Page Styles And Paragraph Styles For Create Space

If you're just a casual word processor user you may have never used styles, but for formatting a book they're absolutely necessary. Let's assume you have a manuscript in some word processor format. You may have made your chapter headings bold, centered, and used a larger font. Wrong! Instead, go through your document and change every chapter heading to have a style of Heading 1. In the upper left corner of your word processor window is a drop-down that assigns paragraph styles. By default it might say "Paragraph" or "Text Body" or even "Default", but if you expand the pulldown you'll see a entries for "Heading 1", "Heading 2", etc. "Heading 1" is for chapter headings and "Header 2" is for subheadings. (Fiction often just has chapter headings, but non-fiction will have subheadings and even sub subheadings). So give every heading and subheading the style it needs. Don't worry about what it makes them look like. You'll fix that later. What you're trying to do is impose a structure on your text.

Why? Well, for one thing, if the word processor knows where your chapter headings are it can create a Table Of Contents for you automatically. It will also help you greatly when you make an ebook out of your manuscript.

The second thing you need to do is figure out what page size your book should have. Create Space recommends 6" x 9" for most books, and I do too. It is a good size for novels, memoirs, and anything else you might want to put in a beach bag.

I do use other sizes. Under my real name I write books for children and teachers and those use a 7.44" x 9.69" page size. There are a variety of pages sizes Create Space offers, so look over the choices and pick one.

Next figure out your margins. If the book is under 500 pages or so you can use an inner margin of .88 inches. For longer books they require a one inch inner margin (or "gutter" as the pros call it). So from the Format menu pick Styles And Formatting, then choose the Default page style and change the Page properties as follows:

Width: 6 inches
Height: 9 inches
Inner margin: 0.88"
Outer: 0.5"
Top: 0.4"
Bottom: 0.3"

Turn on headers and footers while you're in there. This should give you a good idea of how many pages your book will be. Page count (but not page size) determines the cost of your book.

Do you have want color illustrations in your book? You might want to rethink that. Color pages cost four times as much as black and white pages, and if you have one color illustration in the whole book every interior page will be charged at the color rate. Not only that, but color interior pages don't look that great. I did one book with all color pages, a photo on every page, and the interior pages looked muddy.

On the other hand, color illustrations on the cover look terrific. So by all means use color on your cover, but avoid it for your interior.

Now fool around with the style for Heading 1. You can change the font size and every chapter heading will get the new font size. You can change the spacing so that the heading starts one inch down from the previous paragraph. You can use a fancy display font, like I suggested you use for the cover. You'd never want to use anything but Times New Roman (or Liberation Serif if you're a Linux user) for your body text, but jazzing up the chapter headings works nicely.

Study the documentation on styles for your word processor. The docs for Libre Office are here:

https://help.libreoffice.org/Writer/S...

The next post will discuss page styles. For now just experiment with getting your page size, margins, chapter headings, and body text looking the way you want. Then we'll add pages styles for the Title Page and Verso, Table Of Contents, and Chapter First Pages and get the pages so that the right pages have the gutter on the left and the left pages have the gutter on the right. We'll also see that the pages are properly numbered.

Stay tuned.