PART II: Content and Interior Formatting.
If you missed Part I of this series, Red Flags that Scream a Book is Self-Published, you can find it here.
More and more authors are choosing to self-publish: The traditional publishing path often takes far longer than an author, particularly a business author, wants to wait. In addition, the perks of traditional publishing are fading as more tools become available to self-publishers, from the mechanics of formatting and design to distribution and marketing.
But traditionally published books still set the standard and you want your book to look every bit as good. Here are [even] MORE red flags that scream a book is self-published.
The Content Itself
In Part I, I mentioned not having enough content when talking about spine width. Generally speaking, traditional publishers expect nonfiction books to have between 50,000 and 75,000 words. The trend in the past decade or so is towards shorter books. Anything under 40,000 words is going to look like the author doesn’t have enough knowledge to share. And that 40,000 words is an arbitrary number. Some books are meant to be very short—think of parable books like Who Moved My Cheese? (For the record, that may be my #1 example of a crap book, but it sold millions of copies.) Depending on the topic and style of nonfiction, shorter books can work BUT you need to cover your topic—or tell your story—thoroughly and well.
It’s not all about quantity, of course. There are several dead giveaways that a book is self-published beyond thin content.
Poor Editing
Typos and Grammatical Errors. Every book has typos. Professional editors strive to have as few as possible but there will always be a few that slip through. But a book with numerous typos on multiple pages, grammatical errors, and poorly structured sentences screams that the book was not edited by a professional.
Editors are expensive. If you can’t afford an editor, go through your book multiple times with a fine-tooth comb, looking for errors. A good way to find poorly structured sentences is to read your book out loud (or have an app read it to you). You will hear mistakes—repeated words, missed words, subject/verb non-agreement, etc. Then send your clean-as-you-can-make-it manuscript to a [smart] friend to read and ask them to highlight any mistakes and mark anything that is unclear. You can also ask people to be your beta readers to give you feedback.
If you can afford it, do hire, at minimum, a proofreader. Spellcheck doesn’t catch homonyms or when a word is used incorrectly. Grammarly is a help, but it’s not a human—it doesn’t “hear” when something is wrong or a concept is unclear. Which brings us to…
Ideas not fully developed. There’s nothing more frustrating than buying a book to help you with a problem and the author makes jumps in the explanation or process that you can’t follow. As the author, you’re the expert. Your reader needs you to fully explain things, starting with any industry jargon. My goal when I write a book designed to help someone or teach a process is to give them every step along the way. I want them to be able to read my book, follow along, and do the thing—whatever it is. The same goes for explaining your principles or ideas. You need to connect all the dots for your readers. They won’t make the intuitive leaps that you do. The smarter you are, the harder this is. Don’t assume “everyone knows that.” Not everyone does.
Entire sections repeated. Things move around when you’re writing. Sometimes you realize that a section would go better in a different chapter and you forget to delete it from its original spot. Or, you are so many words and pages into writing that you are a bit lost in the woods and you repeat yourself. I have edited books that have pages of the same information, sometimes word for word, other times the same content written slightly differently. This is why I have my book coaching clients start with a well-developed outline. They can check what they’ve written against the outline and see if it is in the right spot or should be moved. The auto-generated table of contents should match up fairly closely with that outline.
Your content is a direct reflection on how well you know your subject matter. You want it to be easy for the reader to understand. You want to impress them with your knowledge, of course, but you don’t want to confuse or frustrate them. Secure people don’t have to pretend to be something that they’re not. Your content should reflect that you know your subject matter fully, but more to the point, you can explain it so the average person can understand it. Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Keep that in mind.
Interior Formatting
My first few books were eBooks on KDP/Amazon. You merely uploaded a Word document and a cover and voila! KDP did its magic. Mostly. This was early days, and sometimes the eBook formatting left much to be desired.
Page numbers in an eBook is another red flag that screams a book is self-published. Readers can change the size of the font to suit their needs, which of course creates fewer or more words on an electronic “page.” Any page numbering is immediately thrown off when the font changes. eBooks are meant to flow, so you don’t have blank pages in order to start a chapter on the right-hand page as you do in print books.
Chapters start at the top of the page in a print book. KDP now supplies templates for print books that will help you format your book. It puts in the headers, footers, page numbers, and yes, starts your chapter at the right point on the page. The best advice I have ever received and followed is to put your work into the template chapter by chapter. Don’t try to jam the entire book into the template in one shot.
If your book has numerous charts, graphs, images, call-out quotes, breakout boxes, in short, more complex formatting than mere text, you may want to hire a professional formatter. I am not fond of Fiverr—too many people who are not good at what they advertise make it hard to find the few who are good. I recommend going to Upwork.com and finding a formatter on there. It’s a more professional site and you will be able to see the formatter’s portfolio of work and get an idea of what they charge up front.
I now use Atticus.io, a simple formatting program that was created by Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur. It has about a half day of a learning curve, but for the price ($147 last I checked), it gives a lot of bang for the buck. There are over a dozen templates and you can see what your book will look like in print as well as preview it on various ereaders.
A lot of Mac users swear by Vellum. Some people have used Canva, but as a Canva user, I couldn’t recommend it—it’s not really a formatting software. You’re basically using workarounds to get a decent end product. If you know how to use graphics programs, you can also use InDesign from Adobe, which is what the pro formatters use.
Other Formatting Red Flags that SCREAM a Book is Self-Published
The right margin is not justified. To be fair, some authors choose NOT to justify that right margin. But a ragged right margin hasn’t fallen into the main stream yet and an unjustified right margin will alert readers that you self-published.
Large font used to increase page count so the book has enough pages to put the title and author name on the spine… and it’s not a Large Print book. Font size looks different in print than on your screen. That’s because you can adjust the zoom or magnification of your screen and you probably have it set to your personal preferences. By the same token, if your book is aimed at older readers (over 40), give us a break and do not use too small a small font. I use templates because they are set for standard font and line spacing sizes.
Font choice. Sans serif (without “feet”) is generally used for eBooks; serif for print. DO NOT USE COMIC SANS. EVER. Dead giveaway. Graphic artists will use you as the bad example long after you are dead. Just don’t.
Indenting the first paragraph of each chapter. Typically, the first paragraph of a chapter and the first paragraph after a subtopic heading start at the left margin. All of the following paragraphs are indented (usually three spaces). (Again, using a template will help you with this.) The first sentence of the first paragraph of a new chapter can start with a drop cap (that big first letter of the first word) or you can have the first line start with all small caps. It’s a style choice.
Take care of your widows and orphans. You don’t want one line all by its lonesome on a page. You DEFINITELY don’t want one word all by its lonesome at the top of a page. A widow is a single line of a paragraph that is sitting at the top of the next page. An orphan is the first line of a paragraph at the bottom of a page. In Word, you can turn on “widow and orphan protect” and it will automatically take care of these things. In formatting programs, not so much. Once you have your print book formatted, you need to go back through, page by page, and make sure no one is lonely.
Text wrap around images and/or poor-quality images. Text wrapping images can be tricky. (Ask anyone who has tried to do it in Word and then watched the entire document get screwed up.) If your book has a lot of images, hire a pro. It will be worth every penny, I promise. You do need good quality images, a minimum of 300 dpi (dots per inch). Some old photographs are, of course, fuzzy and won’t print well. That is the nature of the beast. But new images should be sharp. If a photo comes out as nothing better than a blur, it may be better to leave it out.
It Really Is the Little Things
Does all this seem nitpicky? When I first started publishing books, I had no idea that there were so many elements that went into creating a book. It’s hard enough writing (and finishing!) the manuscript. When things are done right, you don’t notice them. Everything is as it should be. But, do something wrong, and it’s like hitting a deep pothole on a highway. The whole car shakes and you think, “What the hell was that?” Take care of any potholes before you publish. Give your readers a smooth ride.
Need help publishing your book? I do that. Check out my Self-Publishing Services.
