Fitting Your Book For Purpose

In the previous article in this series on self-publishing, I showed how to set up your book’s page size, margins and headers and footers so that all would be the right size to go to print. You will now be in the enviable position that everything you see on the pages on your screen as you write them will have exactly the same layout and positioning when printed.

This avoids those awkward errors that can result when resizing pages at a later date, such as when the flow of text positions a new chapter heading at the foot of a page. I have seen this in printed books, and there’s nothing more embarrassing. So if you followed those instructions, you’re already ahead. You can now lay your book out with confidence, you’ll be able to see when you need to put in hard page breaks and so on.

There are one or two other important matters that we need to put in place at this early stage, though. These aren’t quite so critical as the basics of page formatting, and they can be left till later if you prefer, but I always feel better if I can get them in place before I begin filling the pages.

The thing with self-publishing is, you yourself are solely responsible for ensuring that your book contains all of the necessary and expected features. There’s no editor or publisher going to come along and put these in for you before the book goes to print; if you haven’t put them there, they won’t be there at all. And yes, you can get away with that, but nonetheless all of these things will raise eyebrows if they’re missing and it’s good practice to include them.

Let’s take a quick look at some of these on the early pages of my novel Damsels and the Dark Arts:

I’ve put the image from the cover on page 1. This certainly isn’t necessary; sometimes I do this and sometimes I don’t. In this case, the image was a particularly good one, and since it is line art it prints very well in the pages of the book when grey-scaled.

Page 2, being a left-hand page, is left blank. We’ll be talking about these stylistic matters for ease of reading in the next article.

On page 3, we have several important things:

Firstly, it is a Title Page: it gives the title of the book in larger print, followed by the author’s name in slightly smaller print.

Secondly, it credits the artist who created the cover image, and provides a link to her web site. If you have engaged an artist for your cover image, this is good practice and basic courtesy.

Thirdly, it makes a few important acknowledgements of people the author wishes to thank. If you have a lot of these, you may prefer to dedicate a separate page to them.

Now let’s look at the next couple of pages:

On page 4, we find a couple of important things:

There is a list which informs readers of other titles you have available. This can be really valuable. If a reader enjoys this book, they’re quite likely to read more of your writing, so it’s a good idea to point them to it. (We’ll talk more about this in the next article when completing your manuscript.)

Also on page 4 we find a copyright notice. Most people don’t realise that your book is fully protected by international copyright law even if you don’t post a note to explicitly say so. As long as you can prove its first publication was in your name on a certain date (which its publication record on Amazon or Lulu will certainly suffice for), copyright is fully enforceable.

It is nevertheless good practice to actively assert your copyright (providing it is indeed your own work and yours to assert, of course), with with a simple brief statement such as the one on page 4 of the manuscript above, or a fuller one such as appears below. In either case, your rights are fully asserted and protected by law.

On page 5, we have a table of contents. Most readers will expect this, and it’s so easy to create that there is absolutely no good reason for not including one.

In my earliest couple of books, before I really got to grips with the word processor, I simply created it myself when I had finished writing the book; I flipped through, noted down the chapter titles and pages, then typed them up ahead of chapter one.

Now that I know my way around, it is so much easier. From the Insert tab, you can choose to create a table of contents. You then use the text style box to define which text is a heading or a sub-heading, and these will be automatically added to the table each time you right-click upon it and update it. If that sounds like gobbledygook right now, don’t worry, we’ll be going over it in more detail next time.

If you have a table of contents, of course, you’re also going to want page numbers. We prepared for this in the previous article by setting up a footer when defining the page parameters. The footer is the smaller, single line depth text frame you can see at the bottom of each page.

To add a page number to each page, simply click your cursor within the footer frame, then from the Insert tab on the top menu, select Fields from the drop down menu. One of these fields is ‘Page Numbers’: choose that and they’ll appear throughout your document automatically.

Page 6 is blank, then chapter one begins on page 7…

In the next article, we’ll talk about typing up your actual book contents, text styles and formats, titles, and kindred matters; also using the back pages to promote other, related titles.

New Myths, New Magic

Over the last few months, I have been working extensively with the runes and in the process have developed new ways of using and interpreting them. One of these realisations and innovations has been how the runes can be used to generate not only divinatory readings, but the themes and life lessons contained in those readings can then be recast as mythic stories, through which the narrative is shaped by the chosen runes, which thread through the story.

Presenting readings as myth means that they can be used as metaphor. Just as the original Norse myths conveyed their teachings and lessons through the metaphorical lens of story, so can these new ones. The value of a story is that as each person reads it or hears it told, they apply it to themselves, and thus the wisdom of the runes, woven throughout the very structure of that story, is profoundly communicated to the reader / listener.

This is the forgotten secret of proper magical / mythic storytelling, which truly brings us closer to the mythic world (which is a real place, make no mistake about that) and communicates its patterns and wisdom to our waking lives. The old storytellers of the Norse and the Celts truly believed that to tell or hear a story was to receive a very real and tangible blessing. Thus we see it expressed in the Havamal:

“Now are the High One’s sayings said in the High One’s hall:
Hail the one one who speaks them;
Hail the one who knows them;
Gain the one who gets them;
Hail those who hear them!“

I have written more than 50 mythic stories now using this method, set in the Nine Worlds of Norse mythology; many interweave with the known stories we already possess from the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda, or the Sagas; others feature familiar characters and mythic figures; others stand on their own. All are absolutely congruent with the mythology.

Over the past couple of months I have compiled and edited these stories into three published volumes, under the umbrella title Tales of Yggdrasil. The stories are collected in pretty much the order they were written. There are about 200 pages in each volume, which equates to 600 pages of brand new Norse myths. Not fiction; these are most definitely myths.

In addition to the text of the stories, each myth has been illustrated with several pieces of high quality AI artwork, worked and reworked by myself to accurately convey the spirit and essence of each story. Examples can be seen on the book covers pictured at the head of the article, also on the page shown below.

Finally, for those who know their runes, the divinations which gave the myths their shape are included. Following each story is a runic magic square. The top line of each square contains the runes from the divination that communicated the essence of the story from the Mythic World. These runes are then reflected back and forth throughout the square to show how their flows of power interplay to weave a complex reality. These are a great tool for contemplation if you know your runes, and a piece of real magic to marvel at if you don’t.

These three books contain all of the myths my divinations have generated to date. There will be more later in the year, but first I am taking time to apply the same principle to the oghams and am generating fairy tales in the same manner.

The three volumes of ‘Tales of Yggdrasil‘ are available from Amazon in print or Kindle forms in the USA here or in the UK here. Or in deluxe editions with premier paper and colour inks at Lulu here.

File Formatting For Self-Publishing

Self-publishing is the only available option for many new authors these days. Although it’s fairly easy when you have a bit of experience under your belt, it can be a labyrinthine nightmare when you’re first feeling your way. In this series of mid-week articles, I’ll be sharing many of the tips, tricks and short cuts I have discovered through publishing dozens of books.

I’m going to tackle one topic at a time, so hold your horses if you’re looking for information on cover creation, e-books, art, which services to use, editing, and other such things. We’ll get around to them all.

For this article, before you even begin writing, I’m going to talk about how to format your document in your word processor so that it will all be print-ready from the outset. This will make your life so much easier. And I’m going to talk about a print book first rather than an e-book. In most cases – unless your publication is only pamphlet length – it makes sense to publish for both print and e-book. It doesn’t cost you any more to publish in both formats and it makes more sales possible, so it should be a no-brainer. But I’ve always found it easiest to begin with the print book and you can then adapt your finished book to e-format very quickly and easily indeed.

The first and most important thing you want to do is adjust your word processor’s page size to match the page size of the printed book. You are going to have to do this at some point or another and upload a file of the correct size, otherwise it will be rejected; after all, you couldn’t fit a 3′ X 6′ door into a 4′ X 7′ doorframe or vice versa.

The most common size for a printed book, and the one you will probably use if your book is primarily text rather than an art or photography book, is US trade paperback size, which is 6″ X 9″. Fortunately, it’s a piece of cake to adjust your page to this size. If you’re using MS Word, you’ll find the page size and formatting options under the Layout tab. I use Open Office as my word processor because (a) it’s free; (b) it’s great to use and fully-functioned; (c) it automatically embeds all fonts when producing a PDF (we’ll talk about this in a later blog, but this ability is a big plus).

If you’re using MS Word, you can input the page size in inches, but with Open Office you’ll need to convert to centimetres. In Open Office, you choose the Format tab, then click on the Page option, which will open the following dialogue box, which displays all of the essential settings.

So you can see that the metric equivalent to 6″ X 9″ is 15.24cm X 22.86cm. The page should be portrait orientation by default. This will set the size of your page correctly.

In the highlighted option on the right, you’ll notice that I have set the page layout as mirrored. This means that when you set the margins (in the lower left highlighted section), instead of setting left and right margins, you will be setting inner and outer margins.

This is because in a book, the formatting of left hand pages and right hand pages are not the same; they are mirror images of each other. On a left hand page, the left margin is the outer margin, the one which is at the book edge, and the right hand margin is the inner one, nearest the fold in the centre of the book.

You’ll notice I have set the top, bottom and outer margins all as 2.50cm, a good size. But the inner margin is slightly wide, at 2.80cm. This is to allow for the fold in the centre of the book. In practice, when you open the book carefully to read it, without forcing it enough to break the spine, the pages will still look equal, as the extra on the inner margin takes the printed text out of the central fold. It’s a small point, but makes a world of difference to the reading experience and aesthetic quality of the book.

On the same menu, you can choose the Footer tab, which will allow you to display page numbers at the bottom of the page (I’ll discuss exactly how to do this in the next midweek blog). You can also choose to have a Header at the top of the page if you wish (not so crucial as page numbers; sometimes I do this, sometimes I don’t – it depends on the book).

That is all it takes to set up your page format so that you can begin typing and getting that masterwork written.

You do have the option of going into these menus and changing these values at any time, of course. So if you have already finished your manuscript in A4 or Letter paper size, you can reset the page size and the text will all flow into its new configuration. But this will, of course, drastically alter your page count and any carefully constructed page layouts you had made. Once you know what you’re doing, it’s so much easier to set the pages before you start, then you can see the exact space you’re working in.

Next time I’ll look at some of the other essentials you really need to include in your manuscript before self-publishing.