Step 6: Preparing For Publication

If you did the last steps, you have now read through your finished work about three times and are likely happy with it. Now for the fun, fun task of putting it all together for publication through Kindle Direct Publishing.

Create an account by clicking here. They have a tutorial for formatting your eBook that might want to take a look at as well as a tutorial for formatting your paperback book.

Now would be the time to take all your individual chapter files and combine them into one document. A final word count of 75,000-100,000 is generally recommended for publishing fiction books.

The proper format would be:

Page 1: Title of Book with your name underneath

• Feel free to use fancy fonts here that reflect the personality of the work. It is up to you if you would like to include the copyright on this page as well or on the back of this page

Page 2: Copyright information

• The Copyright should be formatted: 

Copyright © 2019 AUTHOR’S_NAME_HERE.

All Rights Reserved.

ISBN#

• If you have not done so already and live in the United States you can apply for a copyright of your work at the U.S. Copyright Office. The copyright currently costs about $55 (as of 2019) and will take several months to be approved. For certain work it might not seem necessary, but on the other hand if you can afford it, why take the chance of publishing without it?

• Kindle Direct Publishing offers the option of assigning you an ISBN or you can buy your own through the U.S. ISBN Agency. If you only plan on marketing your book through Kindle Direct Publishing, then buying your own ISBN might not be necessary. However, if you plan on marketing your book to libraries or bookstores it might be something to look into. For more information click here.

Page 3: Dedication

• This is your chance to acknowledge in a small way what kept you motivated. Pick something special to you! You can also leave this part out entirely if you are a boring person.

Page 4: Blank page

• This will be the back of the Dedication page if you have one. Otherwise leave it out.

Page 5: Table of Contents

• Do not fill in the corresponding page numbers into your Table of Contents yet. For now, just put in the chapters as follows (or however you would like it to appear):

1 NAME OF CHAPTER

2 NAME OF CHAPTER

3 NAME OF CHAPTER

Page 6: Blank page

• This will be for the back of the Table of Contents. If your Table of Contents is two pages (or any even number of pages) then you don’t need to put a blank page here.

Page 7: Acknowledgements

• Don’t forget to thank your mother!

Page 8: Blank page

• This will be for the back page of the Acknowledgement. If your acknowledgement is more than one page go back and make it shorter. Nobody’s going to read that.

Page 9 and beyond

• Put the text of your book here! Be sure your chapter names appear in the same format for all of the chapters. The page numbers should start here as well with the first page of chapter one being page one.

Next, you are going to make sure your text is compact, but readable. Once you publish, you will be responsible to pay for the cost of printing from your royalties, so the fewer pages the book requires, the more of the royalty you will keep.

Make sure to remove any double spacing. There should not be extra lines between sentences or paragraphs. The start of each new paragraph should be indicated by a TAB. You are going to want to set the TAB to 0.25 inches. To do this go to the ‘Paragraph” section under “Home” and click on the little arrow in the lower right corner. Then under the TAB option set the “Stop Tab Position” to “0.25”.

The font should be Times New Roman size 12 or something comparable. Avoid fancy fonts that might be hard to read except for in the title page.

Make two copies of the resulting document. One is going to be further edited for your eBook and the other for the paperback version.

For publishing the eBook, go on to Step 7: Self Publishing your eBook through Kindle Direct Publishing, or for the paperback skip to Step 8: Publishing Your Paperback Through Kindle Direct Publishing!