How To Format Your Book For Createspace: Step-By-Step

How’s it going guys and gals?!

I am back with another video/blog post for you guys! Sharing some quick tips and tricks to make your publishing business progress!

In this blog post + video, I will be showing you how to quickly and effortlessly format your book for Createspace.com (The video is at the end of this page).

If you didn’t know, createspace.com is an on-demand printing service owned by Amazon.com. They allow you to publish books, CDs and other products and have them printed on-demand (when someone makes an order. This is a fantastic platform for us publishers, as it allows us to quickly and effortlessly turn our eBook into a paperback and generate additional income from one asset. If you’re not already publishing paperback versions of your book, you need to start now! Paperbacks make up more than 70-80% of my income so you also must get your books on createspace.com.

Now, if you work with us at hotghostwriters.com, you will know that all our books are delivered fully formatted and edited according to what looks best and fits best for the Kindle device. This post is going to teach you to take that file, make a few changes and upload it to Createspace.com ready for printing!

If you are not currently getting your content produced by Hotghostwriter.com, you will still be able to follow these steps and format your book correctly for Createspace!

Let’s get right into it!

IMPORTANT: First thing, make sure you copy the kindle word document so that you can format a new document and have the original kindle version saved.

(By the way the screenshots are in Italian but you will still be able to follow me)

Book Size:

We will start with the most important thing; which is changing the book page size. The most popular and most used page size for a printed book is the 6 x 9. So that’s the first thing we’re going to do.

Here are the simple steps:

1. Hold the CTRL + A to highlight the entire book

2. Click on Layout > Size> go all the way to the bottom and click More Paper Sizes

3. Type in ‘6’ in the top section and ‘9’ at the bottom (if your laptop is in centimeters like mine, type in 15,24 and 22,86)

4. Done!

 

So you can see straightaway that the book size shrinks and the content still fits pretty well, and that’s step number one complete.

 

Image Size:

Step two is ensuring that any images are no wider than 12cm, 10cm is best for me in terms of width, so that image fits well on the page and doesn’t exceed the border when printing.

Here are the simple steps:

1. Click on the picture
2. Click on Format
3. Enter ‘10cm’ in the width box

4. Ensure that the image is centered
5. Ensure the image indentation is set to the neutral point in the ruler

6. Done!

Links:

Next thing is ensuring that you have no clickable hyperlinks in your book. I tend to have many links in my book directing my readers to other sources or simply leading them to an online offer. You want to ensure those links are visible since a paperback reader cannot click on the book. Kindle devices use the internet so people can be taken to the webpage but remember to have the full link when publishing your paperback.

So don’t have this:

Have this:

Awesome!

Page Numbers:

Now page numbers, that’s very important. On Kindle, we don’t advise adding page numbers because the size of the pages are completely different once your book is viewed on a Kindle device, so the page numbers are completely different. However on paperback, you want to ensure that you do add page numbers to your books and to do that it is very simple:

1. Click on Insert
2. Then click on Insert Page Numbers
3. Hover over Bottom
4. And click on the 2^nd option with the numbers in the center

5. Tick the box Different First Page to remove the page 1 number (You don’t add page #1 to books)
6. Click on the red ‘X’

7. Done! Awesome.

Table of Contents:

So we added page numbers, great. The next thing is the Table of Contents, now the table of contents that we add to our client’s books have no page numbers, the same reason that I mentioned before. What you can do is simply click on the table of contents and then click on Update Table on the top left. The page numbers should then be added for you.

If you want to add a new Table of Contents, do the following:

1. Click on References
2. Click on Table of Contents on the left
3. Select the Automatic Table 2

4. Make sure it fits well on the page
5. Done!

Page Breaks:

We’re almost done. The next thing is the use of proper page breaks. Page breaks allow you to separate the pages of your book and ensure everything is well presented.

Once you have adjusted the book to 6 x 9, whatever you see in the document is how it will be printed, so ensure that you like the way it looks. Ensure there are no blank pages and ensure that everything looks neat.

To add page breaks, simply click on the area you wish to separate and click CTRL + ENTER.

You can view your page breaks by clicking on the Show All icon

Save to PDF:

Finally, once you’ve gone through everything and are happy with how everything looks, we are going to save your book as a PDF. The reason why you want to convert it to PDF is that that’s the easiest way to upload the file. If you upload the Word document, Createspace will automatically convert your book to PDF which takes extra time. Make the process quicker and upload a PDF.

To do this:

1. Click File
2. Click on Save As
3. Choose PDF from the drop-down menu
4. Click Save
5. And we’re done!

Did you know that when you order your books with us and upgrade to one of our Premium Packages, we take care of CreateSpace formatting for you? 

Hotghostwriter.com is a one-stop ghostwriting service for Kindle/Self-Publishers.

We house some of the most talented and skilled writers in both non-fiction and fiction topics and we aim to write books that will blow your readers away and hopefully get you to that best-seller status.

Your books will be written by a Native English writer, be free from plagiarism and fully edited and proofread by our in-house editing team before being delivered. Your books will also be fully formatted for Kindle as standard (and other digital publishing platforms) and ready-to-publish so that you can get your books on the market quickly and not have to worry about formatting. When you upgrade to one of our packages we will take care of CreateSpace formatting, eBook and Createspace cover design, HTML description writing and more!

There is no other service or freelancer that is as committed to Kindle Publishers like Hotghostwriter.com. Our entire focus is to ensure that you put out great books and scale your income and library effortlessly.

Click here to get started now or click here to contact us if you have any questions. We will be glad to assist you!

 

Now, here is me going through the CreateSpace formatting process:

So that there guys is a simple way to take your Kindle book and convert it into a print-ready book for Createspace! I hope you got some value from that.

For more tips and resources on self-publishing, Learn more about our Services, check the HotGhostWriter blog, join my Facebook Kindle mastermind group, subscribe to my YouTube channel and like our Hotghostwriter.com page on Facebook.

– Delfim Alvaro

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