The actions I will describe to you during this series will lay the groundwork for you to market your book successfully. The rest is up to you.

There may be some steps I describe that may not make sense or be feasible in your particular situation. I’m going to give you as much information as I can, and you can decide what to use or not to use.

After you’ve scribbled your book into a notebook or word processor, you’ll want to decide what format to put it in to make it easy to present to a printer.

I’ll call this your source file from now on. One method of accomplishing this is to type your book into a word processor like Microsoft® Word. I like to split my documents into separate files for each chapter, acknowledgments, index, glossary, and so on. The reason I do this is I learned from experience how tough it is to edit a book as one file. Deleting or adding to it forces you to push the paragraphs around, making everything a big hassle. Once you're finished with all the chapters, you can use the merge function to bring them together.

You might want to make separate directories or file folders on your computer with each version of the file you create to keep everything organized. I ended up with at least seven different versions of my book, depending on what I was using it for.

I go over my chapters hundreds of times to make sure I am finished polishing. Calling your book printer to tell him that the printing press plate for page 173 has to be done over is an expensive mistake, both in money and time. My secret during this process is to read everything out loud to myself. If it sounds great out loud, I know it is ready.

Once you think your book is ready for the printer, you’ll want to set your pages up to represent the final size of the book you are planning to publish.

After much thought, I decided to publish mine in a 6 inch by 9 inch trade paperback format because it seems to be the most popular size. I wanted to lessen the odds that my book printer would have to change the press just for my book.

There's no need to worry if 6 inch by 9 inch is not the size you planned on. You can always discuss this with your printer later.

Numbering your pages can be especially troublesome, so your best bet is probably bottom center. Most books number on the top right on the right-hand pages with top left numbering on the left-hand pages. This can be tough if you decide to change anything about your book’s format.

I won’t go into the technical details about how to set up your page size and numbering because your word processing program may be different. If you are using Microsoft Word, you can always press F1 for help. If you’re considering publishing your book in an electronic book format, you might consider creating another copy in HTML format. I’ll talk about electronic book publishing in a future article of this series.