What does a Createspace book look like? Part 2

I have an extremely popular blog that gets a lot of hits every day about what a Createspace book looks like. Even nearly a year and a half on I get emails from people about it, but its starting to look a bit dated now, so I thought I'd give an update, as my books really don't look like that anymore.

The book featured on my original blog here was done at a cost of $120 (for the rights to use the photo, but everything was my own work. Interestingly enough, the books you will see in the pictures below, whole taking longer to produce, actually cost a little less. The benefits of experience ....

Here's my stack of paperbacks which I bought for some Goodreads giveaways. The covers for both books were done by Su Halfwerk at Novel Prevue and cost $60 each for the ebook covers and the paperback covers together. I have worked with Su several times now and would thoroughly recommend her. She is very reasonably priced, fast, and loves the challenge of wading through my endless requests to get the cover I want. Each cover she does for me is better than the last and I look forward to working with her again in the future.

You can see from my careful thumb placement the width of the spine, 1.8cm to be precise. Head of Words is 96,000 words and this paperback edition came to 308 pages. With these dimensions I am about to sell it for $7.99 and make roughly a dollar profit. 

This is the front. I used Createspace's standard 6 x 9 inch format. I've experimented with different sizes but the price is calculated on page length regardless of height so obviously the less pages there are the cheaper you can price it and/or the more profit you can make. My book The Tube Riders, for example, is 600 pages long, and priced at $17.99. I make about 20 cents profit so its hardly worth thinking about.

This is inside the front cover. For these two books I upgraded on the formatting and hired Suzie O'Connell from Welman Creek Books, who was recommended by a friend. For $50 she added some interesting detail to the chapter headings and the front inside cover, taking the original design of the outer cover and using the same style. I was very pleased and now it looks really professional. Createspace's in-house charges are very expensive but with a little shopping around you get get a really good deal. I don't sell many paperbacks but they're now in place hopefully forever.

Some of the internal detail that Suzie did for me, including interesting chapter headings and dropped capitals at the start of the first line.

Here's a little of the inside of The Man Who Built the World, with some little graphics and the header at the top. For these books the font is Garamond size 11. In my previous post I was using Times New Roman, which I have since discovered is designed for newspaper columns. Apparently two of the most popular fonts to use for books are Garamond and Baskerville. I actually found that with a long book, Garamond came in at quite a bit shorter than Times New Roman. The Tube Riders shrank from 624 pages to 584, meaning, of course, that I could lower the price a little.

Anyway, I hope these pictures are helpful. As always, any comments or questions are welcome. If you want to make sure you get my future blogs then please sign up for the mailing list on the top right.

Chris Ward
20th September 2013

Eight basic formatting tips

I’m not going to go into hardcore details about page numbering and headers/footers, etc, because basically I’m no good at that kind of technical stuff. Recently I’ve seen a few manuscripts and looked at some books on Amazon and a few things have jumped out. These are also things I found out the hard way. As always, this blog is written from personal experience so that you won’t have to suffer the same pitfalls that I did.

1. Justify your text. It’s not a school report. Make it look like a book.

2. Never underline titles or chapter headings. It’s just not necessary, and again, there’s that school report thing. Be careful about using bold either - although I use it very occasionally for things like the Table of Contents header. Don’t use it in-text unless it’s for something specific like a letter that the character is reading.

3. Only use one space between sentences. This is mostly for paperbacks because when you upload to Amazon it defaults to one space anyway, but in paperbacks those spaces will suddenly appear huge when the text justifies. Trust me, I know.

4. Don’t use tab or spacebar to make indents. They might look fine in Word but some programs will screw around with them when you upload. Again, I’m speaking from personal experience. Set an indent of 1.5 or 2 spaces, no more. Don't go any bigger because while it’ll look fine in Word, if you view it on something small like an iPhone your indents will be halfway across the page.

5. Make sure there are no extra spaces at the end of the last sentence in a paragraph. Turn on your Word “show symbols” button to check. One space might be enough to carry over to the next line and then you’ve got what looks like a scene break in the middle of your narrative. Remember, it might look okay in Word but there are dozens of different e-readers out there in many different sizes and your book will look different on all of them.

6. Use a hash symbol / star / “and” symbol to indicate scene breaks. You don’t have to do this - this is my personal choice, but it’s cover in case of number 5 happening. Scene breaks are therefore easily identifiable. However …

7. … don’t put a hash symbol / star / “and” symbol at the end of a chapter. I originally did this in Tube Riders and I had random pages with just the hash tag at the top because it had carried over on to a new page. It’s not going to kill anyone but it looks kind of stupid.

8. Keep your fonts small for titles and chapter headings. Having 36-size font for your title might look awesome in Word but it’ll look rubbish on a little e-reader when it doesn’t fit on one page. You need no more than 14-size for titles, while keep your text at 10 - 12. Remember, you can adjust the size on an e-reader so keep the sizes on your original document close together so that people with poor eyesight don’t have your title spanning fourteen different pages.

Remember, simple is best. If you can afford a fancy formatter to make it look awesome, that’s great, but trying to make it look fancy yourself with lots of interesting fonts and huge-sized titles is just asking for trouble. Been there, done that, learned the hard way. Now I’m passing on my failings to you so you can avoid them.

If you want more information, go to Smashwords and check out the free style guide. A lot of writers whine about Smashwords for whatever reason but that guide really helped me pull my socks up, and even if you're not going to use the site itself there is a lot of useful information there about how to get your formatting right.

Chris Ward

29th April 2013