What are the recommended fonts for a book published through CreateSpace?
I’m no designer, but if your book has a snowball’s chance of selling more than a few hundred copies, you really should hire a text designer.Those who tell you to use Times New Roman are not in alignment with what publishers know about what sells and what doesn’t. TNR makes your book look amateur hour. Yes, it’s a familiar default font. And if your book were a short document for business or school, you’d be fine with it.It’s lousy for books.But you also need to consider leading, and kerning, as well as font size. And you need to tweak all of them on many individual pages so that you have no rivers or orphans or widows or . . . . You don’t want to just dump the text into a template and move on.Amateurs also tend to set the margins as if they were doing a report on the page, rather than printing a book. Gutters should not be the same as outside margins, nor top the same as bottom.And so on.Seriously, if you’re not going to get a designer, at least get a book on book design and production. There are quite a few. Some will even tell you how to do it using suboptimal tools like MS Word. (Word is fine for writing the book and terrible for laying it out afterward.)
Which publishing house is good if I have only 200 USD and I want to publish my book?
If you sign-up on CreateSpace, it offers-up the possibility of self-publishing with book placement on Amazon, to sell the work.CreateSpace offers formatted templates for writing your books, ready for publishing. These templates come in various sizes and it is just a matter of which you believe would be the best format. I like using the 5x8 format with cream paper for novels and 6x9 format with white paper for anything of a nonfiction nature. I also have a larger 8.5x11 size for a joke book I compiled.You can create your own covers on CreateSpace although they will not be seriously compelling and I would suggest creating your own and either photoshopping or scanning your creation as a jpg. I then use Open Office Draw to arrange the look of the cover and put the spine in the appropriate place. CreateSpace will give you spine calculation formulae for both cream and white paper.CreateSpace also offers up free ISBNs and have a service they charge $25 for acquiring a Library of Congress Control Number.Once you save your manuscript as a pdf file you can upload it to CreateSpace for review and putting together, usually there is a 24 hour time period, and then you can order a paper printed proof to actually check your book. Based on that you can make changes then save again as a pdf and upload it again. There is an online viewer to proof your book, which I use, but nothing beats a tangible copy in your hands. When you order your proof, even if it is a 500 page novel in a 5x8 format, you cost will be between five and ten dollars, which includes a delivery through UPS. You are under no obligation to get a Library of Congress Control Number but if you wish to sell you will at least need the ISBN which you will note in your front matter and which CreateSpace will insert into the box you provide at the back cover of your book.You will not spend $200 and it will be under $40 even with the LCCN.To advertise you can start the ball rolling by creating an add you place on Facebook, YouTube and other social media sites.If you wish to check-out my work, you can access my author page on Amazon at this link:Amazon.com: Walter D Petrovic: Books, Biography, Blog, Audiobooks, Kindle