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Custom Book Printing: 10 Tips To Make Your Self-Published Book Look Professional
Published Time:2016-03-22 Original Source:Custom Book Printing: 10 Tips To Make Your Self-Published Book Look Professional
10 Tips To Make Your Self-Published Book Look Professional
YellowPrinting offers 10 tips to make your self-published book look at home alongside trade-published books, so your reader can focus on your words.
1. Edit, edit, edit – Reading a book littered with mistakes detracts from the story and can also make it difficult to understand. Make sure editing is your number one priority before publishing. If you struggle to edit your own work (and don’t worry, we all do!) enlist the services of a professional editor to help you.
2. Make title pages – Quite often, this is the main difference between your manuscript and your book. When you open any book, you will normally see several pages before the story begins; a half-title page, a title page, a copyright page – perhaps even a quote page and/or acknowledgements. Even if your readers skip them, they’ll expect them to be there.
3. Copy other books – Find a book that’s similar to yours and compare how they look. It’s no coincidence that books of a similar genre or audience look the same as each other. Make sure yours fits in before you work on making it stand out.
4. Choose the right font – 11pt serif fonts are generally accepted as easier to read on the page (Baskerville, Century Schoolbook etc), and sans-serif for text on screen (Arial, Verdana etc). Make sure you justify your text so it meets both margins, and keep it single-spaced, too!
5. Manage your chapters – Use page break’ rather than pressing ‘return’ multiple times. This will help ensure that each of your chapters starts in a similar position on the page.
6. Learn some typesetting tricks – on website YellowPrinting.com.
7. Keep it consistent – However you typeset your book, make sure you keep it the same throughout. If you’re using Microsoft Word, you can use paragraph styles to help you. YellowPrinting.com
8. Use large images – When using images in your text or on your cover, make sure they are a large picture file with a high pixel count – pixelated images don’t look professional.
9. Feature professional endorsements – Definitely get endorsements for your book cover and title pages before it is published. Do NOT feature endorsements from your family, friends or institutions that bear no link to the book’s subject.
10. Order a proof copy – preferably multiple copies that you can give to others to check through. If it’s a print book, order a copy and check everything looks.