Smarter CreateSpace Formatting for Better Royalties

While I always encourage writers, self-published or not, to write concisely, even a book without wasted words may run long. All the better, if you have an epic story that’s full of nothing but the good stuff! Still, you don’t want to overcharge readers no matter how good the stuff is, and after all your hard work, you’d probably like to earn a reasonable royalty per copy sold. Luckily, you can make this happen with a few simple adjustments to your formatting. When calculating royalties, CreateSpace (like Lulu) deducts from the author’s share per page. Thus, books with a lower pagecount get a considerably better share of royalties, and can even charge a much lower cover price. This is a win for both self-publishing authors and for readers, not to mention it saves a few more trees from early death.

As an experiment, I ran one of my own manuscripts through a number of formatting changes and kept track of the pagecount. I managed to cut it in half (more than half, actually—from 634 to 250) without doing anything particularly arcane or painful. And the final formatting looks much more professional!

The entire walkthrough, with pictures, is here on my blogspot: http://theresearkenberg.blogspot.com/2013/09/print-on-demand-formatting-for-better.html