Book Formatting FAQ

How does your service work?

Our book formatting page provides a full description of our service – what we need from you to get started, our pricing mechanism, the steps we take to format your book, exactly what you receive back and a selection of examples and customer testimonials.

How do you price different book sizes?

Since there is so much variation in manuscripts we price by an industry standard book page. This is defined as 6" x 9" with standard margins of roughly one ninth – 0.67" left and right, 0.75" top and 0.83" bottom. The page has running headers for book and chapter titles and page numbering in the footer. The font is Adobe Garamond Pro at 12/14.4pt, which is a 12pt font in a 14.4pt (or 5 lines per inch) spacing. At these settings a page of solid text has 36 lines and around 65 characters per line.

The actual pages of your book may be very different in terms of page size, margins and font settings but using this standard pricing mechanism helps us to keep the prices fair for everyone.

Can I submit my book in hardcopy format?

It’s easier if the book is available as a softcopy manuscript, but sometimes when revising an older book it is only available as a printed book. We have the facilities to scan your book and then use OCR software in order to get it into an editable form. Just email us and we’ll let you know where to send it. Please be aware that depending on the book binding we often have to break the book in order to scan it accurately.

Following OCR we will clean up the text by removing additional paragraph marks, soft-hyphens, and extraneous page breaks before finally performing a spell-check to prepare the text for typesetting. Our price for this service depends on the quality of the scanned copies, layout complexities like tables/columns and special characters in equations and foreign languages.

Will the typesetting alter my words?

No. Typesetting is about the layout of your text, not the contents. However, we may make a few amendments to ensure text is consistent. These include ensuring headings are all cased in the same way, there are no spaces before full stops, opening quote marks have matching closed quote marks, all sentences end with punctuation and all punctuation is followed by a single space. In addition if you have used underlining or bold type in ordinary sentences we will exchange this for italics which is standard typesetting practice.

Can you help me prepare an index?

Wordzworth do not provide indexing services. However, we are happy to insert and format your index once it has been produced. If you are planning to have an index produced for your book, do not start the process until the exact page count has been fully finalised. Otherwise there is likely to be unnecessary and potentially expensive rework to your index.

Fully indexing a book is an extremely time-consuming, manual process. Once you have identified every instance of a key term throughout your manuscript you will need to list out all the page numbers. Then you will need to search for all alternative ways in which the key term could be phrased i.e. mice, mouse, small rodent etc. The process will need to be repeated for every phrase you wish to index. We would strongly recommend hiring a professional indexer with the skills to find and categorize concepts quickly and are happy to provide recommendations upon request (typical prices between $3.20 USD – $6.40 USD per page).

What is your changes policy?

Once your book is formatted, it is sent to you for review. Should you find any errors at this stage they will fall into one of three categories: our errors, your errors and styling alterations.

Please note: Change requests must be submitted within one month.

Our Errors – Our experts format the majority of texts without issue. However, on occasion, particularly for complex texts it is possible for misinterpretation to occur. If you find certain elements of your manuscript such as numbering schemes or heading levels are incorrect – don’t worry. The book is now consistently styled and this is easy for us to amend. If you would like us to produce an extended table of contents showing your heading levels to aid you in marking which ones need changing, just let us know.

Your Errors – Formatted manuscripts are often so much clearer that authors suddenly spot their own mistakes in the text. If you find you have made a few typos in your book files and need them amended then this is typically not a problem. If however you wish to make a significant number of changes to a book we have already formatted then there will be an additional charge for this work. The time and price for this can be kept to a minimum if we send you a file to make your changes in. We then compare the updated document to your book file and make any necessary edits, regenerate the TOC, adjust and rebalance pages. Our minimum changes fee is $48 USD.

Styling Alterations – Once your book has been formatted every heading, list and paragraph is styled consistently. If you wish to change the way something looks (e.g. increase the spacing between bullets) one click will ripple this change through all sections of your book. So simply collect your styling changes together in a single email and we will happily make them free of charge. Please allow time for changes to be made.

How are chapter breaks formatted?

We will start new sections and chapters on a recto (right hand) page as standard for most books. If you prefer to have new chapters starting on the page on which they fall, i.e. a mixture of recto and verso pages, just let us know and we can apply the setting throughout.

How are pages balanced?

Balancing the pages of a book is a trade-off between a number of factors: avoiding widows and orphans (short lone lines of text at the top or bottoms of pages), ensuring the pages are evened out to similar lengths, avoiding large areas of empty white space and preventing splits in the middle of lists/tables by keeping them together on the page. We will use a number of techniques to balance pages in a way that we believe suits your particular book. If you have a different preference simply let us know.

How does payment work?

Thanks to PayPal customers are able to make payments with any debit card, credit card or their PayPal account. These can be made in any currency, safely and securely without us ever needing to receive any of your details. When we return your document for review we will include a Pay Now link. Once you’re happy with your job, simply click the link and follow the instructions.

Can you help with print and distribution?

When printing your book you cannot just take it to your local print shop. You will need to send it to a speciality book printing house that understands the particular layout of book pages, will generate a barcode incorporating your ISBN, provide full instructions for the layout of cover files for their presses and have experience professionally binding the finished article.

If you have established yourself as a publishing house then we would strongly recommend using Lightning Source for printing and distribution. We have an excellent relationship with the company and have received a great deal of positive feedback from our customers.

We hope to establish a partnership with Lightning Source to offer this service to individual authors soon.