Indie publishing is an adventure. It also comes with a steep learning curve and can cause all manner of frustration and back-aches as you sit at the computer for hours cursing and sighing, and occasionally cheering when you finally get something right. I’ve become tenacious about publishing and I crowed last night when I finally got it.

One of the tasks that seems to give Indie authors the most trouble is preparing a finished manuscript for upload to the distributer (CreateSpace, IngramSpark, etc). I don’t usually publish how-to posts, but as I’ve been learning, I’ve encountered so many people having the same issues, I thought I’d try and simplify the process with a few key moves.

First of all, this is for writers using a Mac. The basic question I googled the past few days was this: how do I save a pdf copy in book size on a Mac? This is what I figured out after reading a zillion threads written by frustrated Mac users. I discovered that Macs are built to do this, so you don’t need to buy Acrobat software. You just need to know how to do it.

A Word About Formatting Ebooks

Ebooks and print books need two completely different formats. Kindle Direct Publishing provides an excellent guide for formatting and uploading your ebook to Amazon. Just follow along and you’ll be successful. (Although one glitch I have discovered  is that when you use a Mac, you have to save the final Word doc as a Web Page, Filtered in order to get an HTML file for upload. Otherwise, any photos don’t appear when you proof it online.) Another format you might need to upload is e-pub for Kobo, I-books, etc.) I publish through IngramSpark so I upload the e-pub version on their site. You can download Calibre for free (thanks Sionnach for this tip) and convert several formats in a snap. But print books are a whole different process.

Formatting Print Books

So. Print books. First of all, the formatting is different. You want your book to be visually appealing, error-free, and set up professionally using Word styles. You have to pay every time you upload a new edition to IngramSpark, so try to get it right. There are a couple of ways around this. Join ALLi (Alliance of Indie Publishers) and get their coupon code or wait for one of Ingram Spark’s free offers. Right now, they’re offering free revisions until May 31 and a new title upload for free until June 30.

I’m preparing to release the Hollystone Mysteries as a trilogy within the next year, so I’m setting up my own formatting guide using Word styles so they’re all consistent. The last few weeks, I’ve been re-editing book two. I decided to change the book size from 6″ x 9″ to 5.5″ x 8.5″ because I thought it might look and feel better. After editing and formatting, it grew from 276 pages to 310 pages and that meant the trim size would be off for my existing cover. My cover designer, Kat McCarthy at Aeternum Designs, graciously resized the cover for me. Thanks Kat. It took a lot of finagling to get the most white space as possible without going over those 310 pages. Last night I was still playing with this—even changing words here and there to make it fit. As I said…OCD.

When I thought I had it perfect, I drove down to Staples with my Word file on a flash drive because they said they could convert it to the size I needed in a couple of minutes. However, once it was up on their screen, my fancy font that matches my cover (Celtic Garamond Pro) didn’t show up. I’d used it for the title page, drop caps, and headings, so I was ready to scream! “Bring us a PDF and we can re-size it for you no problem,” she said. So I drove home and hunkered down at the desk again. While I was giving it one more appraisal, I noticed that on page 6 the scene break icon and the page number were not centred correctly. NO!! I discovered that the footer style was set to “normal” which meant it had a .25 indent and that was throwing off the centring. I fixed that and played with the white space some more. Then I put it up on the big screen.

Suddenly, I noticed that the first four pages (section 1) were actually appearing in book-size; whereas the rest of the book was still showing with the text in book-size but on 8.5″ x 11″ paper. This is the problem people are screaming about on the threads. So I went back in and tried one last time. Hallelujah! This, in three steps, is what I discovered over the last three days.

How to Save a Book-sized PDF on a MAC

1. Go to File—Page Setup. Set the desired size (5.5 x 8.5) formatted for any printer. Make sure everything in Word is perfect. Check all styles to be sure everything is centred correctly. Check paragraph format—watch for first line indents that need to be removed that will affect the centring).
2. Go to top screen menu: Format—Document. Check all margins and “apply to whole document”— If  just “this section” is ticked, it won’t work. (This was the clincher!) And you have to do this every time because it defaults. Even making this demo pdf of my first chapter, I found errors and had to resize the doc.
3. Go to File—Print and in the bottom left click on “pdf” and choose “save to pdf”

This should save the document in the book size you require and look exactly like the interior of your book.

Good luck on your Indie publishing journey. If you get stuck or have any questions, contact me or leave a comment and I’ll try to help you as best I can.

with all good wishes, ~Wendy

P.S. After all that, when I tried to upload the new file size to Ingram-Spark they said it was too big for a revision and I’d have to upload it as a new title. Argh! Consequently, I went back to the original cover. My books are now all 6×9!