What Should You Think About When Publishing?

Whether you’re self-publishing or working with a publisher, there’s a lot of things to consider in terms of design and structure before getting your book out. Michelle Vandepas, a publishing industry veteran, breaks it down for you in this episode.

Full Transcript:

I’m Michelle Vandepas, co-founder of GracePoint Publishing, and also one of the publishers, and I want to share with you today just a few things that you want to think about when you get ready to publish your book. One of the things is book sizes, and I brought with me some books that I’ve published over the last year or so and they’re all different sized books. How you layout and choose and determine the size of your book, maybe the amount of words in your book, right? Because you want to make sure that your book has enough pages to be able to fit the spine, and the name of your book on the spine, so if you have a short amount of words, you’re not going to be able to have a spine. I brought along this tiny little booklet that you can see it’s just stapled here, real small book that isn’t big enough, but very powerful words. Great book, but not big enough to have a spine. Small books are totally publishable. They’re great to put in your purse or your pocket, take with you, have in your car, have in your desk, be able to look at and refer to, but is a different style of book, right? So, other things that you want to think about when you’re publishing: will you be publishing in color or not, do you have images inside your book because it will change the cost of your book and how you layout, typography – what fonts you’re going to use. You want to make sure you’re laying out so that the first chapter, it shows when you open up for chapters. How are you going to have the sentences? How are you gonna have the title of the chapter? Are you going to have headers and foots? Are you gonna have page numbers? All these things are things that you think about when go to publishing stage; whether you’re self-publishing, working with the publisher, or any other model. So, what I recommend is that you go to a bookstore or go to your bookshelf and your favorite books, and look at them. Study them to see what book covers you like, what typography you like, is each chapter indented, do you have drop caps, do have the title of the book at the top of the page? Think about these things and then work with your publisher to get the best book that you can publish.