Format Your Own Create Space Interior And Save $350
There are many reasons to have a book on Create Space, but if you're an unknown author seeking an audience making money probably isn't one of them. Getting someone to take a chance on a 99 cent e-book is a lot easier than getting them to buy a fifteen dollar trade paperback, and your royalty for both might be the same amount. Having said that, you might want to have a trade paperback available anyway. If nothing else you can buy them up at the author price and give them away to friends and relatives.
So if you want to have your book on Create Space you probably want to do it as cheaply as possible. You still want it to look like a professional did the work, but you don't want to pay the professional. If you do the work yourself publishing a book on Create Space costs very little. Basically setup is free and you just pay for proof copies of your book.
You want your interior pages to look good. Create Space offers a free Word template you can use as a starting point, or you can hire one of their formatting pros for various rates:
https://www.createspace.com/Products/...
The simplest option costs $349. If you want anything fancier than that you might need a professional (and expensive software), but you can do the simple layout yourself with nothing more than a word processor and some free fonts.
The word Processor I recommend is Open Office (or its variant Libre Office):
https://www.libreoffice.org/
This is a free word processor comparable to Word. If you already own Word you could use that but ever since Microsoft introduced Ribbon Menus I have found MS Word to be more trouble to use than it's worth. Libre Office and Open Office have a built in feature to generate a PDF, which is what you're going to submit to Create Space.
Libre Office can read Word files, including the template Create Space offers as a sample. I used that template for my first Create Space book but I think it's too fancy to use as is so I recommend taking your existing manuscript, making a backup copy, and then messing around with styles until you have something suitably formatted. You can of course use the template to get ideas of what is possible.
Your book probably has the following page types:
Title Page and Verso
Table Of Contents
Chapter Start
Default
Index
You also might have the following paragraph types:
Chapter Heading
Subheading
Body Text
Footnote
Title (for title page)
Author (for title page)
You have to create a style for each page type and paragraph type in your book.
How to do that? Stay tuned.
So if you want to have your book on Create Space you probably want to do it as cheaply as possible. You still want it to look like a professional did the work, but you don't want to pay the professional. If you do the work yourself publishing a book on Create Space costs very little. Basically setup is free and you just pay for proof copies of your book.
You want your interior pages to look good. Create Space offers a free Word template you can use as a starting point, or you can hire one of their formatting pros for various rates:
https://www.createspace.com/Products/...
The simplest option costs $349. If you want anything fancier than that you might need a professional (and expensive software), but you can do the simple layout yourself with nothing more than a word processor and some free fonts.
The word Processor I recommend is Open Office (or its variant Libre Office):
https://www.libreoffice.org/
This is a free word processor comparable to Word. If you already own Word you could use that but ever since Microsoft introduced Ribbon Menus I have found MS Word to be more trouble to use than it's worth. Libre Office and Open Office have a built in feature to generate a PDF, which is what you're going to submit to Create Space.
Libre Office can read Word files, including the template Create Space offers as a sample. I used that template for my first Create Space book but I think it's too fancy to use as is so I recommend taking your existing manuscript, making a backup copy, and then messing around with styles until you have something suitably formatted. You can of course use the template to get ideas of what is possible.
Your book probably has the following page types:
Title Page and Verso
Table Of Contents
Chapter Start
Default
Index
You also might have the following paragraph types:
Chapter Heading
Subheading
Body Text
Footnote
Title (for title page)
Author (for title page)
You have to create a style for each page type and paragraph type in your book.
How to do that? Stay tuned.
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MM wrote: "Please write more. I would like to learn how to format my book."
Did you read all the articles in the series yet?
I do plan to write more, not only formatting for Create Space but also formatting e-books.
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I would like to learn how to format my book.