How to get a finished manuscript through to a printed book and an ebook, one task at a time. Written to be followed, whether or not you use Nueel.
Vellum is Mac-only and $249.99. Atticus is $147 and runs in any browser. For most authors the comparison is settled before it starts — by the computer on the desk. Here is what is left to decide once it is.
Compile does more typesetting than its reputation suggests, and more on a Mac than on Windows. What it leaves you holding is the reconciliation: KDP's inside margin moves with your page count, and nothing in Scrivener notices.
Backspace does nothing because there is nothing there to delete. The page is being produced by a mark Word hides by default, and which of the four marks it is decides how you get rid of it.
Three marks of different lengths doing three unrelated jobs, and one of them is not a dash at all. Which to use where, whether to put spaces around them, and the manuscript habit that produces none of them.
Where the comma goes, why a new speaker gets a new paragraph, what happens when one character talks for three paragraphs, and the difference between a dash and an ellipsis when someone stops speaking.
A line beginning with a quotation mark starts a fraction late, and a column of them looks bitten. What optical margin alignment does about it, where it matters most in a novel, and where it is not worth chasing.
Most drafts stall because the author edits and formats too early. Finish by giving the draft one job — to exist — with a daily word count, no revision pass, and formatting held until the end.
Revision is three different jobs that most writers try to do at once, in the wrong order: fixing the story, fixing the scenes, fixing the sentences. Doing them in order is what stops you polishing prose you are about to delete.
The fi ligature exists because two letters collided in metal type. Which ligatures a book should use, why the decorative ones age a page, and the compound words where an automatic ligature is simply wrong.
Leading is the one typographic setting whose correct value depends on another setting. Where the 120 to 145 percent range comes from, and why the same number is too tight on a wide page and too loose on a narrow one.
The Look Inside preview starts at page one of your file and stops at a fixed percentage. Every page of front matter before chapter one is spent from a budget you cannot top up — and for an ebook that budget is 10%.
Indent the first line or put a blank line between paragraphs — but not both. Why almost every printed novel indents, why the first paragraph of a chapter does not, and how wide the indent should be.
A poem's line breaks are the poem. What to do when a line is too long for the page, why a centred collection is centred on its longest line rather than line by line, and the page-count arithmetic a stapled chapbook cannot escape.
Your paperback has a price floor you did not choose: the printing cost divided by your royalty rate. Typography decides the page count, the page count decides the floor, and the floor decides whether you can compete on price at all.
A series is one product sold several times, and most of the work that makes it feel like one happens in the files: consistent typography across volumes, a back matter that leads somewhere, and a series page that puts the books in order.
A memoir is not your life story. It is one argument about a piece of it, told by a narrator who happens to share your name — and the hardest problems are deciding what the book is about, and what to do about the people in it.
Every major ebook store accepts embedded fonts, and not one of them recommends them. What Kindle, Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes & Noble and Lulu actually say about fonts, body text size and line spacing, and what it means for the file you upload.
The whole process from nothing to a published book, in six phases: deciding what you are writing, the first draft, revision, making the files, publishing, and what happens after. Written to be followed, one step at a time.
The page ceiling is not one number. It is a cell in a table of trim size, ink, paper and binding, and every printer publishes a different table. Here are KDP's, IngramSpark's, Lulu's, B&N Press's and PublishDrive's, read from their own pages, with the cells that catch people.
An advance reader copy is the file you send reviewers and beta readers before the book is out. What it should contain, what it must not, how to mark it, and how to make it from the same manuscript as the final book.
Ebook stores police image size — some in pixels, some in megabytes, and Kindle turns excess file size directly into lower royalties. The limits the stores publish, what the delivery fee really costs, and the sizes to aim for.
Three categories and seven keyword fields are the two levers you set by hand; the title, the description and the book's own sales history do the rest. How the shelves work, what Amazon actually documents, and how to spend the slots.
Acknowledgements, about the author, the other books, a teaser chapter. What goes after the story ends, the order it goes in, and the two pages whose job is selling the next book.
Amazon dominates ebook retail in the US, but a substantial market exists beyond Kindle — across Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, libraries and regional stores. How direct publishing compares to an aggregator, and why one standards-compliant EPUB usually serves them all.
The description is the book's only salesperson on the product page, and it has about three sentences to earn the click. How the structure works, what the length limits are, and where it differs from the back cover.
Word counts by genre, where the expectations came from, and what a manuscript twenty thousand words over or under actually costs you.
Most novels run chapters of two to five thousand words, and nearly every rule about them is really a rule about where the reader puts the book down. What the conventions are, by genre, and what each choice costs.
The least-read page in the book carries the notices that make it real: who owns it, which edition it is, and who printed it. What belongs there, in order, and what the ebook changes.
An accessible ebook is one a screen reader, a magnifier and a text-rewriting tool can all use, and the difference is mostly structure. What the requirements are, what they cost, and what the law now asks.
Three borrowed-text elements that look alike and behave differently. Which one your quotation is, how each is set, and what each does in an ebook.
Three file extensions do most of the work in publishing, and one of them is finished as a format to produce. What each format is for, what Amazon takes now, and why a fixed-layout book is a different product.
Fiction uses almost none, literary nonfiction hides them at the back, and academic books run them up the page. How notes are marked, numbered and placed, and what survives the trip into an ebook.
A hardcover is not a paperback in better clothes: a different body, its own cover geometry, a narrower page window on KDP and a market that buys the object. What KDP offers — case laminate only — where dust jackets still exist, and when the edition pays for itself.
The line at the top of the page and the number at the bottom follow conventions about sides, chapters and front matter that nobody states. What goes in a running head, where the folio sits, and the pages that carry neither.
Two print-on-demand services, two different businesses. Amazon's printer pays you more on Amazon; the world's largest book-distribution network puts you in shops and libraries. Most books eventually want both — printed correctly, and for the right reasons.
Large print is a real market — older readers, low vision, libraries — and it is not the same book with a bigger font. What the format requires, what it costs in pages, and how it is published.
Margins are not padding: they set the measure, and the measure decides how the page reads. Where the numbers come from, and why one margin — the inside one — is never like the others.
One typeface for the text and one for the display, chosen so they agree without matching. How to build a pair, which combinations are proven, and what embedding a font legally requires.
A formatter reads styles, not appearance. Here is how to get a Word file ready so that everything you meant survives the trip into a book — and the things you never decided stop costing you time.
From an Amazon account to a live book: the steps, the decisions that are hard to reverse, and the order to make them in. The paperback, the ebook and the hardcover are three products, and this is how they go up.
A print contents page lists what a reader might look up. An ebook contents page is how the reader moves at all. They are different documents with different rules, built from the same chapters.
The file you preview and the file you upload are not always the same file, and reading systems are more different than they look. A testing pass that catches what the upload would have caught instead.
The manuscript page count and the book page count are different numbers, and the second one decides your spine width, your printing cost and your cover. How to estimate it before the book is typeset.
An image that looks sharp on screen is often too coarse to print, and the same picture behaves completely differently in a PDF and an EPUB. Here is how to work out whether yours is good enough, and where it will actually appear.
The two formats are not the same book in different wrappers. One has pages and you control them; the other has none and the reader controls almost everything. Deciding which to publish changes what you have to do to the manuscript.
Half title, title page, copyright, dedication, contents. The pages before chapter one have a conventional order, a page-numbering scheme of their own, and a rule about which side they open on.
A book may need no ISBN at all, or several, depending on its editions, formats and distribution. What an ISBN actually identifies, when a free one limits you, and how to work out how many you need.
KDP publishes its requirements across several help pages and enforces them at upload. Here they are in one place, with the numbers that change by page count, and the ones that get a file rejected.
What a printer means by print-ready, item by item: embedded fonts, single pages, bleed on the right edges, image resolution, and the colour and PDF standard your printer expects. Check these before you upload, not after the proof.
The gap between two scenes is a piece of punctuation, and a blank line alone cannot carry it. Here is why an unmarked break disappears at the foot of a page, and which ornament to use instead.
The conversion is not the hard part. What decides whether the ebook works is whether your Word file says what its parts are, and most manuscripts say it with formatting instead of with styles.
A print cover is one flat sheet: back, spine and front together, with bleed around the lot. These numbers are for a perfect-bound paperback — hardcovers carry their own geometry. How to size the file, what stays clear of the edges, and why the cover comes last.
Amazon, Apple and Kobo all run the same validator before they accept a file. Here is what epubcheck is actually complaining about, in the order the errors appear, and what each one means for the book a reader ends up holding.
The page dimensions change how your manuscript paginates, which changes the book's thickness, its printing cost and whether it looks like the books beside it. How to pick one — by genre, by page count, and by what it costs to print.