Pulling Your Book Together

Lulu allows you to upload files individually for conversion or as one PDF file. But first, you’ll need to organize your book’s sections so they’ll be reader friendly. I’ve included layouts for fiction and non-fiction books as guidelines.
Fiction
1. Review page(s)
2. Published book page (if this isn’t your first book)
3. Title page
4. Copyright page
5. Dedication page [...]

Is There a Standard Format for Copyright Pages?

Yes, although the wording varies. The name and address of the publisher comes first, followed by the copyright owner, the ISBN number, the legal verbiage, and the copyrights/acknowledgments for the book designer and any artwork or music lyrics used.
Legal Verbiage for Fiction
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any [...]

The Final Layout Procedure

This is where I screwed up when publishing the anthology. Lulu requires your page count to be divisble by four. Not a problem, I thought. I’ll just add a couple of pages to the back and one to the front to get the right number.
I succeeded with that, but the layout wasn’t what I had [...]

Planning the Layout of Your Body Text

For novels, this is very simple and straightforward. You’ll want to justify the paragraphs with the last line aligned left. Set the first line indent a .3. In typing class and on the job, I was taught to set the indents at .5, but with novels that’s too wide of an indent.

For this main [...]

Planning the Layout of Your Chapter Pages

Like the headers, there are no set rules on what format to use. However, readability and design consistency are critical for preparing your book for publication. Your chapter headings must start at the same position on each page, usually between 1.5 to 3 inches below the top margin. The same goes with any quotes or [...]

Is There a Standard Format for Headers and Footers?

After looking through several books on my shelves, I came to the conclusion that there are no set rules regarding header formats for fiction and nonfiction books. Some authors choose not to bother with headers. For the purpose of this exercise, I’ll assume that you want to place headers in your book’s format. The screenshot [...]

The Best Fonts for Your Book

Open Type fonts are the best because they are cross-compatible with PCs and Macs. The internal coding (called unicode) allows a typeface file to have over 65,000 characters, a big improvement over the older typefaces that are limited to 256.
The second best are PostScript or Type 1 fonts. These are good for offset printing, especially [...]

Formatting Your Book Interior with Word

Do you set up your document’s style and margin formatting before you type a word? Or, do you use your word processor’s default settings like many of us are guilty of doing? Either way, you’ll have to reformat your manuscript to fit Lulu’s printing specifications.
If you’re publishing a paperback novel, you can copy your standard-sized [...]

Planning Your Book’s Format

The first step in publishing with Lulu is formatting the content of your book. This takes some planning and a bit of research. Get out a piece of paper, jot the following questions down, and answer them as best as you can. Then get a manila folder or a small binder to store the questionnaire. [...]