gutter and the left margin and it's like oh well your gutter isn't this and your left margin is this and it just doesn't like that so i just like to get rid of the left margin all together so i'm gonna hit zero and then we're just going to change the gutter to like one to start out with and then gutter position you want to keep to the left because that's the inside of your document and then if you go down here to pages multiple pages if you hit mirror margins so as you can see the document changed so like this inside here are my gutters and it's basically like okay so you're turning this into a book so it knows that the two inside margins need to be like used as the gutter so if we go and hit okay see nothing really changed but now the document knows that gutters for print are being used and now let's say my document was like 400 pages okay so if we go back here so let's say we have like 301 to 500 that's 0.625 boop absolute minimum now if we go and get our little calculator out so kdp recommends an inside margin of 0.625 and an outside margin of 0.25 we enter 0.625 plus 0.25 we get 0.875 which i think is what i use to determine my gutter for thickest blood but i should have rounded up i probably should have gone 0.9 so learn from my mistakes okay so off camera i just went in and added some chapters to my book i think i added like i don't know five or six and the next thing i want to talk about is the front matter so one of the most useful buttons that i have found in microsoft word when editing especially like formatting and stuff looking for crazy looking things and when you know you go in to do page breaks and section breaks is under like the paragraph thingy up here this little button the show and hide paragraph marks you click this and it tells you every like invisible mark that you have on your page so spaces are used by these little dots paragraph is like the enter and then when you add in certain breaks it'll tell you what the break is front matter refers to the first couple pages of the book before you get into the actual book this can look different for everybody there's a couple of things that i think are pretty universal like a title page and a copyright page but after that it just depends on what you want so you can add like a dedication a map table of contents i'm not real big on table of contents but some people are and that's where you would put this i don't have a lot of knowledge on it so i can't really talk to table of contents but for this video we're just going to be adding so when you first open up your book you have your title page here on the back of your title page is your copyright page and then across from there i have a quote from the book but a lot of times this is like your dedication page and you can add more or less pages as many as you want really a miniature book um but for me i just do this and then a blank page and then we start in to the book so we're gonna kind of follow that format for the purposes of this video so if we go to the front of the story here we are gonna do our title page first so the partitioner wintergatelli and then we're gonna go to the end of winter canatelli do a couple of enters and then we're gonna go up here to insert we're gonna enter a page break and here we are so now you can see like this is where the break starts so anything after this will show up on the next page anything before this shows up on this page this is the part where you want your title page to reflect the cover of your book so by now you should probably have in mind some fonts that you want to use maybe a symbol or a little picture that means something maybe pulled from the cover of your book itself since i have not created a cover for this story i'm just gonna go to home and let's just do something fun something crazy i don't know let's find something wild ew i hate that okay let's find something else something good yes okay so we're just gonna bump up the oh my god and then this will just be you know in the middle of the page yeah so that works we're gonna show the paragraph marks again and we're gonna this page break and now page breaks and section breaks are very important especially if you're going to be converting your book into like kindle format for an e-reader it's going to make the transition so much easier so i highly recommend this even if you're not it's also good for just formatting in general if we go back up to a chapter one and we're just gonna insert another page break page break so now we have that and if we go to the oh hello just go to the beginning of that guy just get out of the way i get some questions about copyright i'm not like an expert but i have looked into this i mean at least in like as far as america goes as soon as you create something it's yours there's no like legal document that you need to write up saying oh i created this from my own mind so saying something is copywritten is like i did this it's my own and it's copyrighted like that kind of thing i don't know i'm sure there's like some more legal things you know it goes under the intellectual property act you know ideas and things like this especially like books and stuff are 100 protected under that act and the thing with copyright pages go is like you type it up yourself so you can really put whatever you want in there basically even i'll look it through books that i own for their copyrights and see what they have see what kind of things like aspects i want to include in mind it probably wouldn't be smart to copy and paste one think about you know your story what's in there that you need to protect you know the fact that maybe your characters are based on other like people or that they're not specifically for the purposes of this video i'm just gonna copy the copyright page i have for thick as blood i would create a whole new one for a story though that's important to say it's like i wouldn't just copy and paste this if i was actually publishing this book i am going to add that so i'm just going to copy from her and paste here and yeah this guy's all kind of wonky so there's tons of different ways you can format this i've seen books who do like a left format towards the top of the page i've seen center towards the bottom of the page typically what i've noticed is that the copyright page is in a smaller font than the rest of the book i don't know if that's a thing but i like doing that because i think it looks nice so for me my copyright is perpetua 10.5 and then i'm just gonna hit just do that down there let me just get this guy so it's towards the bottom and then yeah this has all of your stuff on it um as well as your edition and your isbn now as far as isbn goes there's a couple different ways to do this people ask me about this all the time i just use the isbn offered by kdp it's free yes you get it through kdp but your book is not owned by kdp like if that makes sense like the distribution like yeah like the books like physically distributed by kdp are you know technically like theirs or whatever but the content in the book is yours you can buy them you know individually they're kind of expensive but for my intensive purposes like i just get kdp's call today that's fine so typically in this stage of the book i don't have an isbn yet um you don't get one assigned to you unless you've already purchased them until you go onto kdp's website and actually set up your book through them so typically this will be the last thing that i add into this book before i upload the final version to kdp so isbn part is typically blank until the very last minute and then i can just go in and add that later so yeah so now we have title page copyright and here is where i'll add a quote or dedication or picture i've kind of done it all so far i'm gonna go back to before chapter one we're gonna go insert page break and bada bing bada boom so let's dedicate this to [Applause] bam dedication page done we have title page copyright dedication slash quote whatever back of this we want a blank page your book should always start on a right page because if you've noticed every book ever made the right side of the book is all odd numbered pages and the pages on the left are all even number pages typically you want your book to start on page one all right so we're gonna go back to chapter one and this time instead of a page break we're gonna do a section break because your front matter is going to be a section all its own and then each individual chapter in your book is going to be its own section as well and this is really just for the page number aspect which is coming later on it is the one thing that gives me trouble every single time i format a book but i've learned to like try and conquer it we are going to go to let's see layout breaks and we're gonna go to section break next page um hello there we go okay so as you can see it's a different thing section break next page so to tell if something is in two different sections you can double click on your footer or header and it'll say footer section one footer section one and then you go down it'll be footer section two which is what we want which means if we did this correctly let's scroll up and make sure we did so title page very first one you open on back of it copyright page next page dedication page after that completely blank and then here we're going to start chapter one congratulations you got through the front matter part all right now we're going to jump into the body of the text i don't like doing the back matter until i finessed the body it just helps later on because at the beginning you don't really know how many pages your story is going to end up and then back matter really is determined by if your book ends on like an even page or an odd number page so back matter i save to let later for now we're going to do the different sections of the book and we're going to use styles to separate each section we're going to jump up to section 1 so i can just like show you what i mean by this so if we go up to vu and here we want to look at the navigation pane so this is where all of your headings are going to go again if you are going to be converting your manuscript into an e-book this is going to make things so much easier because you'll be able to jump to every chapter and every portion of your book right from the navigation pane let's say we have the partitioner our title here let me just turn off i'm just going to turn off the paragraph things right now because they're kind of annoying i highlighted the title so now i'm going to go up here to styles and i'm going to hit the little pop out style box and then down here i'm going to hit this little a plus icon which means new style so now with this selected i am creating a style for the title so i'm just going to do i'm just going to call it partitional title text i don't know name it and then i'm just gonna leave all of this here and this is where you can like mess with it a little bit so you can like literally create it if you know you didn't already have it formatted how you want but down here under format this is gonna be really important so we're going to go to format we're going up here to paragraph and then outline level we're going to hit level one okay and this is what makes it a header and this is what makes it gonna pop up in the navigation pane so make sure you hit level one okey doke and then hit okay and then bada bing bada boom there it is oh my god so now if you are anywhere in your document let's just go down here and hit that bam it takes you right to it love it technology am i right we have our first section now we're going to be doing basically the same thing with every chapter we're going to start here at chapter one and i am going to let's put it like halfway down the page let's do that and then we're going to highlight chapter one let's say we use that joker man text we'll do it at 24 point all right so bam there's that and then the styles is should still be out unless you close it which you know just go to a little pop out if you do hit a plus and then we're gonna do title text and then we're gonna go down here to format again we're gonna hit paragraph we're gonna hit level one very important okey doke okey doke bam chapter one bada bing right and now while i'm here so i'm gonna go to where did i put chapter two oh boy i literally just threw it in here randomly um the great thing about navigation is that you can search stuff chapter two there you are okay so now if i just highlight chapter two i can go to title text hit it and bam that's it so what we wanna do is go to the end of section or chapter one sorry just do like a little space there we are going back to layout breaks and make sure you hit section break next page so now if we go and turn on our paragraph markers it'll show us there's a section break next page we are in chapter two we double click the footer footer section three footer section two we are good to go and now if we go back up to chapter one so as you can see here with the marker showing you can show exactly like how you formatted it i have not unlocked the secret to creating a style that includes like the spaces for the formatting i know it's possible i just haven't cracked the code and for me i have not been able to find a consistent way of doing so that doesn't give me a headache so for the purposes of this video again this is something that i'll probably learn in the future uh but for now what i have to do is i just count the number of spaces between the top here and the chapter so one two three four five six seven go down to chapter two i have one two three four five six seven go back up to chapter one what do we have and then one space between the chapter and the text and then i think that one is already there now i'm just gonna go through the rest of the chapters that i made up here and do the same thing a couple more times and something i do want to show you really quick at the beginning of every chapter sometimes you know people do like a drop cap or i know for me i don't like to use any indentations on the first line of every chapter a way to make that consistent is to again create a style for it let's say we're at chapter one and i don't want this indentate indentated indented indented but because i have it under the style first line hanging i cannot backspace it and have it go back so what i can do highlight the whole thing go to my pop-out styles okay i don't know why you're down there go to add and then we'll do first oh god first paragraph maybe and then from here if we go back down to format and we hit paragraph right here we can change it so first line at 5.3 we can do none and that way when we hit okay we hit okay bam it goes back so let's say we go to chapter two whole first paragraph we just hit first paragraph and bam and you can do that for every single one so if you do something like super crazy to your first paragraph of every chapter instead of trying to recreate it every time you can just save it as a style and just apply it wherever you want now for my least favorite part of everything that ever was the page numbering i swear without fail every single time i do this something goes wrong but hopefully we can get through it smoothly here honestly do not expect this to go right the first time because i've never had it go right for me the first time but i'm gonna try and explain it in a way that hopefully goes right for you this is another reason why i like starting out with a clean slate um that's why i don't add page numbers until this point because i don't want to screw anything up i want to make sure i have all of my sections laid out first before i add page numbers just because page numbers can get really weird really fast typically in books you'll find that the front matter pages are either not numbered at all or numbered roman numerals roman numerals always confuse me so i just do not number my front matter pages at all yeah i can actually show you better because thick as blood i did not figure this out how to do what i'm about to show you but in the scum at the end of the road i did so so the scum at the end of the road is kind of different in the way that my chapters are just parts i mean the book is so short there's three parts so the first part is today no page number okay and then we have my very beginning so this is technical you know like chapter one would be but i didn't want a page number on here now you can add a page number to every page you want it's up to you but to do this so to have this page just text or even like you know the chapter one and then to start you flip it over and you're on page two we're going to ignore the front matter for now jump to chapter one and what you're going to do is go to insert we're going to go to header and footer over here page number and you can put the page number wherever you want top of page bottom of the page i typically like to do the center of the page but you can do like on the outside that's a little more confusing i'm not gonna go over that just because i don't think i could do it the first try but for this book we're gonna put the page numbers at the bottom of the page plain number two just so it goes in the middle hit that the default font is i think calibri calibri calibri or whatever um i'm just gonna hit ctrl a or sorry i'm just gonna highlight that first and i'm just gonna change it to uh perpetua and then we'll just leave it at 11 for now but yeah i just like to automatically change it to whatever font i want the page numbers to be at as you can see we are starting off on page six um just because the document thinks that we are starting on page one with the front matter and we are not we're starting in section two because remember section one was the front matter so you're good to start at section two and what you're gonna do is up in the layout nope oh sorry i am so lost right now okay so up in the header and footer section here see this button that says link to previous the first thing i want you to do is turn it off okay so that means section two is not going to link to section one when we go up here to section one and we maybe delete these numbers it does not alter section two so we still have page number five that's fine in section two but the front matter pages section one we should not have anything and now what we're going to do is highlight page five i think it should be page five depending on you know where you're starting out or whatever either way it should be an odd number page because remember odd numbers start on the right hand side so as long as this is an odd number you're good so highlight it that's important now we're gonna right click and we're gonna go up to format page numbers and then we're gonna hit start at one hit okay so now these guys are still blank in section one section two we start on page one if you want you can leave it at that no problem now if you want to not have a page number on your chapter page then all you have to do is go up to this box and hit different first page and then this guy you can put like hey what's up how's it going instead of a number for every single beginning of the chapter or you can leave a blank it's up to you if we jump to chapter two we are going to see while the page numbers are continuous which is good we still have a page number here double click in section three make sure that different first page is checked and linked to previous is also highlighted we want to keep that so we want to continue the stream of page numbers so 11 12 and then we have 13 14 and if we go to chapter 3 same thing just double click different first page but make sure we are still linked to previous chapter four different first page and we got 71 72 73 74 it all looks good again it's good to go through your entire document and make sure that all the page numbers are there and that they are all in sequential order sometimes i have found that page numbers get a little wonky sometimes page numbers get missing i don't know microsoft word is really weird in that way it's always good to make several passes through your entire document as we're going through this process to make sure everything is still good and then we're at the epilogue and we're gonna do different first page now another thing that i'm just gonna um quickly like talk about some people some authors i guess like to have every single chapter start on a um like right hand page so let's say my chapter 5 on here ends on an odd number page which means that it's going to end on the right hand side which means that if we turn it over as things are the epilogue starts here and let's say we want the epilogue to start here on the right hand like we want all the chapters to start on the right hand side that's a pretty easy fix so what we're gonna do we're gonna turn on our page markers just so we don't mess anything up and if we go to the end of floor let me just hit enter so you can see so the section break is right there and now after this section break we are going to go to layout breaks and i think if we hit even page and there we have it 165 166 167 and then 168. i think as long as that section break even page is before the section break next page your numbering should stay fine alright guys we're almost there you can do this now for the back matter the reason why i saved the back matter to the very end is because of the page numbers so if we take a look as blood for example so we have this is the very end of my book so last page ends on a 379 so it ends on an odd page we flip it over and then this page is blank and then this is my like about the author type thing and then we have blank page and then kdp automatically adds in like an end page so don't worry about that but we look at the scum at the end of the road for example this book ends on an even page so 104 which means i could have had like a little about me or whatever here but i wanted to leave it blank because i wanted to be like okay end of the book clean we're done so that page is blank flip it over another blank page and then this was um a note to the author or a note from the author oh my god and then back here another blank page and then here was my little author you know bio type thing and then end page kdp ads this at the back for this story we are also ending on an even page back matter like the front matter can usually include some stuff but you can have whatever you want if you don't want anything back there like that's fine don't put anything if you want to add like a thank you or you know like a list of your other books or you know like a little problem like hey you can find you know the author on these platforms like you can put whatever you want back there i'm just gonna show you how i do it and how i typically like for my back matter to look so i'm just gonna go to the end here and i'm gonna make sure we're in layout go to breaks go to next page because we ended on an even page i want this page to be blank and now here we're gonna add another break next page and the thing with kdp is if you have what like two blank pages in a row they're gonna flag it and gonna be like no you can't do this but one page is fine and by page i mean like page okay if you had like let's say these two were completely blank they'd be like no i can't do that and now if we go over to the next page i'm just gonna do let's say we have like um thanks i don't know why this isn't calibri not all sorry this should be in perpetua perpetua 12 please thank you thanks for watching so let's see i have about a bing bada boom if this was this book we would have the end right and then we'd have blank page oh shoot do we need i need another blank page don't i yeah so we have this is why i like actually pulling up a book and referencing an actual book as we're looking at this just because you know microsoft word isn't going to tell you like this is the right side of a book so that's why i do this so left page and bright page blank i think i just want a page break yeah actually back here we don't need section breaks we just need page breaks so i'm gonna delete that because we want one section break here but then we want a page break yeah we don't need a whole section break back there so section break page break here we want another page break there we go that's better okay so section break blank blank note from the author or thank you whatever and then i'm gonna do another blank page so we'll go to break page at the blank page here break page and then here we'll have um like a little author bio again it's in column i cannot say that font name it's fine like i said it will add a page at the end okay and then as you can see because we did the one section break here and then this is like a different you know first page the page numbers continued on through the document which we don't want like the front matter the back matter isn't part of the book it doesn't need to be numbered to get rid of these page numbers what we're gonna do is double click we're gonna uncheck link to previous so now these guys are not connected to the book section so section 8 is no longer connected to section 9 so when we go through highlight and delete these page numbers section 8 page numbers continue but section 9 page numbers have been deleted that is that for the back matter and then one final thing before we go ahead and export this would be a great time to once again go through your entire document with your sorry i do not talk this much oh my gosh so be good to go through your document and with your paragraph markers on and again look for any stray marks like really get up in there you know what i mean be patient you know this process should not take as long as it took with me going over it like with me going over it it took like no time at all but when you're doing this for your own manuscript for a work that you're actually going to be publishing put in the time okay do not expect to knock this out in one afternoon because we just got lucky with this honestly and because i wrote like a million notes on it i was just able to knock this out and because this isn't a real book so when exporting your manuscript to a pdf or document i guess it's not a manuscript anymore it's like a formatted book congratulations do not get this wrong because kdp will reject anything that you miss this would be a good time to pull up the build your book page again i reference this every single time i go to export because kdp is very specific about exporting to pdf if you go down to the very last step proofing and exporting to pdf um you can watch these videos i think it's annoying to watch videos so i just go down the step-by-step instructions basically what this talks about i'm just gonna walk you through right now so if we go up here we're gonna go up to file go down to options and then we're gonna go to save this is one of the things that screwed me up when doing the scum at the end of the road i don't know if you remember those videos but my fonts were not properly embedded i can't remember now what i was doing wrong but i know at the time i was like what is going on um you want to go down to the bottom here where it says preserve fidelity when sharing this document so you want to embed the fonts if you do not embed the fonts in the pdf then the printers at kdp will not be able to properly print your fonts and uncheck do not embed fonts alright and then on the left we're going to go back to advanced and now when we scroll down okay to image size and quality check do not compress images even if you don't have images just do it and then default resolution since this is going to print anything above 300 ppi is good for print so the option that microsoft gives is 330 which is perfect this means that your stuff will not be pixelated now we're going to hit okie doke back over here to file now do not hit save as adobe pdf we want to export i've made that mistake before too and it just didn't work out the same so export and now do not hit create adobe pdf go down to create pdf xps file and now it's going to pop up with this guy here and now what you're going to do is you're going to go to options make sure that pdf a compliant is checked i think by default it is not checked so make sure you check it and then hit ok and now you're going to hit publish and typically it kind of crashes word like it tells you word is not responding for a minute let's see yeah so that i think is normal so now if you go to your files click open your formatted and then with the date this is really important because when you upload to kdp it'll give you like a preview of what your book is going to look like and then if you order proof copies you'll be able to see it i think it's very very rare for a first proof copy to come back perfect so it's always good to save multiple different files on the days that you actually do them because it's more than likely that you're going to be formatting your manuscript a couple different times in different ways we have opened up the pdf that font though i'm dead now we have our story and it is looking beautiful look at that that is gorgeous i can't even and then if we scroll down to the end here yeah i'll even see so 176 blank blank thanks for watching blank author bio and stupid caliber calibri font whatever and that's that your next step is to head over to the kdp website and you know formally create your book but we are not going to be going over that in this video so that is how i format my books specifically novels for kdp wrapped up in a nice little package trust me i made it seem way easier than it actually is again don't take my word as law the whole point of being able to publish uh your own book and format it how you want is to create your own piece of work you know play around with it push the boundaries try something new something different this video was just to serve as a jumping board and a starting place and with that being said thank you so much for watching i hope this was helpful for you i hope you're happy because now i've lost my voice because i don't talk this much ever good luck with whatever project you're working on i hope you're staying safe and i will see you all very very soon and stupid caliber calibri font whatever you

Channel: Wynter Cannatelli

Views: 27,753

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Id: T9L3FG-hGf0

Length: 52min 31sec (3151 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020