Professional book cover design, interior formatting, and visual branding for authors.
22 articles
Everything that belongs on the back cover of a book: the blurb, the ISBN barcode, a short bio, praise, the price and your imprint, plus what Amazon KDP and IngramSpark need for the barcode area.
How to make a table of contents in Word for your book: Heading styles, an automatic TOC, chapter-only lists, and the difference between a clickable Kindle TOC and a page-number print TOC.
CMYK or RGB for your book cover? What KDP and IngramSpark ask for, why bright screen colours go dull in print, and how to check and convert in Canva, Photoshop and Affinity.
Matte or glossy? How each book cover finish looks and wears, which genres tend to use which, and exactly what Amazon KDP and IngramSpark offer for paperbacks and hardcovers.
The parts of a book, outside and in: covers, spine, joint and hinge, head, tail and fore-edge, endpapers and flaps, then front matter, body and back matter, all labelled in plain English.
What widows and orphans are in typesetting, how to tell them apart from runts, and how to fix them in Word and InDesign, plus why KDP will never flag them for you.
The main types of book binding explained for self-publishers: perfect bound paperbacks, case bound hardcovers, saddle stitch booklets and coil binding, with the page-count limits and what KDP, IngramSpark and Lulu actually offer.
What interior book design covers, from trim size, margins and fonts to running heads and chapter openers, how to spot an amateur interior, and when to do it yourself or hire a designer.
How to calculate your book's spine width and full-wrap cover size for KDP and IngramSpark: the official per-page figures, bleed, spine text minimums and worked examples in inches and millimetres.
What typesetting means for self-published books, how it differs from formatting, and when a Word layout is enough versus a page-by-page InDesign interior for KDP and IngramSpark.
Hardcover vs paperback for self-published authors: what each costs to print on KDP, what you earn per copy, KDP case laminate vs IngramSpark jackets, ISBNs, and which format to print first.
The front matter of a book in the right order: half title, title page, copyright page, dedication, contents and more, plus back matter, page numbering and a printable checklist.
