An Interesting Question on Formatting
August 7, 2024 by Harvey
In today’s Journal
* An Interesting Question on Formatting
* The Numbers
An Interesting Question on Formatting
Yesterday, a writer emailed to ask me whether D2D would change the placement of the page numbers in her manuscript when she uploads it for publishing.
Naturally, I thought she was talking only about the placement of page numbers in a manuscript submitted for publication to paper.
So I said I don’t know. I routinely submit my fiction and non-fiction manuscripts to D2D and Amazon for publication as ebooks, and in ebooks, there are no page numbers. More on that later.
I very seldom publish to paper because
ebooks continue to increase in popularity, and
ebooks can be read in a variety of formats (the main ones are .epub, .mobi, and .pdf), and
ebooks can be read on a variety of devices: cell phone, ereader, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer, and finally
ebooks cost the reader a lot less (so they sell far more copies) and earn me a lot larger royalty: up to 80% on the dollar of the cover price. More on this later too.
Your royalty is your initial return on your investment (ROI).
For any ebook or paper book, in part your investment includes the time it takes you to write the story and format it for publication.
For ebooks, I format directly in Microsoft Word and the format is pre-set in a template I developed. So all I have to do is write the story, design the cover, and submit the whole thing for publication.
In other words, it’s one and done. I’m free to go write the next story. And for me, writing the next story is everything.
Re formatting, I don’t do much of that for ebooks either. As I said, I developed a novel-or-short-story format template a long time ago in Microsoft Word.
So now all I have to do is open the template, click Save As and save it as the filename for the current story or novel, then write the story.
Yes, I have to update the back matter from whatever was originally in the template, but that takes only a matter of seconds.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m happy to share my fiction template free of charge. You only have to email me at harveystanbrough@gmail.com.
I also offer a free template for a reverse outline, the value of which I’ve talked about elsewhere in this Journal. Visit the Journal website and key “Reverse Outline” into the search box to find those posts.
Your investment also includes whatever you invest in cover art. Most of my cover art is free or extremely inexpensive. I get most of my cover art from Unsplash.com.
On the other hand, paper books have a high overhead. The investment in time alone is huge.
Even if you use D2D or Amazon’s paper book builder thingy (shrug), you still have to
format the book (though you could develop a template to take care of most of that for you, including placement of page numbers, chapter heads, and chapter breaks)
save the manuscript in an acceptable PDF file (be sure to imbed the fonts and any graphics, for example if you use a small graphic for your chapter breaks)
determine the trim size of the finished paper book (D2D and Amazon will help with this)
determine the thickness of the spine (depends on word count, font size, and other determinations)
provide the front and back cover information
provide the spine information
provide a ton of other stuff I haven’t mentioned here because I don’t publish to paper so I don’t know.
To begin figuring the value of your time investment, first determine what your time is worth to you. Give it a monetary value. Then compare that to the hourly rate your mechanic or your plumber or lawyer charges.
Paper books also require a monetary investment.
I believe both the D2D and Amazon paper book builders offer a free ISBN.
Yes, that makes them the “publisher of record,” but you can still list yourself or your publishing company as the publisher inside the book and possibly on the spine. I recommend doing that.
Or you can purchase an ISBN (or a block of them) from Bowker. They are expensive individually or in a block, but you can’t get them anywhere else. I don’t know why the feds haven’t busted their monopoly.
Additionally, cover art is often more expensive for paper books than for ebooks. The cover for a paper book, if it qualifies as “merchandise,” requires a different license.
Then, after all the time and money (your overhead) you’ve invested in publishing your book to paper, your initial return on investment (your royalty) will be ridiculously low at around 10% or less.
See why I don’t publish to paper?
Finally, back to the writer’s original question of placement of page numbers (top, bottom, outer corner, or centered):
With ebooks you should NEVER insert page numbers.
Why?
As I wrote in the first bulleted list above, readers can read your ebook on a variety of devices: cell phone, ereader, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer. Or even on all of the above.
In doing so, the reader can change not only the screen size, but s/he can change the font and the font size. At will.
So say you set a page number on the pages of your manuscript. And say those page numbers appear after every manuscript page of 500 or so words.
When the reader changes your original font or font size on their screen, the page numbers you so meticulously placed will appear in weird places.
The reader will open your book. S/he will be reading along just fine, deeply engrossed in your excellent story or novel. They s/he’ll be interrupted by a numeral that suddenly appears for no apparent reason a third of the way or halfway down the screen.
Or, if a sentence runs from the end of one page of your manuscript over to the next page, the number will appear in the 36 middle of a sentence. See how that jerks you out of whatever you’re reading?
All of that said, if your sense of success or self-worth or ego demands that you “hold your paper book in your hand,” that’s fine. Publish to paper and order your copies. The paper publisher (D2D, Amazon, whomever) should leave the page numbers where you placed them, and I suspect they will.
But don’t expect to make much money on sales. You will be disappointed.
Let’s look at some actual numbers:
First, remember that I would personally rather spend my time writing instead of formatting.
But even if I don’t have to do the formatting (or pay someone to do it for me), the return on investment to publish a book to paper just doesn’t make sense to me and for good reason.
Long ago (late-1990s), I wrote Punctuation for Writers. The first edition was published traditionally by Central Avenue Press in Albuquerque NM.
So the publisher, not I, paid the overhead, took care of the formatting, etc.
Win-win, right?
Um, no. But thankfully, I retained ebook rights and epublished PFW myself through an outfit called HardShell Word Factory. (Or something like that. I forget.)
I was on the road a lot back then, speaking at conferences, doing book signings on the way there and back, checking and signing stock in bookstores, etc. It didn’t take me long to realize two things:
Each time I sold an ebook copy of PFW for the cover price of $10, I received a 70% royalty. So I pocketed $7. BUT
Each time I sold a paper copy for the cover price of $25, I received a (high at the time) 10% royalty and pocketed $2.50.
That is not good math.
Look at those numbers again. With an ebook, the reader gets exactly the same content but for a much lower price. So I sell a lot more ebooks.
And on the other end of the equation, I make a much higher ROI via royalties from the sale of the lower-priced ebook than I could ever make from the sale of the higher-priced paper book.
To paraphrase a famous writer whose name I can’t recall, “To compare ebooks to paper books is to compare porcelain plates to paper plates. The food on each remains the same.”
Again, I would rather be writing than formatting. I would rather be driving forward than spinning my wheels, stuck axle-deep in mud.
That—combined with the fact that I would rather sell for a lower cover price and make up to 80% on my writing than sell for a higher cover price and make only 10% on my writing—makes the decision to publish to ebook instead of paper a hands-down no brainer for me personally.
As always, your personal desires and needs may vary. But trust me, your results will not.
Talk with you again soon.
The Numbers
The Journal……………………………… 1460
Writing of Blackwell Ops 27: Sam Gentry
Day 1…… 3004 words. To date…… 3004
Day 2…… 2111 words. To date…… 5115
Day 3…… 1726 words. To date…… 6841
Fiction for August…………………….….… 6841
Fiction for 2024…………………………. 482082
Fiction since October 1………………… 738891
Nonfiction for August……………………… 7860
Nonfiction for 2024……………………… 254870
2024 consumable words………………… 690704
2024 Novels to Date……………………… 11
2024 Novellas to Date…………………… 0
2024 Short Stories to Date……………… 4
Novels (since Oct 19, 2014)……………… 93
Novellas (since Nov 1, 2015)…………… 9
Short stories (since Apr 15, 2014)……… 241
Short story collections…………………… 29
Disclaimer: I am a prolific professional fiction writer. On this blog I teach Writing Into the Dark and adherence to Heinlein’s Rules. Unreasoning fear and the myths of writing are lies, and they will slow your progress as a writer or stop you cold. I will never teach the myths on this blog.
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If you are someone who wants to offer paperback and hardback books along with your ebooks (and audio which is another animal), then there are programs out there that do cost a one time investment, but will do all that for you. They are pretty easy to use and are getting better each year.
I used to use InDesign for it, and that is a nightmare.
Now I use Atticus and it works great.
Vellum is for the Mac and is more expensive than Atticus.
There are a few others but don't have experience with them and so can't speak for them. (Kotobee, and some others)
It's all in how complex you want to get, and how much you want to spend and how much time you want to spend on doing the formatting in something besides Word. Like all Indie publishing, it's all up to you to decide and no one is going to make you!
If she was talking about when she uploads a PAPERBACK manuscript, the answer is, it depends.
If she's uploading a a fully formatted (as it will appear in paperback) copy of the book's interior, then no. Neither D2D nor KDP will make any changes to the interior then. (They won't make any changes to the interior of an ebook we upload either.)
However, D2D offers "print book publishing services". If you utilize that service and have them create your paperback, they will take care of page numbering while doing the formatting. In that case, the page numbers WILL change from the manuscript that is sent to them simply because it has to. I haven't utilized that particular service since I do all my own formatting. Because of the latter, I know how dramatically the page numbers vary from a manuscript and the interior of a formatted paperback.
I hope that helps.