When an author first considers publishing a new work it can be in many forms, from just a concept with a collection of notes to a fully typed and organized manuscript. If the work is not yet complete either due to lack of typing skills, grammatical problems, lack of information, or other basic problems we have provided links to help solve those problems. If an author is new to the field and simply does not understand even the basic language of publishing there are sources here to educate not only the language but how a book is organized, the steps required to move it from the desktop to the bookshelf. The goal is to move the work whatever its current status into a format, which can be sent to a publisher, or be self-published. Whatever the experience the author has had good resources are a must in writing. Links to resources that will aid you getting the book properly into text form can be found here: Basics

      Once the text is complete, grammatically correct, and separated into appropriate chapters the formatting is relatively easy. A good starting point is to understand how a book is organized in the standard way. Most books have a standard order to the layout. This is as follows:

      The front pages in a book, those before the main body of the text, are like the opening credits in a movie. They are there to allow the author to inform the reader about the title, authorship, proprietary and copyright information, thank those who contributed to the authors work, and to provide a navigation tool in the form of a Table of Contents, and preface the work with an introduction. Please be advised that these are guidelines based on industry standards and not strict requirements. The actual numerals of the opening pages are not normally Arabic numerals but Roman numerals or some other numeral system. Arabic numerals generally start at the introduction.

 

Basic Book Layout

Page 1 - The Title Page
      The first page of a book quite naturally contains all pertinent proprietary information:
            The Title - The full book title and any subtitles.
            The Author - The real full name of the author, or authors, or a Pseudonym*, AKA,
            Pen-Name, Nom De Plume: An assumed name used to protect the anonymity of an             author. * See Pseudonym *****find sources on this and link*****
            The Publisher - The publisher's name.
            The City of Publication - The city and state in which the publishing organization is             located.
Page 2 - The Legal Page
            Copyright *© _(The year of copyright)_
            A Copyright Statement: All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
            reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means
            electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written
            permission of the publisher.
            (This is a standard copyright statement and does not require these exact words)
            Library of Congress Catalogue Number, LCCN:_See LCCN_
            International Standard Book Number, ISBN: __See ISBN_
            Printed in the United States of America,
            (0r the name of the country in which it was printed}
            Printing
            (The order of printing runs. 2nd, 3rd, etc. Note: If this is the first printing this line is not
            required)
            * The copyright symbol, ©, is a character that can be produced on most Windows
            operating systems by using ANSI character codes, (American National Standards
            Institute), entered on the numerical section of your keyboard. Such symbols as •, ™, ¢,
            £, ®, ¼, ½, ¾ are but a few that can be placed in a document. See ANSI Characters

Page 3 - The Acknowledgements

Page 4 - The Dedication

Page 5 and 6 - Blank
            (These pages are sometimes left blank)

Page 7 - Table of Contents
            (Or Page 5, if the blank pages are eliminated)

Page 9 - The Introduction
            (This page number is determined by the length of the Table of Contents but should be an
            odd page.)

Page 11 - Chapter 1
            (Again, this page number is determined on the basis of the length of the Table of Contents and the Introduction but should be an odd page)

The Back Pages

            The Appendices

            The Bibliography

            The Index