BitBoR: Publishing Process Update 2

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 of 11pt, the book comes in at 768 pages.

Clearly I'll have to use a larger print format, because the cost of that smaller book would be prohibitive.

I just wanted to share, because I find all of this stuff both frustrating and fascinating.

Yet another reason authors speak in Word Count, because that doesn’t change just because you made the book smaller.

222k words, for those that are curious.

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