Behind The Scenes: Formatting

When you publish your own book, that means you are in charge of everything. I talked about making the cover a couple weeks ago in the reveal post. Covers are obvious, and pretty easy to fit into any given genre. Something we don't think about as much is in the interior formatting. It is just as genre specific as anything else about publishing and is still fairly new to me.

I purchased Atticus a few months back and am learning the ropes there to make my books look exactly how I want them to. It’s a great program (no, I don’t get anything for saying that) and I am pleased with my progress each time I use it. But there are SO MANY OPTIONS!

My first step was the library, the new fiction section, where I scouted out an armful of new thrillers and plopped them on the check-out desk. Each is slightly different inside, and I made pages of nearly nonsensical notes to decipher what was most common and what I liked best. Those didn’t always line up, but I took the fact that everything in my selection was published by one of the big five publishers to mean that any and all were acceptable.

Fun things like fonts, chapter titles and drop text, boring things like page numbers and where my name goes and stuff that you can hardly tell is different until you really line it up like line spacing. My brain fried pretty quickly, but I got my ebook version whipped into shape. The paperback took longer as I wanted to play with the customization a bit more where possible and making sure the alignment worked perfectly. Even with a top-notch program, you can’t just click ‘done’ and not re-check and reread it a million times.

It’s the little things that make a big difference in how professional a book feels, and I hope that, with all the time I’ve spent molding this baby into its final form, my readers will agree.

Here is a little sneak peek inside the paperback version:
AtP will hit Amazon on November 9th 2022. It is up for preo-order now!