Margins

Margins appear to be pretty straight forward, top, bottom, left and right.

In print books, the side margins are called outside (away from the binding) and inside (near the binding). There’s also a gutter margin added to the inside margin where the book is bound. This needs to be big enough to show the text without the need to break the spine of the book.

Margin	Measurement
Top	.75"
Bottom	.5"
Inside	.5"
Outside	.5"
Gutter	.16"

The minimum margin is .25", but that really crowds the page. If the book is very small or very large, I’ll play with the margins until I get a pleasing balance.

I’ve added .01” to the gutter measurement to avoid the common margin-too-small error in CreateSpace.

Access the Page Setup from the Layout tab. Click on the expansion tab in the bottom-right corner to see the settings all together.

Trim Size

When self-publishing a print book, one of the many choices you have is trim size. During the printing process, the book pages are printed slightly oversized, stacked, glued, and the cover added. To ensure neat edges, the book is trimmed to the desired measurement.

The most common trim size is 6" x 9", width by height. For myself, I prefer a smaller size that fits more easily into purses and backpacks, 5.5" x 8.5" or 5.25" x 8.25". For poetry, I suggest the smallest standard at 5" x 8".

The deciding factor is to balance the number of pages with the trim size. For a book larger than 400 pages, go with 6" x 9". For novellas, go with one of the two smaller sizes.

With this comes a decision about pricing your book. You want to cover the cost of printing and make a profit. To help you decide, play with the royalty calculator on the Royalties tab of CreateSpace’s Book page www.createspace.com/Products/Book/. IngramSpark also has a compensation calculator www.ingramspark.com/resources/tools.

The Template I’ve given you is set for a trim size of 6" by 9" with margins to accommodate up to 500 pages.

Hyphenation

Sometimes the way the words happen to lay in a sentence means justification (left and right margins are square rather than ragged) can only be achieved with wide spaces between the words, resulting in an odd appearance.

Turning on hyphenation can smooth away the odd looks. Word will select which words can be correctly hyphenated. Limiting the consecutive hyphens to two stops Word from going overboard.

Untick the hyphenation of capitalized words as they are often acronyms that make no sense when split up.

We’ll come back to the Layout tab later.