Support for Indie Authors discussion

Hi,

What are suggestions on Paperback and Hardcover book sizes? I had a sample sent to me of my first novel from Lulu, but it reminded me more of a children's book (bigger pages, bigger font) than a new adult/romance novel.

Thanks,

KR

Speaking only for myself and my spouse, we both prefer a paperback that's smaller. Lulu seems to use trade paperback sizes, or 6" x 9". If you have a chance to make paperbacks smaller and hardcovers larger, then do it. Try to copy the "pocket books" model as much as possible. It makes the books easier to carry. Tweaking the font is worthwhile, something around 10 point can work well.

As a final tip, if you didn't know this already, do all your final editing with your page size in your word processor set to exactly what your final size is going to be. That way you can do a better job of guessing what your product will look like.

For example, with "Dice of Fate," I set the margins to 3/4 of an inch, the font size to 10 or 11 point, and the page size to 6 by 9. Then when I did all my editing I had a good idea of where my paragraphs would fall.

Hope this helps a little.

Thanks! The first sample from Lulu was 6x9 and it just seemed big. I think I'm going to try a smaller size.

It depends on how long your book is, too, and how thick you want it to be. If your book is short, then a large trade paperback size may make it way thinner than you like, whereas if it is very long, a big size is good. If you want it to look like a nice thick book, you may want a smaller size.

My book is 95,000 words. I used a relatively large font (11 pt) because it is a YA book. Set to 5.5 X 8.5, it comes t o 372 pages and I feel that it is a good thickness - not too thin, but not intimidatingly large, either.

What I did was look through my own book shelf, find a book that looked like what I wanted, and measured it.

What about line spacing? I'm about to format and read single space is too tight and 1.2 to 1.5 is preferable. Thoughts?

I used the createspace template for that and they used a 5 pt spacing by default. It looks like more than single spacing but not as much as one and a half.

After looking through the templates on Createspace, I'm using 5x8.5 with 1.25 line spacing.

I use US Trade size on Lulu, and set my novel in Microsoft Word to the proper paper size with 1.00 spacing. I have yet to tackle the hardcover aspect, just trying to reaffirm the appeal to trade size.

US Trade size is great, IF my first published work was longer. The first thing I published was a novella, so it wasn't a huge length. The book printed quite thin due to this, which is why I'm going with smaller.