You’ll notice that professionally published books have a few blank pages before the title page as well. I always set 4 blank pages in front of the title page. I don’t keep author notes that are basically apologies for not updating often enough. I keep author notes that talk about what the story means to the author. On a third page, you can format the author summary and any author notes you want to include. In most of my books, I put in a word count and which font I used, just so I can keep track of about how many pages a word count will be. I put in basic information in a list format. This is where you have the copyright information and publisher information. Now we’re going to format the “about this book” page. (If you’re going to have it printed at a shop, don’t use easily identifiable text ornaments unless you want to explain to the print shop employee why you aren’t violating copyright laws.)ĭepending on your fandom, you may be able to find a fun text ornament that identifies your fandom, like the Avenger’s symbol, a Star Trek symbol, Star Wars, whatever fandom you’re in, I’m sure there’s a graphic you can use. You would have to ask them about printing on custom sized paper and see what they charge. Some bookbinders send print jobs to Staples or other office supply shops. If you don’t have a printer or can’t connect it, then … um, problem. My printer has a paper size option in the menu, in which I could select “A5″ and then just push the paper holder in the tray for the smaller paper. This is a good time to find out how to print on A5 paper. Anyway, play around with your formatting until you like how it looks. Not as lovely, I’ll grant you, but it fits better on the spine of a book. I titled my story “The Next Job” because I lack the fanfiction ability to select beautiful lines of poetry for story titles. I googled the name of the fandom to get a text block that says “The Old Guard.” A recognizable symbol for that movie is the main character’s labrys, so I googled “labrys line drawing” and snipped it. It’s going to have the title, the author and maybe a text ornament. You’re going to format your title page basically the same way. Go pull a professionally published book off your shelf and look at the title page. It’s 5.83 wide by 8.27 high:Ĭlick ‘OK’ and let’s get started putting text on the page. If the dropdown menu doesn’t include A5, then click on “More Paper Sizes” at the bottom of the menu and fill in the A5 size manually. Click “Layout” then “Size.” You need to tell Word that you’re printing on A5 size paper. The intro pages file does not have page numbers the text file has page numbers.Ģ. This way I don’t have to figure out how to suppress page numbers on part of a file. I have two separate files per book - the intro pages are one file the text is a second file. In the Simplified Bookbinding method, we print on A5 pages, which makes the pagination a whole lot easier than printing signature booklets. So look at this tutorial as your starter pack, and once you get comfortable, branch out and get as fancy and specialized as you want. I get overwhelmed if I have to do something specialized every time or have too many choices. I know one method and I stick to that, and I use basically the same formatting process on every story. I use Microsoft Word for formatting and printing. There are two main formatting sections: (1) the intro pages like the title page and the “about this book” page:Īnd (2) the text of the book, which may include specialized chapter title font and text separators: In this post, I’ll give some pointers to get your story from a word processor, or an AO3 story, to a printed page. In the first post in this series, How to Make a Cheap First Book, I set out the four steps of bookbinding:ġ.
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