Self Publishing, Detailed Formats

Posted by Jerry Lopper Dec 5, 2007

In the last entry I selected content material and organized it. Now for some details that are very important to visual appeal.

Lulu and Wordclay both recommend using serif fonts. Although I've heard the terms serif and sans serif, the relationship between these font families never occurred to me. A serif is the little curly foot at the bottom of letters. You've seen this in printed material using Times Roman and similar fonts in the serif family. Sans serif simply means no foot, sans meaning without. Sans serif fonts are less formal.

I picked 11 point Garamond, 1.5 line spacing, with the margins and gutter of Lulu's template, which automatically makes my book compatible with the standards of book distributors. This is important in order to sell books through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other distributors.

The de facto standard for books is to place the title page as well as the first page of chapters on odd pages (right hand side). Normally, page numbering starts with chapter one. But the word processor is keeping track of all pages, so chapter one may actually be page 10. Even though you want chapter one to be numbered page one, another standard is to omit page numbers on the first page of a chapter.

The way you accomplish these page numbering standards is to make each chapter an independent section, starting each on an odd page, and selecting chapter one as the start of page numbering. You accomplish this, as well as omitting a page number on the first page of a section, with the format option for each section. Sounds complicated, but with some trial and error, I got the numbering and formats I wanted.

With the book's material now organized and formatted, it's time to turn to the cover.