The Ayrelon Times

Let’s talk about Adobe InDesign… Formatting a novel for both e-book and print is tedious. There! I said it! You authors out there know what I’m talking about. There are so many facets that affect how you get it done, and how successful you’ll be at it. Where are you publishing? How long is your novel? How many chapters did you break it into? Do you use Mac or Windows? Can you afford a software license for the fancy stuff? Can you get by with free formatting processes? Does your book include graphics, or little poems/parables at the start of each chapter (like Bathed in the Blood of Ravens)? Is it Tuesday? No matter what system you choose—and you’ll likely try several before you settle on one—there is a learning curve. A learning curve that you must fit into your schedule between any day job you might have, your family time, attempting to continue writing, whatever time you’re spending on marketing yourself and your novel… the list goes on and on. Through experimentation, scouring of bl...

Today I finished the final editing pass on Bathed in the Blood of Ravens. After receiving the last of my Beta Reader feedback last week, I spent most of my evenings and the entire weekend working on finishing touches, and even added some new content. Now I dive head first into the self publishing process, and it’s going to be a bumpy ride. I just spent the last few hours repeatedly exporting to Word from Scrivener, to play with initial formatting. Then I fell down the rabbit hole of formatting my book for print. Paper sizes, margins, gutters, font sizes, white space, section breaks… whew! My lovely wife and I are trying to decide which size to target, because that has a dramatic impact on page count. Remember those smaller paperbacks that seemed so common in the 80's and 90's? Mmhm. Those. 4.2x7 inches, according to my calipers. Page count for Blood of Ravens at that size, with 9pt font mind you, comes in at a whopping 1022. Meanwhile, at 6x9 inches with a slightly larger font ...