Editing Your Book For Independent Publication

Having now edited and published ten novels using the Createspace facility I thought it might be good to share some helpful points for writers out there who are embarking or struggling with this process.

I have writer  friends who are independently publishing with the technical help of their tech-savvy partners or co workers, I’m not so lucky so I have done every stage myself.

I must say if I can do it then so can you. I  I have become comfortable with the Createspace process but there are other printing/publishing enterprises out there which you may choose.  The principles will be similar.

This is the first of five posts about First Principles of  Independent  Publishing

1. Editing Your Book In for Independent Publishing.

2. The Cover

3. Uploading the interior and the cover.

4. Proofing

5. Selling

 Editing your book  for Independent Publishing

1.       Make sure your manuscript in Word is as good as it can be by assiduous line editing, proofing and manual spell-checking. Also do a mechanical spell check to back this up.

2.       Read through and ask yourself it this core of the book says truly what you want to say. You feel the need to alter and amend even at this stage.

3.       Now is the time you insert the front pages that are in any book. (Check half a dozen books and note the pages that occur before the book begins. These pages should include.

4.       Two blank pages at the beginning

5.       Facing Half Title page with just the title (no author)  

6.       Blank page

7.       Facing Title Page with Title and Author, perhaps a quotation or phrase as appropriate, and the publisher at the bottom of the page. (Give your publishing enterprise a name…)

8.       Copyright Page. Take a published book and copy the form of the copyright page. Leave a space for the ISBN which you can insert when you have uploaded the manuscript.  Createspace will assign you an ISBN number.

9.        Facing page – Dedication and Acknowledgements

10.    Blank page

11.    Facing page - If you want this. (Essential for the Kindle version) - A summary of the story. If you are doing Print in Demand.you can copy  and paste this onto the back cover.

12.    Contents Page (if necessary). Or leave page blank,.

13.   Facing Page: Beginning of your story. Leave a ten line gap at the beginning of every chapter.

NEXT

Studs 

14.   In your word document  created a page break between each chapter

15.   First paragraphs in each chapter should be on the margin.

16.   If, within a chapter, you leave white space (double-double click)to indicate to the reader a change of time of place then the  first line of the new paragraph should also be un-indented.

17.   At the end of the ms you might want to insert pages with :

-          Information about  you and contact details

-          Blog, Twitter and Facebook links if these exist

-          Information about earlier or other publications

18.Leave two blank pages again.

I know it’s a bit fiddly but if you do it step by step you will be OK. Your manuscript should now be ready to upload to the Createspace template.
 More about that next time . 

NEXT:
Creating your cover and uploading your prepared manuscript.

On this page  are three of the books I have published using these processes.

Forms of Flight: 

Lines of Desire