We can take care of all your book formatting needs. Formatting a book so that its ready for the publisher can be difficult – especially if you are not comfortable with the tools of the trade. You don’t want to take your pride and joy home only to find out the book formatting doesn’t look precise and consistent. Let us do your book formatting for you and make your manuscript immediately ready for publishing.
Coloring books
Coloring books are extremely popular for both kids as well as grown-ups. Our artist will read your book and produce stunning illustrations from key scenes. Use these as you see fit or engage us to format them into a book for you. What could be easier?
It takes about 4-5 weeks for the illustration artist to read through your book(s) and produce the illustrations. As a result, our coloring book service is strictly limited to a handful of clients per month.
Introductory prices opposite.
How does it work?
Our book formatting process is simple. You provide us with your manuscript text. It doesn't have to be pre-formatted. In fact, the less formatting, the better - just a plain Word document is perfectly fine, although you can provide it in whichever format you want.
We then take that and load it into our special book formatting software. We'll check for obvious errors, like duplicate lines & spaces, indents, scene separators, etc. We then talk to you about what what type of book formatting you want or need. We'll ask you about any specific fonts you want us to use, whether you want anything fancy like drop-caps at the start of each chapter, whether you want alternate pages to have different margins, etc.
Once we've agreed with you on how you want everything to look, which might mean looking like a previous book you already have, for example, then we set to work. We'll provide you with a PDF/MOBI/ePub of the finished result for you to inspect, as per your order. Typically, we tweak things from there until you're entirely satisfied, which might mean several iterations depending on your specific needs.
Once your book formatting is complete, speak to us about a Marketing Plan to get your book noticed!
A few formatting things for you to consider
No two books are the same. Besides the usual conventions, like starting chapters on a right-hand page or ensuring that the front matter pages are present and contain the right information, etc., everything else is up for grabs. In no particular order, here are just some of the things we'll discuss with you about your specific book:
- Front matter. Do you have a dedication? Do you want to include your ISBN numbers? Is there someone, like the cover artist or editor, you want to mention? There are a few conventional items for your front matter but there's also scope to accommodate some variation based on your wishes.
- Alternate pages with a wider gutter, so that the print appears closer to the outside edge than the inside edge. This allows for easy reading without having to wedge the book completely open.
- Line spacing. Spacing the lines farther apart makes for an easier reading experience but also increases the number of pages. This is a trade off and getting the right balance may depend on whether or not you have a page limit you want to adhere to.
- Margins. How close to the edge of the page do you want your text to be printed? There are some restrictions your POD publisher may have that you may need to adhere to.
- Fonts. For the main body text, you may want an easy to read font. For chapter headings, you may elect for something more fancy
- Chapter headings. Want to include a graphical chapter separator? No problems, we can custom build them or work with you on finding something to your liking.
- Scene separators. There's nothing wrong with the conventional '***' scene separator but if you want something a bit more fancy, we can accommodate that.
- Page size. We can accommodate any page size you want but you'll want to figure out which page size your POD printer supports and match it to your cover art.
- Indents. With the exception of the first paragraph of each chapter, each new paragraph should be indented. How much of an indent is somewhat down to personal preferences. We'll go with something standard but you have the option to chose something specific.
- Headers and footers. Do you want your headers and footers to be centred or alternatively left/right justified? There's no right or wrong answer - just what you prefer.
- Table of contents. Do you want a separate TOC? If so, we can put one in and format it to your liking.
- Back matter. Want to put in an acknowledgement? Maybe you want to ask the reader if they could leave a review for you? Perhaps you have other books you want to tell your readers about? You can put just about anything you want into your back matter, so think about how to take advantage of that.
If any of this seems daunting, don't worry. We can manage all of this for you. If you just want to hand over the manuscript and say 'just do it', that's exactly what we'll do and we'll deliver you something spectacular.
For a more detailed discussion about some of these book formatting aspects, check out our blog entry: top 8 book formatting considerations.
File formats
Whether you're looking for a print book or eBook, we work with the most commonly used file formats.
Manuscripts are often provided in Word format
Print On Demand (POD) publishers require books to be provided in PDF formatAmazon supports files in the MOBI format for the Kindle
ePub files are supported byt Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Sony, Kindle Fire and others
(*) Additional fees may apply for larger or more complicated manuscripts. Please use the Contact form or Email us directly to discuss further. Non-fiction manuscripts often require more fomratting and thus are quoted separately. The above pricing table assumes a standard fiction novel with no complicated formatting rquirements, as would typically be the case for most novels.