How To Format a Word Doc into a Paperback Book

welcome back in this video we're gonna go through turning your eBook file into a paperback file so I have a checklist in that downloadable worksheet for module 7 that you can follow along kind of talking about the essential things that you need to do if you already know some of the steps go ahead and fast forward to the steps you don't know is so I have the e-book file that we're working on from the previous video we're gonna start with this same file and turn that into a paperback book so we're gonna save it as to do the same name but now we're just gonna add paper back to it and that way I know that this is my paperback file and so I need changes I made to this one will only affect this one and not my original draft or my eBook file so the next step that I do is actually go in and I change the layout to the margins that are gonna fit the size of book that I chose now in the description for this module I'm gonna include a link where you can actually go to the Amazon KDP website and download pre-made templates for the different book sizes that you might want to use pretty much all of my books are 5 by 8 and show you that size so you can see this is a 5 by 8 book it's a little bit bigger than my hand this one is I think a hundred and 80 yeah about 180 pages see it you're pretty good with I get emails at least once a week about people saying you know they read my entire book in one sitting and I think having a size that's 5 by 8 or 6 by 9 is doable for that because we want people to not feel intimidated by a giant Gantt ik old book or if you know your book is 600 pages for whatever reason then maybe picking a bigger size might be good but for the majority of what we are creating and what I walk you through in the course 5 by 8 or 6 by 9 would be perfect and again you can go to the link in the description that's going to give you templates so you can see what margin sizes they chose and with that when I was first starting out you could even copy and paste your text into their templates and just go from there but everything I'm gonna show you turning your ebook into the paperback file is actually very simple and it actually ends up with a much better product so you have a few different options I just want to make sure you're aware you don't have to make the exact same size book that I'm going to show you how to make but you're gonna use all the same steps to make whatever size book you want so I already wrote down the margins I'm going to need so I'm just gonna show you how I would go about doing that so I go up in the left corner for the Layout tab then I'm gonna head over and I'm gonna hit size and I want my paper size to be the size of the book I know that that's gonna be five by eight and then I'm gonna hit okay right after making that change you can already see that it starts to look more like a paperback book like the individual pages and whatnot so now we're gonna go ahead and change the margins we're gonna cut it margins we're gonna hit custom margins and again all of these settings are gonna depend on the size book that you want and they're gonna be available in the templates at the link that I provided so you won't have to guess about any of this stuff it's gonna be really simple let me just go through 0.76 for a top left and bottom type that in real quick and then 0.64 right to the header and footer change that to 0.35 section start it continuous all right so I think we are all set cool so that should be that whole step you change the size of your book you change the margin of your book and now when you scroll through you should see that there's a little bit of offset so when a page starts on the right let me zoom in a little bit so as you flip the book each page the left versus right page needs to be a slightly different size and so changing the margins ahead of time makes it do that for us so that as we go through and format the rest of the text in the book it's gonna look the way it's supposed to look on every single page my next step is that I like to go and justify all the body text in my entire book this just makes the book look very professional let me show you what justified means do you see how if I can show you there how it's a nice clean cut on either side nice straight line that's what we want our body text to look like inside our book we don't want it to look like you know see this how to kind of drag it all along the right edge there we want to fix that so it looks nice and professional all right so I'm gonna go ahead and justify all of this text now one thing to note as you go through and do this is when you have things like subtitles or bulleted lists you don't want to highlight and justify those because that'll mess up the spacing that you designed for that so usually I just go through and I select it paragraph by paragraph or a section by section and again this can be a little time-consuming a little tedious but it makes the final product look so good that it's definitely worth doing [Music] after all of my body texts in my book is justified that's what I'm gonna go back through and see if I want to change any of the font for my chapters subtitles or body text I usually wait until this stage because now I can get a better idea of what the spacing looks like what the size looks like and now I just have a better feel for what my finished product might feel like when it's in book form and as you know we already did some of the formatting when it was in eBook version so all of the chapters and subtitles are already formatted ahead of time one additional step that I usually do when I'm turning something into an e-book is that I try to Center things or space things a little bit more generously so for example on the title page for my book I'm gonna turn on the show/hide and I might just kick it down a few notches so that's a little bit more centered on the page now with that the rule that I talked about where you shouldn't have more than four paragraph symbols or enters in a row when you're working on an e-book format it doesn't really apply in paperback be there's no computer trying to read what you're doing you're literally just submitting a PDF file that's going to get printed out the way that it looks right there so feel free to kind of use whatever formatting you want you can be a little bit more generous with spacing and things like that I'm gonna go ahead and scroll down I'm okay with those being that way I think I am gonna space my chapters down a little lower another trick that I showed before if you hit ctrl F that brings up in navigation pane so that you can you know find whatever things you're looking for but along with these you also get the option to choose headings in this corner and that way I know I want to spend some time jumping to each chapter and making them a little bit lower so now I can do it a little bit quicker than just scrolling I hit chapter one and I already did that so I can jump to chapter two pop in a few more spaces chapter three do the same thing and it just saves me a few seconds just by using this method instead of scrolling and yep those look good to me I'll leave those the way they are so after I do that the next step I do is completely optional but I find that it just adds a nice little flair or design to the book is I go to the first letter of every chapter and I use the drop cap function and so this makes your letters or the front page of your chapters stand out let me show you what that looks like right there you can see a very big M to kind of start off the chapter and it just makes it look nice and professional makes it look like a well formatted book and to do this is really easy you just highlight the letter that you want to drop cap and then there's a long way to go find it but I usually just go ahead and search drop cap and you see the options right here and a drop cap and I usually always choose drops not in margin because I want the text to kind of wrap around it so I just click drop and there it is now it's big and it's gonna show up really nicely when we submit the PDF to Amazon now again with all those things you can go ahead pull up the option you can right click it and you're going to have the option to add it to the quick access toolbar and that means it's going to be up in that corner so again if you have 15 20 30 chapters you don't want to go ahead and be searching for this every single time you do want to make it a little bit shorter and so that's what I usually do I just throw it up in that upper left-hand corner and that way it's really simple to click the button whenever I need it I'm gonna go ahead and jump to the other five chapters and add my jhatka we're gonna need a net navigation function to move to the top pretty quickly just a couple more chapters my friend I usually only do my normal body text or the content of my book I usually don't drop cap the rest of the front matter or the back matter again this is his personal preference so feel free to do whatever works well for you or for how you want your book to feel the next step that I do is I go through and I make sure all the spacing in my book feels and looks the way I want it to so again this can be personal preference but let me show you what I mean so you know how when we went through the e-book and I made sure that the paragraphs were at least one or two spaces apart I'm just going to go ahead and do that again but now that it's in paperback format I might add or subtract certain spaces so as I scroll through for example on this first chapter page I can see that this first paragraph seems kind of big and so if I could break it up in a way that didn't mess up the idea that it was communicating that's something I would do so just throwing in two enters or two paragraph marks you see just kind of makes it a little bit more readable so it's not just one giant block of text as soon as someone comes to the first page of my book I would kind of do things like that as I scroll through if there's anything that stands out to me if I want something to stand apart like a certain sentence or a quote I just go through and I make sure things feel and look the way I want them to usually this includes breaking up big paragraphs making the subsections stained apart in a big way or just highlighting and doing random font fixes then I go through let me get too much into things evil laughter sometimes that's my face any other big things going out to me for like this page there's a lot of small spacing and that might have been a purpose for evaporation so maybe for this paperback book does that make sense and it's a complete block and I'll bring them together and make it more precice another paradox this better tip I'm used to reading when everything a paperback you have a lot of freedom and creativity here just fine how are you want your speaking to be are you like pretty great and pain like the way I like it this brings me to the next step and again this one is optional personal preference but we're gonna examine the blank pages in this book and determine whether or not we want them to be there and then whether or not we want to add any additional blank pages to make our book look the way we wanted to for example I prefer all my chapters to begin on the right-hand page let me show you what I mean so you see how when someone opens the book they're gonna be looking at the right-hand page and that's where I want my new chapter to start on this example I had text so it made that chapters naturally start on the next page but let's say the text ended on the page before what I would do is add in an additional blank page here that my chapter started on the same page every single time so the reader gets used to seeing the new chapter on the same side of the book when you're reading this is something really easy to accomplish we're gonna scroll all the way back up I usually like to leave it in the two page view when you open the book right away your title page is going to be the first thing they see and that's gonna be on the right-hand side of your book so if you want your chapters to start on that same side then you want to make sure that every chapter page is on that same side within the word document so for example title the book is on the right and my copyright is on the left right behind the title page that's all fine and now my table of content would be on the right side because it's on the same side as the title page but my chapter title would actually be on the back of a table of contents and so it would start on the left side of the book and that's not what I want so what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna add in an additional page break I'm just gonna throw it in you can throw it in on either page that you want but now you see that my chapter starts on the right side of the page the same side that the title of my book start on and so that's what I'm gonna go through and I'm gonna make sure that every chapter starts on the same side of the page you can see already having naturally P then I stopped on the left side and on the top is on the right the doctor topic really I need a good investment and I'm gonna add in a clean break I'm not gonna give me the exact and I want if you're I can break up a very pop on the possible friend John Tucker fuller I need to add in a blank page and then chapter 5 and get one like I'm and now I'm gonna come to the back matter this is again for some preference they look like there's already a blank page that works out and I'm like my back my knees either start with same size so I'm sorry they're starting on D writes on poop spent with you I used to reading if they're seeing something here when they turn to that page that I just like to make sure there's consistency when my reader is working their way through my book just another added level of professionalism and makes your books stand apart when your reader is getting it off Amazon pulling it off the shelf just makes for a really good reading experience one of the last steps that we do as part of the paperback formatting is we're gonna insert page numbers and I'm gonna show you how we do this there's a couple ways one of the simplest ways if we're gonna go to insert and we are going to choose page numbers I usually do bottom of the page that's just how I like my books to feel and I usually actually do it in the center of the page one thing I do always do is I make sure that you see how there's options up on the top ribbon is I choose a different first page and that's because I actually want my title page to not have a number on it so if you click that option you'll see that that first title page number goes away and now the rest of my text has exactly the numbers that I want now there are additional ways that you can do it you can use section breaks to make sure that everything before your table of contents uses one set of numbers such as like Roman numerals and then the rest of your text uses normal numbers like that and that it can start at one this is more of an advanced feature if you want me to show you how to do that I'll make a separate video just so you have that option let me go ahead and close the header and footer and now you can see that our entire book has all the numbers that it needs the step after that is we want those numbers to show up in our table of contents in order to do that I'm just gonna jump over to the references tab make sure my cursor is in the table of contents itself and we're actually going to insert an entirely new table you can do whatever kind you want you can use the automatic ones if you want to use those features I usually always use a custom one because I don't like to have the tab leader so I'm gonna leave these off I do want to show my page numbers I do want them aligned to the right and that's pretty much all I need to do I can go ahead and use the simple format again that's what I used for the eBook version this is your preference hit OK and there we go you can see that the page numbers are in our table and they're aligned to the right now I'm gonna do a little formatting on this and let's get me turn off the shirt side and just feel that effect I don't know that's like a very good care of content we can see that some of my chapter titles are really long and they kind of run all the way into you what a page there is nothing we can change right Evie I'm gonna hit the share button again and I'm not gonna girl you put my cursor back when I hold down shift and hit enter and you see that's gonna throw half of the rank off the chocolate title right into a second right so just look for that premium link you are skinny to the killer content I'm gonna give a same thing on this additional reading and there you go you can see that the number where that top there's a line for that second line of cops I dislike very cream and now there's no like sunic after this I usually like to go and scroll through my book one more time just to see if I catch any weird formatting issues or text issues and as you can see it's a pretty clean product let me zoom out all the way so you can see a bunch of pages at once it looks really good I'm gonna go ahead and save this as a PDF that's the file type that we're gonna upload to Amazon when it's time to publish a fire sale as my folder we're gonna pass a main fan which is psi up and hits me let them give me a printable version on anything that we did and now in the PDF you can kind of see the offset a little bit more dramatically some of the text pages are a little bit more to the right or a little bit more two left and that's again because of whether or not it's printed on the right or left side of the page and one thing to know is the bigger your book the bigger the margins gonna be in the side of the book because there's more pages that need to be held on to that spine so again I'm gonna link in the description to the templates that Amazon provides and I believe they also have a calculator that will tell you if your book is past a certain point in pages it's gonna need a different sizing of margins and so on so I'll make sure all that's linked in the description do you don't have to worry about that but as we scroll through you can see it it already looks like a really good paperback book I'd be excited to get this and read through it there you have it these are pretty much the basic steps you need in order to turn your word document into an e-book file in your eBook file into a print-ready PDF it's really easy to do some as you follow the steps that I've included there's a checklist again in the downloadable worksheet for module 7 so go ahead and follow that along and you'll have a finished product like this you can see we did it in about half an hour a little less than that when you're doing it your first time and of course you're gonna have a bigger book than just 40 pages it's gonna take you little time so make sure you just block off maybe an hour to to go through it and just learn the process learn how you want things to look and it's gonna save you a lot of money and time in the long run I know formatters can charge as much as a dollar to a page if you have a normal size book which is about 150 to 200 pages that could cost you anywhere from three to four hundred dollars just to do what we did in about half an hour and again it might take you a little bit longer the first time or two that you do it but over time you're gonna learn how you want things to be and it's gonna become a much quicker process alright the thing you get for watching and I hope this was helpful I'll see you in the next lesson

Channel: David Ramos

Views: 28,518

Keywords: self-publishing, microsoft word, how to format your book, kindle direct publishing, kdp paperback formatting, kdp paperback formatting guide, kdp print, paperback formatting, book design, how to format a book, format a book for publication, format a book for createspace, format a book for print, kdp print formatting, print on demand, amazon self publishing, format book for amazon, how to format book for kdp print, book formatting tips, kindle direct publishing tutorial

Id: Em9lLPb-M9s

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 31 2020