What do you want to publish?

There are many format options... paperback, hardcover, eBook, audiobook, bespoke and more.

Knowing what you want to publish is important as it plays an important factor in later steps. Of course, you can always come back and re-publish your book (using a different ISBN) using a different format. For your initial book launch though, you need to know what format(s) you're going to want.

This step is important is because certain formats have their own idiosyncrasies and standards.

If your goal is to only publish eBooks,

you can skip to Publishing eBooks!

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Publishing Physical Books

There are various factors to consider when publishing a physical book.

Trim Size

Physical books require a front AND back cover, which requires knowing what the physical size of the book is.

Anyone that's ever walked into a bookstore or library knows that books come in all shapes and sizes. Custom-shaped books require finding a specialty printer that can do die-cut books, so I'm going to focus on traditional square or rectangular-shaped books.

There are many "standard" trim sizes and they do vary by genre. There's also many conflicting reports on what sizes for which genres, but this is more or less a popular summation of the various different sources I've used and been taught.

Fiction

• 4.25" x 6.87"

• 5" x 8"

• 5.25" x 8"

• 5.5" x 8.5"

• 6" x 9"

Children's

• 7.5" x 7.5"

• 7" x 10"

• 10" x 8"

Textbooks

• 6" x 9"

• 7" x 10"

• 8.5" x 11"

Non-Fiction

• 5.5" x 8.5"

• 6" x 9"

• 7" x 10"

Memoir

• 5.25" x 8"

• 5.5" x 8.5"

Reedsy has an excellent resource on standard book sizing, complete with visual comparisons.

Check it out!

Paper Colour & Weight

Paper size plays a big impact because it affects how many words fit onto a page, which subsequently affects how many pages your book is, but another factor that needs to be considered is paper type.

Most novels are very text heavy and therefore are printed in black and white. This allows for lighter paper stock to be used, which in-turn keeps printing costs down... thus affecting the book's affordability and your royalties.

The rule of thumb I was taught, was that fiction should be printed on crème 50lb/74gsm paper and that white 50lb/74gsm paper should be used if your fiction book has some colour or pictures in it, or the book is non-fiction.

Then if you're creating photography books, coffee-table books, children's books or any books with a lot of pictures you may want to use 70lb/104gsm white paper stock to reduce tearing and damage.

This makes a difference as the thickness of the paper also affects the thickness of the book, which then affects the spine size when designing your cover.

Cover Design

Get a professional

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Publishing eBooks

Compared to printed books, electronic books (eBooks) really are the most bare bones type of manuscript, you don't need to worry about trim size, paper types, number of pages or any of that sort of mumbo-jumbo. The reader gets to configure their own font type and size for their reading comfort.

Formatting

All you need to do is make sure is that the manuscript file you upload is in 12pt font and that any chapter titles are configured as HEADING 1!

Uploads are usually done in either DOC/DOCX, ODT, RTF  or pre-formatted ePUB files and they MUST be less than 100MB in size.

ePub files pretty much stay as you send them, especially if they in ePUB3 format! However, if you use an ePUB2 format with Draft2Digital, it will allow you to make use of their automated front and end matter. Which is will update content such as the author biography, publisher biography, copyright information, and useful marketing tools such as book Teasers and Also By pages. By opting into automated end-matter, you only have to enter information once, and it can be included in your books automatically, and kept up-to-date any time you make a change.

Cover Design

For cover design, you don't need to worry about the back cover or a spine. Just a front cover graphic that meets the recommended criteria. Some distributors may require different dimensions, but they pretty much all conform to the 1.6:1 ratio, so if you use the guidelines below it should work for pretty much every distributor.

• 2,560 pixels high x 1,600 pixels wide

• 300dpi, which is good enough to print, not the basic 72dpi that most computer graphics are.

• High-Quality JPG format (although TIFF can also work) with minimal compression.

• Keep image to 5MB or less. Distributors will automatically compress your cover to their requirements.

• Stick to the standard RGB colour profile, other profiles may be interpreted differently by different devices.

Cover design considerations.

Some e-readers are grey scale black and white. If your cover is light-coloured or even white, consider adding a narrow border around the cover to differentiate it from a normal page background.

Finally, the biggest thing when considering your font and images choices is see how it looks as a thumbnail. This is important as that is the default view of your book that readers will see when they are searching online books.