Self-publishing 101: Formatting tips

The difference between traditional publishing and self-publishing is a bit like being employed vs being self-employed. If you work for yourself, you wear many hats: you have to deal with tax, business admin, marketing, sales etc.

If you self-publish, you also need to take care of the complete book publishing process, from drafting and beta reading through to editing, formatting, marketing, and sales.

With this in mind, today I’m going to talk briefly about …

Book formatting for self-publishers

A few years ago, many people would hire a book formatter (someone who would do the traditional publishing equivalent of typesetting).

Fiction is far easier to format than non-fiction because it’s usually just text. No footnotes, images, diagrams, tables, or illustrations.

But that doesn’t make it easier to edit, as editors need to know how flexible to be, and they need a grounding in fiction craft knowledge – POV, narrative distance, etc.

Because fiction is relatively easy to format, however, many authors now use applications to help them instead of hiring someone.

If you have access to an Apple computer, Vellum is great!

Otherwise, or if you’re on a budget, you can use the free Reedsy Book Editor to format your novel. It sorts out the imprint page with all the copyright details too. I’ve been playing around with it recently, so I’ll look at it in more depth here soon. It’s really easy to use!

As for cover design, if you are on a tight budget, you can use Canva.

But I do recommend setting aside money for a decent cover design (here’s one service, Astereilly Designs, which a friend, the author Rachel Rowlands, used) because a decent cover is up there with copyediting as an essential service.

Why? Because the cover and blurb are usually the first things readers see, so it’s important they create a great first impression.

How do you format your books for self-publishing? If you have any tips or comments, hit reply!

SFeraKon workshop

On Sunday, I ran a fiction editing workshop at SFeraKon – a science fiction convention in Zagreb, Croatia – and it was epic! Around thirty people attended and it was fun listening to all the feedback on the different writing extracts. If you want a copy of the slides for this workshop, just send me an email. It covered publishing options in the US and UK, then POV and head hopping, fiction dialogue, and editing for worldbuilding and setting.

One of the highlights for me was the panel Queering Speculative Fiction. The prolific, best-selling fantasy author Samantha Shannon was the guest of honour – here’s a picture (above) of her writing a list of sapphic must-read novels on the whiteboard! And you can find the list below.

Another highlight was learning about Shtriga, a publishing house in Rijeka, Croatia, that publish in English and Croatian – they have a new anthology with short stories based on Slavic mythology, which I couldn’t resist buying.

And that’s it for this week! I’m still on the road in Croatia and Germany, but I will be back in my office next week.

Take care,

Andy from The Narrative Craft