Writers Remedies

Formatting a book involves more than simply typing words onto a page, it involves ‘shaping’ the text so that it looks right and is easy to read. Text can be formatting in 4 ways. It can be centered, aligned right (left ragged), aligned left (right ragged) or justified. Which alignment is best for self published books? What is Justified Text? Justified Text can be Ugly if columns are narrow. Simply put, text that is justified forms a ‘block’ on the page. The alignment on the left and the right of the text are straight, except for the final line, which likely will contain a shorter line. See image. Justified text can look neat and visually appealing unless each line is short and therefore possess fewer characters. This will not pose a problem with novels, as the lines all run the entire width of the page and therefore each word will posses equal relatively equal amounts of space. This can be seen in the upper 2 screenshots which possess quite a few words per line. W...

Creating a book with images, text, diagrams and complex elements can be a nightmare when self publishing on POD for the first time. Book formatting picture books such as art books or science books seems to be an art in itself. Having gone through the process myself, have learned a few things to make text and images do what I want when converting onto PDF, fine tuning the look of the book or uploading onto POD platforms such as Createspace. Why Avoid Floating Images When initially faced with the task of formatting books with pictures, floating images within text seemed to be the answer. However, unless the images are placed inline with paragraphs and do not affect subsequent elements, will tend to slip around or misbehave when converting the file. The larger the book, the more of a nightmare the task became. This is because re-positioning the images would have a knock-on effect upon the formatting on the following pages. Like a domino effect, a slight adjustment could mess...

Making sure images are more than 300 DPI (dots per square inch) is not easy when first publishing picture books on print on demand platforms such as Createspace or Lulu. How does the writer ensure each image is at least 300 DPI within picture books? How to Create Great Images for Picture Books Obviously, the pictures have to be good quality in the first place, meaning, good lighting, sharp focusing and high resolution by the use of a good quality camera. But this is different to the DPI setting, which can be lower than 300 DPI even if the images look great on screen. Print on demand publishers will also alert you of images that are less than 300 DPI. Createspace’s preflight download will inform on which images will look pixilated in print, but cannot change it. So how can this be remedied? How to Avoid Image Compression How to Prevent Image Compression on Save Firstly a few things to avoid when creating a book with images. 1 Never copy and paste an image into t...