Today we are talking about the
basics of formatting your book. We're not doing a book formatting
step by step tutorial video. We're gonna be doing something
a little more basic than that. We're gonna be talking specifically about
what type of content should be inside your book because there's a lot more in
the books that you purchase than just the book itself. Once you pick
up a book off of your shelf, you may notice there's a few more extra
pages that you maybe haven't thought of yet. So we're gonna be talking about what
you should be putting inside your book. I'm going to be giving you
some tips along the way, and of course I'll be showing you some
resources to going more in depth about book formatting if you wanna learn
more about it. My name is Mandi Lynn. I make weekly videos on the
business of being an author. So if that sounds like
something you're interested in, make sure to subscribe and hit the belt
notification icon so you never miss a new upload. So like I said, I'm not gonna be doing a tutorial
on how to format your book today, but if you are looking for a
in-depth step-by-step tutorial, then be sure to check out
my book formatting course
formatting print books and e-books with Adobe InDesign
is a course that I designed. It has three hours of video lessons. It has a printable step-by-step guide, as well as an Adobe InDesign template
where you can basically drag and drop your book into the template
and format it to your liking. I personally believe that Adobe InDesign
is the best book formatting software out there, and if you
wanna learn more about it, I have a video that talks all about it, why Adobe InDesign is better
than Microsoft Word, cuz frankly, Microsoft Word just isn't designed for
formatting books. Can you do it? Yes. Will you pull all of your hair
off along the way? Possibly. So if you wanna learn a lot
more about book formatting, be sure to check out the course
which will be linked down below. This video is also a part of My
Beginner's Guide to Self-Publishing, a book series here on YouTube. So if there's anything in
the self-publishing world
that you wanna learn about, be sure to check out that video playlist, which will be linked in the
description of this video. And if a topic you wanna see covered
isn't covered yet in that series, be sure to let me know in the comments
down below and I'll be sure to make a video on it. So today we're gonna be
talking about three different things. We're gonna be talking about front
matter, the book itself, and end matter. So let's start first with front matter. So when you pick up a book off of a shelf, you're gonna notice there's a couple
pages before chapter one starts. Those pages are called front matter
and it can be a few different things. Typically, when you open up a book, the first thing you'll
see is the title page, which is just the title of the book. It's also the page where an
author will sign their signature. Sometimes there's a second title page
where it has like the subtitle and the publisher information. That's
not something that's required, but you can add it into
your book if you'd like. There's also always a copyright page. Copyright page is just where you're
gonna put your copyright information. Who owns the copyright of the book?
You're gonna put disclaimers like, this is a fictional book. Any similarities
is coincidental, blah, blah, blah. You might wanna put your author website. You might also wanna put your
contact info if someone needs to ask you a question about the copyright
of the book or for some other reason, they may wanna reach out to you. Sometimes the copyright page is a spot
where authors will put who designed the book cover or who formatted the book
just to give them credit for their work. I don't wanna go too much
into copyright today, but if you have more questions on the
copyright page and how to file for copyright, and if you need
to file for copyright, let me know in the comments down below
and I will make sure to make that another video After the copyright page. There's sometimes a dedication page you
can choose if you want to dedicate your book to someone. Usually it's just
one sentence and it's short, simple, sweet. Those are the three basics of
front matter. We've got the title page, copyright page, and dedication page, but there's also some other things that
you can add in as front matter as well. One of those things is a map. If your book is a fantasy
book or if your book just has references to a map, you can either design a map yourself or
you can hire someone to design a map, and you can put that
as a page in your book. And it's a really fun thing to do,
especially if you're a fantasy author, to design a map, and it's just something you can add to
spice up the formatting of your book. Then we also have author's note. This
isn't always necessarily front matter. I've also seen author's notes used
as back matter, but very rarely. Some books will need a little introduction
for the author or a little disclaimer from the author, and that's
usually what authors notes are for. If an introduction is needed
before you start reading the book, they'll put it at the beginning
before the book starts. And if it's more of a disclaimer
or why the author wrote this book, or really any reason why an author might
want to say something after a reader has read their book, it will go in as
end matter rather than front matter. Lastly, you can also have a table
of contents as your front matter. You don't see table contents
a lot in fiction books, but you definitely see them a lot in
non-fiction books because oftentimes an reader may want to jump to a particular
chapter if it's a non-fiction and they wanna learn about something
in that chapter in particular, you can have it for fictional
books, it's just not as common. Now in Adobe InDesign,
it's actually super, super easy to make a table
of content that has the uh, page numbers auto-generated in. So
if you wanna learn all about that, I have an entire lesson on that in
the Adobe InDesign formatting course. So you can check that out down below. Those are some of the typical
things you see as front matter. It's certainly not a cut and dry list
of what you can have as front matter. There's other things that you can add
in or maybe you don't have all of these things as front matter for your
book, but it's just a starting place. Let me know in the comments down below
what you're gonna be having as front matter for your book. Let's talk about the manuscript itself
because this is gonna be the thing that you spend the most of your time on
is formatting all of the chapters of your book. So every time you
have a new chapter start, you're gonna be having a beautiful chapter
page for it where it has the chapter number in big, bold letters. Maybe it'll have whatever the name of
the chapter is or some other fun info, but you just want it to be a beautiful
clear start to a new chapter. In my opinion, this is the most
fun part of the formatting process. I like to create a graphic in
the background to match the cover of the book to make it more fun, and I usually use a more fun font
for the chapter header as well. Just to spice things up a bit, what's important about formatting the
start of a new chapter though is not to have any headers. Now, we'll
talk more about headers later on, but headers are just uh, when we have the author in the
book title at the top of the page. Now obviously, especially if you have beautiful art
going on in the background at the start of your chapter, you aren't gonna wanna
have a header. So in Microsoft Word, it can actually be pretty difficult
to remove headers while still keeping headers throughout the
rest of your document. It's something that's super
easy to do in Adobe InDesign, but just be mindful that this is something
you're gonna wanna do is make sure that you don't have any
headers on that page. Now, you can also remove footers from the
page as well to make it look super clean. This is what I personally do
with fiction books. However, with non-fiction books, I tend to
leave the footers in, and in this case, the footers are page numbers. So
obviously for a fictional book, we don't really care what page the
chapter starts on because we're reading it from start to finish. But
for a non-fiction book, I like to make sure that we keep those
footers in with the page numbers. So if someone is using the table of
contents at the beginning of the book, they can easily find the page
number at the start of each chapter. So besides formatting
the start of a chapter, you obviously still have to
format the whole rest of the book. So like I mentioned earlier, you wanna have headers and footers
throughout your entire book. Besides the chapter pages
where the new chapter starts, headers can differ a little bit. Typically it is author name on
one side and the book title on the other side, I've also seen
it specifically with non-fiction, where it's author name on one side and
then chapter title on the other side, because again, non-fiction books, you wanna be able to jump from content
to content easily and be able to easily identify what chapter you're
reading in because it is non-fiction. And each chapter will
have specific content. So you may wanna customize your page
headers that way by instead of doing the title of the book to do
the title of the chapter. Then you have your footers,
which are your page numbers. That's pretty straightforward
and it's pretty simple. And then the last type of formatting
you wanna do throughout the entire manuscript is to fix
any orphans in widows, orphans and widows are basically
when you have one word all by itself on a line or one word
all by itself on the next page. It's a bit of an older
style of formatting, but it's something you can still choose
to do and it's more stylistic and it looks better if you remove it when
there's just one word dangling all by itself on the line. So if you wanna learn specifically how
to fix that issue and how to do more monotonous, tedious formatting
updates to your manuscript, again, be sure to check out my book
formatting course. Besides that, when it comes to formatting
the entire manuscript, you just want it to look clean
and professional. Keep it simple, don't do anything fancy and most
importantly, make it readable. Sometimes I like to print out test pages
to make sure the font size is okay and that the line spacing is good. Uh,
but again, in my formatting course, I have a sort of template
that I personally always
work off of where I always use about the same font
and about the same spacing, and it's a sizing that I find
works really well. All right, let's talk about end matter now. So end matter is everything that
comes at the end of your book. So you've written the end, and sometimes books do just end
and there's just a blank page. Other times there's additional
content, like I mentioned earlier, sometimes that content can
be a note from the author. Other times that content can be
a reminder to review the book. If you're an indie author
or really any author, this is super important to do because
many times readers will read a book, love the book, and it will never even
occur to them to review the book. So I like to add in immediately
at the end of a book, a reminder to review and how to review it. Sometimes I'll also add a call to action, and that call to action can
be many different things.
A call to action could be, again, a reminder to review the book. The call to action could be to
read the next book in a series or the call to action can be to sign up
for your author newsletter so they know when the next book in the series releases. There's a bunch of different call to
actions that you can do and you can do all of them. But my
advice is, is to do one, maybe two. Um, it's very tempting to do
multiple calls to action, but when you have
multiple calls to action, oftentimes you overwhelm the reader
and then they don't do any of it. So if you wanna pick the one that
you feel is the most important, do that one and put as much effort
into it as you can to make it pretty and to make the call to action for the
reader as easy as possible. Lately, I've been having a lot of fun with QR
codes where I add in QR codes to my book, and this is specific to the print edition. So I'll put a QR code where if
someone's physically reading the book, they can just take their
phone, scan the QR code, and it'll bring them to the Amazon page
to buy the next book In the series. I find that's a super simple, easy way
to add a call to action to your book. Then for e-books, you
can add in hyperlinks. So they're reading the e-book on their
e-reader and they can literally click it and it opens up a new
link in their browser. Another thing you can add as end matter
in your book is you can add in a sneak peek into the next book. So say this is book one and
book two is already out. What you can do is you can add in the
first chapter of book two at the end of book one, so people can read
the first chapter of book two. They fall in love with
it, they get addicted, and then at the end of that
first chapter, sneak peek, you'll have that call to action
so they can go buy the next book. Another piece of end
matter is acknowledgements. This is just where authors can say thank
you to everyone who may have helped them write and release the book. I personally believe the shorter the
acknowledgements the better because sometimes readers don't read them,
but it is still nice to have. Just don't get too lengthy with it. I
try to keep it within a page or two. And the last piece of end matter
is typically the author bio. This is just your quick
one paragraph about you. Maybe there's a photo of you as well, and hopefully you're adding links
to your website, your social media, and your newsletter so people
know where to find you. And same with the front matter. This isn't
a cut and dry list of the end matter. There's other pieces you can
add in as end matter as well. But what I mentioned here today
is just a good starting place. So if you have any fun
ideas for end matter, be sure to share them and down below
in the comment section of this video. Otherwise, that is it for this video. That is everything that you might want
to include in your book when you're formatting your book, and some
quick formatting tips as well. If you enjoyed this video, be
sure to give it a thumbs up, comment down below and subscribe.
Otherwise, I will see you all next week.
