Formatting

If you've read my last couple of posts, I’ve gone into the editing process and a bit about finishing up the first draft of Dirty Hit. Now, I want to talk about formatting the book.

I’ve done it both ways - formatted the manuscript myself into the ebooks and paperbacks you read, and I’ve also hired a designer to do it for me.

I love hiring a designer (I worked with Dee from Black Widow Designs on Beautiful Carnage and Sweet Destruction as well as Fallen Star), but the problem with it is I don’t have access to the raw file, so if something comes up and I need to change what’s called back matter (the links at the end, acknowledgements, etc.) I have to reach out and it’s a whole thing to change something relatively simple.

I also have the formatting software to do the formatting myself (I use Vellum), but I’m not a designer so the ones I format just aren’t as pretty as the ones a professional does.

But with Dirty Hit, I’m going to format it myself, so I thought I’d share what that looks like.

First, I go through the manuscript and figure out which chapter belongs to which character.

The reason I do this is because I like to have custom graphic headers for every chapter of my book. The formatting program has built in options, but I don’t like how generic they look so I design my own.

Next, it’s off to Photoshop.

I start by coming up with an idea. For this book, the eBook is going to match the style of the man chest cover instead of the alt cover. So, I look over the cover for inspiration:

For this cover, a few things stuck out that I wanted to explore in the chapter headers. First, I always try to match the cover fonts on the inside chapter headers, so I knew I’d be using the same font as the title. I also liked the rough ice texture and the city of Seattle in the background. Those things were my inspiration, so I took the idea to a stock photo website and started searching out elements.

These are the three stock images I used to create my headers. I played around with them a lot, but this is what I finally settled on:

I’m really happy with the way it turned out. Now I have to go through and make a new image for every single chapter. This book has 62 of them, so that’s 62 individual images. Once that’s done, the design aspects for the eBook will be ready to go when I get the manuscript back from all the editing parts.

I’ll post about the process as I go, but for now we wait.