Have you ever opened up a book and decided to read it because the font was too small, the spacing was too tight, or the text just looked hard to read? This is something that happens more often than you may think. As an indie author, you work months, even years, writing your book, you don't want someone to reject it because the book formatting is a mess. Today I'm talking about the common book formatting mistakes self-published authors are making, and the extremely simple solutions you can do to fix these errors. We'll be talking about Industry standards that are expected when formatting your book and how to keep the text in your book looking clean and professional, and when you're formatting your book for print.
Learn how to format your book in Adobe InDesign:
Watch my tutorial on book formatting using Microsoft Word:
0:00 – Intro
2:27 – Font
3:40 – Font size
4:48 – Line spacing
5:49 – Letter spacing
7:37 – Alignment
8:20 – Headers & footers
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Mandi Lynn published her first novel when she was seventeen. The author of multiple books, Mandi spends her days continuing to write and creating YouTube videos to help other writers achieve their dreams of seeing their books published. Mandi is the owner of Stone Ridge Books, a company that works to help authors bring their books to life through cover design and digital book marketing. She is also the creator of The Book Launch Planner, a planner designed to help authors publish and market their books. When she’s not creating, you can find Mandi exploring her backyard or getting lost in the woods.
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Title:
6 Simple Book Formatting Mistakes Indie Authors Need to Avoid & How to Fix it!
Search terms: how to format a book, how to format a novel, book formatting tutorial
this stuff is important, im glad youve made a video. ive had to slowly figure things out as I go LOL its def a learning process. Thanks Mandi !
Happy to share what I’ve learned along the way!
Oh, the fun of adjusting tracking and kerning! I’m doing it right now. Forty chapters of a 90K-word novel. 🤩
Great video 👍 I personally love Vellum and Scrivener for my books as they work for me, and I find them easy to use. I sometimes use MS Word, but find it so tricky! I end up with blank pages I can’t delete, and have trouble adding page numbers.
I once brought a romance novel from a favourite author of mine, and it was unreadable. There were literally no paragraphs, it all read as a massive chunk of text, and the font size was tiny!
50% of a 10 point font is 15 points, not 20.
Sorry, mom brain moment 🫣
Great advice – but you pronounce it “ledd-ing” not “lee-ding” because the word is from the days when printers put strips of lead between the lines of type.
Appreciate the correction! That’s a bad habit of mine
@@MandiLynnWrites Sorry to be pedantic!!! I’m a graphic designer so I always catch that. Thanks for the excellent info – your videos have been a lifesaver for me. 🙂
Great info
Thank you! I have watched other videos on formatting and the skip over things like font size and line spacing. I guess they assume everyone knows those things. Thank you for not skipping the basics!
I learned a lot about book formatting. Most of my formatting was through Microsoft Word, and thus complex. I would like to try Adobe InDesign, to give it a chance. Thank you for sharing this great information.
A very useful video,Mandi.Thank you.
I’m currently working on typesetting so this advice is timely. Although I think this will be the first and last time I ever do this myself.
I would BEG everyone when choosing a font for writing your novel, to PLEASE compare fonts before you make your FINAL CHOICE.
Personally, I LOVE ‘Book Antiqua.’ ❤❤❤
Adobe scrape your intellectual property to train AI.
You should have mentioned this.
Thank you. I am adding this to my formatting list!
I recently came across another person on youtube talking about formatting who recommended NOT using Times New Roman…but when I first started writing, my resources recommended it, and it is what I have been using for years. I was relieved to hear you suggest it…and wonder why that person is against it. (and thank you for the tip about the spacing between words/letters. It might have saved me some page count on my longer books!)
Could these tips also apply to Google Docs? That’s the programme I use to write my books (haven’t used Microsoft Word in ages!)
Atticus is excellent.
My first draft manuscript was in Times New Roman just because it was the default font. When I started formatting I changed over to Adobe Caslon Pro, and wow! Then it looked like a book! Not a fan of TNR.
My personal favorite if Book Antiqua!
While I do think there is a place for large print books, I understand your point.
Do you have a suggestion for dyslexia -friendly font? I don’t know if I want to use one but I am curious what is out there. Because I have heard that most of them are more wild than simple.
I would say I would be most concerned with widows is the end of a chapter and for both Orphans and Widows if it is a change in medium. I have two stories, not to formatting but one is written and one I am still working on, that have quite a bit of text messaging. I would not want that to be orphaned or widowed. I could also see it for emails, articles, work assignments, excerpts from books (hopefully not copyrighted if not original excerpts) or other similar things.
Hi. I was a literacy tutor for a few years. The main thing for dyslexic readers is that letters are clearly differentiated and simple – so none of the fonts with glyphs: those curly little extras at the start and end of some letters. Also dyslexic readers tend to need more white space, less content on a page. That said, dyslexia is a wide catchment term and there are many forms of neurodivergence, in terms of how it presents for each person. For some people, white background is hard on their senses. Contrast between background and the typed words can be important too. Hope that’s some help. There are online guides for this sort of thing, thankfully!
I have never liked MS Word, for home use or business, so never bothered with it for my writing. I’ve never heard of Adobe InDesign. I’ll go look at that now. Thanks for all this free and extremely useful info and advice.
I’m planning on translating my novel into Japanese since it’s set there and I want to have it sold in Japan. Can you go over formatting a book for right to left reading.