Print-on-Demand Manuscript Preparation
If you've been following this guide so far you should now have a manuscript set up for producing a book in paper format. It will need a few tweaks before it can be sent to a print-on-demand publisher. These won't take long.
Make a copy of your manuscript and save it as [your title]-print.docx
It helps if you know a little about how a book is constructed. The longest lasting books are hardbacks where the pages are stitched together. Paperbacks and a cheaper form of hardback are produced by gluing the inside edge of the book into the spine. If you examine a hardback book you should be able to see that they are made up as follows
The text block, the pages containing text, is made up of 'signatures'; 4 - 7 sheets of paper, printed on each side, folded and stiched together. If you find the centre of a signature, you should be able to see the stitches holding it together.
Paperbacks are a simpler construction but the signatures are not stitched. Instead the folded edge is guilotined off, the cut end roughened, and a strong but flexible glue is used to fasten them inside a thin card cover. Paperbacks normally won't include the half title page unless you have chosen to include a frontispiece which would be printed on the other side of the half title sheet.
Assuming a signature made up of five sheets, that would contain 20 pages of text. If this signature was Chapter 1 the pages would be in this order:
On the outside of the fold page 1 and page 20 are on the outside sheet with page 2 and 19 on the other side. Page 1 will always be on the right hand side when the 'signature' is closed.
Remember that extra blank page added to a MS Word document so that we could display pages on the correct sides in a two page spread? We'll need to delete that.
Now re-save the document as [your title]-print.docx
Then use 'Save as...' to save it again as the same filename but this time as a PDF file - [your title]-print.pdf When doing this click the 'More options' link and then the 'Options' button and make sure you are saving for 'Standard (online and printing)' and 'PDF/A compliant' and 'Optimise for image quality' are both checked.
Once you have saved the PDF you are ready to submit it to print-on-demand services. I'll detail three of them.
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Want to produce a paperback book at home yourself?
Paperbacks are relatively simple to make at home if you want just a few copies. There are many bookbinding sites on the Web which will teach you how to do this. They are the experts - not me so I'll give you a link to a Youtube video rather than telling you how. You would need to print the pages yourself; I suggest a laser printer for this.
How to make a paperback book by hand
Need a heavy duty Guillotine? Try this one.
