When is a good time to use Microsoft word to lay out my book?Simply put… Never!! To put it another way, Microsoft anything does not work very well with any printing process with the exception of your desktop printer. Bill Gates started off as a computer geek, not a commercial book printer. Word and Word Perfect are both word processing programs. As word processing programs they both do a good job of processing words. Spell check… grammar check… thesaurus… all great tools to help you write a better manuscript. However, when it’s time to turn your manuscript into a book you will be wasting a lot of time and effort trying to make a word processing program act like a page layout program.The primary problem is that a word processing file is a single “living” document. A small move in any part of the document can affect the layout throughout the entire document. Every time a change is made, the entire document “reflows”. This also occurs when you move your document from one computer to another depending to the user’s personal settings. A word document can be converted to a PDF document (a file format that commercial printers can use) but you usually have the same problem in making the conversion. A 256 page word document can all of a sudden turn into a 292 page PDF document. You may struggle for dozens of hours trying to jerry rig your document to “look” like the book layout on your screen, only to find that once you convert the file to PDF for printing, the result is a jumbled mess.

If you really have the urge to design and lay out your book, you’ll need to invest in a page layout program like Quark or PageMaker and learn how to use them. These are fairly expensive programs and not particularly easy for the novice to understand. I know plenty of authors who have gone this way and found the experience to be quite personally rewarding.

However if this doesn’t sound exciting, you can do a little shopping and discover that the price to have your book professionally designed and laid out does not cost as much as buying the layout program. In my opinion, you will be much better off saving the money, time and aggravation and investing it in a marketing program for your book.
My personal favorite designer is Jonathan Gullery, whom I have been working with for over 20 years. He is quite talented, easy to work with and is very reasonably priced. You can get a complete design and layout of a 256 page book for about $250. He will also design a book cover or dust jacket for another $250.
You can visit him at www.budgetbookdesign.com.

If you have a question pertaining to the publishing production process, please feel free to contact me at ron@rjcom.com.

Last 5 posts by Ron Pramschufer

• I want to self-publish a book. Where do I start? - May 29th, 2008
• What do you think about Amazon’s announcement that small publishers need to print with their printer in order to be listed on Amazon? - April 17th, 2008
• What are the steps are involved in Self-Publishing a book? - March 24th, 2008
• Do you know any good book printers? - February 11th, 2008
• What do you think of Facebook as a marketing tool for self-published books? - December 5th, 2007