Picture this: you’ve finished writing your book. You’ve had it professionally edited. Maybe you’ve hired top quality artwork to accompany the text of your masterpiece. You’ve got a plan for marketing. You’re ready to release this work of art into the world.
You’re ready to hit PUBLISH.
But are you? (You can skip this part if you don’t want to feel stress. Seriously.) You download a template for making a print book from Amazon. You copy and paste your book into it. Randomly, the pages start changing size halfway through the manuscript. What?! A quick google search suggests it has something to do with the text styles you used. That’s weird, you were just using the Word defaults. Uhhh, okay. So you strip the styles (losing all your italics in the process, but that’s okay, your editor disapproved of them anyway) and you manage to tame the page sizes. Fine. Good. Now since you did all that work, you decide you’d like to have page numbers. You remember something about not having a page number on the first page of a chapter but the idea of manually deleting the page number on every single first page seems like such a headache so you decide to just be artistic and leave them on. That’s okay, right? It’s your book, after all.
You finally get things sort of the way you were hoping they’d be, and then you upload the manuscript to Amazon.com. 54 errors. 54 ERRORS? Something about the gutter margins not being wide enough? And when you manage to upload your book into the Kindle conversion process, the end result is just ugly. Well, your mom says its beautiful, and that’s good enough, right?
Right?
No. No way. You wrote an amazing story. You put your heart and soul into it. You paid for professional editing services, pored through beta reader feedback, wrote and rewrote. If you want the rest of the world to see how much work you put into it, you deserve to have a book that looks like it was written by the professional you are.
Relax. Instead of trying to figure out all this on your own, treat yourself. Put yourself in the care of someone who’s already figured all this out. I’ve studied hundreds of real published books to find out what looks good and how to craft your book in such a way that it blends beautifully with your genre. I can answer any questions you have about the technical side of the self-publishing process. I can create files to the specifications of whichever publishing company you want to release your book through, such as Amazon.com, Ingram Spark, or Lulu.
Here are just a few of the things I will worry about so you don’t have to:
(if you don’t know what something means, you don’t even need to learn – I’ll take care of it! 🙂 )
- page numbers
- working Table of Contents
- correctly sized margins
- the “right” paper size for your book
- indents
- line spacing
- readable fonts
- correct amount of bleed for your illustrations
- justifications
- widows and orphans
- high enough resolution/DPI for illustrations
- making sure everything matches
- headers
- attractive chapter pages
- and so. much. more.
Are you looking for professional formatting for an illustrated children’s book? This is my specialty! I’ve been a reader since I was very small, and I have four children I still enjoy reading to. Children’s books have a special place in my heart. Of course they also have special challenges all their own. Things like making sure the illustrations reach all the way to the edge of the page, ensuring that the text can be read over or alongside the images, or ensuring that the file size isn’t too large for a Kindle book. I can create children’s books in both print and digital, for any platform.
So what are you waiting for? Visit me on Fiverr and send me a message to tell me all about your book. I’m here to answer any questions you might have and I can’t wait to hear from you.