An e-book is not hard if the finished product is only a 1, 2 or 3 pages to 85,86, 87 pages. These type of e-books can be printed on an inkjet or laser printer at home (one could print it at work, ask the boss if it’s okay!)
Creating your next e-book as a hard copy to be found at the local book store or library should be easy. Books sold at the bookstore or found on the shelves of a library, chances are the finished product was printed at a commercial printer. An incorrect number of pages could be an issue. The easiest method is to insert blank pages into the book. The pre-press department should be giving you the heads up with the problems on hand. You could meet the expectations by learning and gain the essential page layout skills that will enable your next book to excel. This article isn’t about specific topics or ideas to write about for e-books. It’s essentially telling you how to set-up the finished product if you decide to make it a coffee-table book.
eBook Challenge?
Create an e-book that can be ready for commercial presses or home printer. Now, look around you. Do you see a magazine? A paper book? An instructional manual to an appliance, a newspaper or a weekly grocery flyer. If it’s a multi-page document, a commercial printer printed it. How do I know?
eBook Math
As long as you know, simple math such as division, this is going to be a snap. If not, grab your calculator.
Let’s grab that magazine or book* beside you. Count how many pages it has. Include the front and back cover, and the inside front and inside back cover too. Take the number of pages in the magazine or book and divide it by four (4). That’s right, divisible by four!
Now look around you, majority of the printed pieces are stapled in the middle (saddle-stitched bindery—each spread is made up of four pages). Therefore, you need to have a page count based on four pages to fill the spread count. So, the magazine am reading is 72 pages / 4 = 18 spreads. With a saddle-stitch book, you can’t have missing pages; pages can be blank, but they must be in your layout.
*Note: If you live in a world of tablets and mobile devices, and there isn’t a hard-copy around to count the number of pages, go to Amazon. Type in Best Sellers Books in the search field and choose any book on the page. Scroll down until you see the ‘Product details’ of the book and you should see the number of pages. Here, divide by four.
Ebook Solution
Confused? It has to do with the bindery method that you have chosen. Typically those romance or mystery novels found on the shelves of a store’s book aisle have the pages and the cover glued together along the spine (called perfect binding). It’s perfectly normal for these books to have page counts be divisible by 2. Except that sometimes it can be more cost-effective to have your page count divisible by four.
If In Doubt
Check with your commercial printer, they may have ways to lower the costs of your finished product too. Let’s do it right the first time around—if you decide to create an odd number of pages, and then a month later, you decide you want to sell this same book on Amazon; you may need to go back and fix the number of pages. If you create your book with the ‘divisible by 4’ principle on the get-go, you will always have a book ready to be printed the correct way!
Watch this page for templates!