You have written your book haven’t you?

And you have let it gel for a while now so it is time to do the proof reading.  I’m going to assume that you don’t have the finances to pay a professional to proof it for you so you are going to have to be ruthless.

Absolutely.  You are going to read your book with a really critical eye.  Print it out.  Site down at the table and read it out loud.

I’m totally serious, reading it out loud isolates your words and thoughts from the book.  It also shows you where sentences fail to work because they read clumsy.

It identifies the punctuation points and usually highlights the spelling mistakes. Once you have been right through the book read it backwards.

Why?  Because then it makes no sense at all so you cannot read what you think is there, you have to read what is there and this picks out more spelling mistakes.  Yeah it is really hard but you have to do this to make sure your book is as good as you can make it.

Now for the additional bits which make it like a real book, which it is going to be right?

You need to create a cover, see this ebook on creating 3D book covers but just don’t make it 3D, Doh.

You can add a review page, if you have any.  You can ask some friends for those if you like, if you don’t have any then it isn’t totally necessary.

You’ll need a copyright page, open any book you have and use that as a template, it’ll give you the idea.

Add a dedications page if you want, something like “I owe it all to Mr Bearly and Bearly Books.”   OK, that’s not really necessary but a dedications page is good if you want one.

Another optional page is an acknowledgements page.  All of these are optional, you choose.

The next page though is important, the menu page.  This is not only important it has to be accurate so you have to make sure the chapter headings match the page numbers.

The next important page is the introduction page, this introduces both the book and you.  Tell your readers what you are going to tell them in the book, a bit about yourself and why you wrote the book and perhaps why you are qualified to write the book.

A couple more optional pages, a foreword and a preface.  Both usually give a bit more information about the book or you but if you have covered it in the introduction they are not required.

Now we come to the reason for the book, the chapters and the content.  These need to flow from one the the next building as they go and ending with the conclusion, whatever that might be for your book.

At the end of your book you might have an epilogue, summary, end note, next steps or similar.

Add an appendix perhaps, some additional information, perhaps a glossary and then the index.

At the very end you may have an “about the author page” perhaps with a photograph or something relevant.

Now some tricks, always set your book to be fully justified.  I know it looks crap on the screen but look in your printed books and they are fully justified, it seems to read better in print that way.  Set words which break over the page to being hyphenated.

Set your line spacing to 1.2 or 1.3 not any bigger as the white space will look terrible.  Put in a header and a footer, put the chapter heading, the name of the book or the author in the header and the page number and perhaps a web address if that’s relevant in the footer.

Use a Serif font for the titles and headings, Times New Roman or Ariel are good.  For the text use a Sans-Serif font such as Verdana or Tahoma.  These are much easier to read.

I like a bigger font size but you may not, don’t make it too small though so I wouldn’t go below 10 point.

Colour book cost significantly more to print, even a single spot of colour in your book makes it a colour book.  Think carefully if you really need colour inside the book.  The cover should be colour.

Always start your next chapter on a new page.  Keep it consistent if you can, start the new chapter on the right-hand page follows the usual format of a book.

Try to keep your paragraphs down to a few sentences and the sentences relatively short.  Most people don’t have a very high reading standard, don’t make it harder for them than needed.  Same with the words you use, use the correct word where it’s needed but don’t use long words unnecessarily, like that one.

Next post will talk about actually getting your book published but for now you have work to do, get into it.