Book formatting for print and ebook
We are no longer offering formatting services for indie authors, because invariably it leads to months (or years) of ongoing changes and upgrades. If you’re self-publishing, we strongly urge you to learn the basics of book formatting yourself so you can make changes yourself in the future.
To that end, we’ve prepared a package of DIY book formatting templates and tutorial videos you can use and download. Our designers can tell you the fonts we’ve used on your cover design to make sure your interior matches the cover art and looks as professional as possible.
Click to Get the Formatting Templates.
OK let’s do a longer version down here, shall we?
Formatting in MS word is a pain in the butt. I still mostly do it anyway, but usually get stuck (or it’s just so tedious, going through and fixing the styles for all the headers, subheaders, paragraph styles…) There are tools that make it easier, like Atticus and Vellum. I wrote up a review of those on my main blog here “how to format your book for publication”.
I prefer Vellum even though I don’t have a macbook so I have to use mac in cloud, and then drag and drop assets into dropbox and back again. It sucks but it’s the best solution right now since there are no good solutions. Vellum is the best; Atticus is OK for PC, Indesign is probably just not what you need and way too hard to learn (it does handle text, and especially images better, but in most cases you don’t need it).
Microsoft Word *can* be good enough, and my free formatting templates make it easier. You can also hire someone cheap on Fiverr to do it for you. Just make sure you’ve completely edited and proofread your book 100%, because making editorial changes after formatting is not something you want to do.
