If you’re self-publishing your book for the first time, it’s easy to miss the amount of work that goes into creating that perfect layout. Having a professional book layout is as important as the cover design of your book as it directly impacts readability. The perfect layout also ensures that your content does not get cut off during printing or your images/tables do not extend beyond the edges of the page. While creating your book’s layout, you would have to decide what fonts to use, what sections to have, how to add images, headings, front matter, end-matter, section breaks - It’s a lot of work.
Fortunately, for you, we have made it so much easier to create a professional layout for your dream book. We’ve created easy-to-use Microsoft Word templates with the right margins, spacing, fonts, and layout in several book sizes. You can download these templates here.
Using our templates is super easy. Also, we’ve designed these templates to match international book publishing standards that most publishers follow. Read on to find a step by step guide to creating your book’s Interior Layout.
What type of books are these templates suitable for?
These templates are most suitable for books that have a combination of text and images, tabular columns, charts, and other types of creatives. For example, some genres these templates would be suitable for are some Non-Fiction Books, Academic Books, Recipe Books, etc.
If your book only has text and very few images (10 images or less)- like most Fiction books, Non-Fiction books, and Poetry, we strongly recommend that you use our Online Book Interior Formatting Tool and Online Cover Creator on the Notion Press Publishing Platform.
We’ve broken this guide down to three areas of focus-
The Parts of a Book
Steps to create your Interior File
Important Book Layout Rules you should follow.
First things first! You need to know the different parts of a book before you can start creating your layout.
Parts of A Book
Front Matter
No book opens directly to Chapter 1. All books start with a Title Page (the first page), the copyrights page, dedication, contents, foreword, preface, acknowledgments, etc. In the templates, we’ve made provisions for you to add any of these front matter sections and also other front matter sections you wish to have that are not mentioned here. If you’re unsure of what sections to pick for your book, you can have these essential front matter sections in your book.
Title Page
The Copyrights Page (We’ve already added this for you)
The Dedication
Table of Contents and
The Acknowledgement
The template has other sections as well, but if you do not wish to include them in your book, all you have to do is delete them.
Content / Body Text
The Content or the Body of your book is the text you have, the images, graphs, or charts you want to have inside your book to tell your story or share your knowledge or to teach readers about your field of expertise.
This usually includes part pages, chapters, and text subdivisions. In the templates, you can assign up to four different heading levels within chapters. These can be accessed from the Styles gallery (discussed in the next section) in each template.
End Matter
The end matter consists of sections like the epilogue, glossary, appendix, references, index, etc. Academic books usually have extensive end matter sections that provide additional information on the text given in the book. Just like the front matter, you can delete the sections you don’t want.
Styles gallery
Each passage or heading with special formatting can be assigned as a style to the Styles gallery. This style can then be reused for subsequent sections. We’ve pre-loaded all templates with various styles for headings, passages, quotes, etc. This feature is especially useful to maintain uniformity in books that have multiple heading levels and body text formatting.
For example, the first heading in a chapter is assigned the style ‘Heading 1’, the next level heading ‘Heading 2’ and so on. To apply a heading style to a phrase all you need to do is select the phrase and choose the heading style from the styles gallery as seen below.
The text within a chapter can also be given styles. The first paragraph after a heading or subheading is usually given a flush left alignment, whereas subsequent paragraphs are given slight indents. We’ve created a style called ‘normal_without indent’ for first paragraphs and ‘normal_indent’ for subsequent paragraphs. Assign the style ‘normal_without indent’ for first paragraphs and ‘normal_indent’ for all other paragraphs.
Here’s a full list of different parts of a chapter and it’s style names-
Book Title- Book title_front page
Book SubTitle- Book Subtitle_front page
Author Name- Author name_ front page
Copyright- Copyright content
Dedication - Dedication text
Chapter Title- Heading 1
Heading - Heading 2
Subheading- Heading 3
Chapter/Section Text First Paragraph - normal_without indent
Chapter/Section Text Remaining Paragraphs - normal_indent
Image Descriptions/Caption/Legend - Image_caption
Headers and pages numbers
Headers in a book’s page usually have the book’s title and/or author’s name/chapters name, and page numbers. Setting headers and page numbers in a book is quite tricky. Page numbers in the front matter are usually Roman numerals (i, ii, iii, iv, etc). Page numbers restart from one in the body text and are usually Arabic numerals (1,2,3,4,etc.).
Please note: The first page of a new section/chapter will not contain a page number or a header.
In the front matter and end matter, headers on both the left and right side pages of the book usually consist of only the name of that particular section. For example, the headers on both the left and right side pages of the Foreword would be ‘Foreword’. This is different in the body text. The left side page headers are usually the title of the book and the right side page headers are either the author's name or the name of the chapter. Since the templates have been pre-set according to these rules, all you would have to do is replace the text in the headers of one right side page and one left side page in the body text and the rest will automatically flow.
Section breaks
To start a new chapter or section in a new page, it’s always best to add section breaks. These can be found in the Page Layout tab in Microsoft Word. To start a new page on an even page, that is a left side page, add an even page break. To start a new page on an odd page, that is a right side page, add an odd page break. These have already been added in the templates; be sure to add odd page breaks when you add new chapters.
Adding Images
If you wish to add images to your book. Be sure to insert images with at least a resolution of 300 dpi.
To add images, click on the “Insert” tab on Microsoft Word >> click on Picture >> and select the image from your computer.
Remember- If you have chosen the Black and White Interior Option on the Notion Press Platform, the book will be printed in Black and White even though the images you add are in color. Choose the full-color option when you set up the book on the platform if you want your book to have color images.
Also, please note that making the book full-color would substantially increase the printing cost and, therefore, the MRP of the book.
If you have more than one image in the book, be sure to number the images as in the image below.
Now that you know the different sections, here’s the order of operations so you can begin formatting your book.
Step 1: Adding Content
First add all your content- Text, images, graphs, charts, etc. In the template, you’ll find that we’ve already chapter templates. Simply copy and paste all your content into these chapters. Add section breaks wherever necessary.
Add your Front Matter (Book Title, Dedication, Foreword, Preface, etc.) and your End Matter (epilogue, glossary, appendix, references, index, etc.)
Also, add the headers and footers wherever applicable.
Step 2: Format your Content
Once you have added your content, you can begin formatting your content by adding styles. Each part of a chapter has a style. Make sure you format all your pages, right from the Title Page to the End Matter. You can use the checklist mentioned under Styles Gallery to do this.
Step 3: Final Checks and Updates
Once you’ve added all the chapters and formatted them, do the following-
Update the contents page by right-clicking inside the field and selecting the ‘Update field’.
Check all the Headers and Footers in your chapters to see if they have the correct information and that it matches the content on that page.
Proofread your book to check for any errors.
Save the file as a PDF to upload it for publishing on the File Upload option under the Interior Design section on the Notion Press Publishing Platform.
Rules of thumb to follow when creating your book’s layout
Before you start doing any of the above, create a folder and save this document in that folder. Don’t forget to Name the folder.
Save your file often. Being a little paranoid about this will ensure you don’t end up having to do this entire exercise all over again from scratch.
Make sure to read the instructions mentioned in the downloaded template before you start each section
Once you do this, you will have created a professional layout for your book!