I haven’t been posting much of late. Every free moment has been lost in the final days before publishing research marathon. Originally I’d only planned to upload my novel as an eBook, but with the ease of POD (print on demand) publishing through CreateSpace, I plunged into the wonderful task of preparing a 400 page novel for paperback print.
I wasn’t able to find a Formula specific to what I was trying to accomplish with my Novel’s formatting and my writing software so in the hopes of saving other’s the hours and hours I have spent getting this far, I thought I’d share what conclusions/decisions I reached.
Hopefully someone can take this formula and tweak it to their own liking.
Note key take away here: I don’t pretend to be an experienced expert.
As I get further along in the process, I may post additional entries, but this one will focus on my copyright page, margins, and line spacing. Later, if it proves to be as challenging — so probably — I might go into other elements, like modifying my cover and seem to fit the novels dimensions and page count.
The formula below is built around my specific conditions, its not a how-to guide:
- I am using Scrivener 1.7 on a PC with Windows 7
- I miss owning a Mac | every youtube tutorial using Scrivener I found was on the Mac platform.
- I created my own publishing company, Foggy Night Publishing, in order to:
- Write off expenses such as cover art, and copy editing.
- Funnel any income from the book into a business.
- Gain the added benefit of not having CreateSpace listed as my publisher.
- I am creating a 6 x 9 Non-Fiction (Science Fiction/Fantasy) Novel.
To Start, I went with a…
Simple Copyright Page Formula
- Blue X: is pending me busting out the old Adobe Photoshop skills and creating a simply logo for Foggy Night Publishing.
- Yellow Highlight: I haven’t purchased my ISBN for the book yet.
- I’m waiting for the absolute last second in case I want to tweak the novel’s subtitle.
- I used simple Times New Roman | Size 10 | font
- The image below captures my line spacing settings.
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Window Found under: Format –> Text –>Spacing
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Now for the meat and potatoes: (1) Line Spacing and fonts in the body of my Text. (2) Formatting of Margins.
Line Spacing And Fonts Formula
- I choose Trajan Pro | Bold | Size 10 | Alignment Center – for my Chapter subtitles (Red)
- I choose Garamond Font, Size 12 | Alignment Justify – for my novel text (Blue and Green)
There are three sets of Line space settings taking place here(see images below):
- Left Image | Subtitle Settings (Red Selection in image above)
- Middle Image | Initial Paragraph of a Chapter (Blue Selection above)
- Right Image | All Paragraphs after initial (Green selection above)
Please keep in mind that these setting may not look nice if you change fonts or font sizes. (This is a formula not a guide, there is a reason one can spend hours trying to figure these things out on their first run).
Disappointing Scrivener Limitation: I couldn’t create a Drop Cap at the beginning of the Chapters. If I want to go from image on left to image on right I appear to have to edit in word. (Again, don’t know it this is true on Mac).
Margins Formula
Disclosure. I pulled a copy of of the 6 x 9 paper back The Name Of The Wind by Patrick Rothfuss and stole the publisher’s margin settings because I found them attractive. I literally did this with a ruler and a notepad.
There was no 6 x 9 paper size setting in Scrivener’s page setup window (at least on the PC). Assigning the page dimensions takes place later in the compiling phase. So I left the paper size as standard and set the margins per below. Window found under: File –> Page Setup.
These setting were approximations from the following measurements, see image below for a visual explanation:
- (Red) Margin left or right of page to text = 2/3 inch
- (Blue) Margin From top of page to text (not header) = .85 inch
- (Green) Margin from top of page to header and page number = 1/2 inch
- (Purple) Margin from bottom of page to bottom of text = 3/4
Another Disappointing Scrivener Limitation: couldn’t seem to find a Gutter Margin (again on the PC version). The gutter margin is how you build the seem into your novel, and it has to change from left to right based on what page you are printing:
- On the left page, gutter is on the right
- On the right page, gutter is on the left
Hope this helps get someone started. If you have any thoughts, or a work around for the issues I ran into, please let me know.