6. Formatting Your Books Insides for Kindle or Print

6. Book Insides. Format your book in MS Word or some similar word processing application such as Google Doc, Pages, or Scrivner. If you are going to print your book, create an original document that is the page size of your book. 5 ½” x 8 ½” is a great size and is easy to get printed at a quickie print shop for those first copies. If you have access to Adobe InDesign that works very well. A local designer can help with this stage.
A. Set up a page template that matches how you are going to produce your book. Print local, ebook/Kindle, Print on Demand CreateSpace/Amazon, or pdf for your web site. Review books you like for design ideas.

B. Design and layout all the book’s pages, a local freelance designer can help with this stage, though you can do it yourself in a program like MS Word.

C. Print the book out and do another round of edits.

D. You are striving for a 28-36 page book. Remember we aren’t doing a manifesto, this is a quick short book.


Layout your edited book, add in photos and or graphics. A good size if you are using print-on-demand is 6” x 9”. If you are printing your book at a local quick print shop then 5 1/2” x 8 1/2” is a good size because it is based on standard 8.5” x 11” page size. If international one half of A4 works well also. Margins should be 5/8” of an inch.

We are looking to create a book in the 28-36 page length. If you are printing your book using a local quick print shop and binding the book with staples then you want your page count to be a unit of 4. Something like 20 to 24 pages works very well.

There are many ways to publish your book, but I highly recommend putting it up on Amazon as a print book using CreateSpace.com or an ebook through their Kindle program.

If you are setting your book up for print, add in a header with the book name and in the footer add in page numbers and maybe your web address.

Click Here to Read Chapter 7: Creating Print or eBook Book Cover