Understanding Print and Digital Publishing Formats

Why the Format Comes Before the Formatting

By the time most writers reach the formatting stage, the hard work feels done. The manuscript is finished, the cover is chosen, and what remains looks like an administrative hurdle to clear before publication. In practice, the opposite is true. Print, ebook and audio each impose their own logic on the same words, and a book designed for one will rarely serve the others without adjustment. Understanding what each format demands before you begin will save you weeks of reworking and a good deal of frustration.

Trim Sizes: the Physical Promise You Make

A trim size is simply the finished dimensions of a printed page, and choosing one is a decision about how your book will feel in a reader's hands. Several sizes dominate UK publishing:

• A format (178 × 111 mm) — pocket-sized, familiar from mass-market fiction.
• B format (198 × 129 mm) — the standard literary paperback, and a comfortable default for most memoirs.
• Demy or C format (216 × 135 mm) — a little roomier, well suited to non-fiction and memoirs with photographs.
• Royal (234 × 156 mm) — generous, and the usual choice for large-print editions at 14pt or above.
• A5 (210 × 148 mm) — practical for local history and family histories, where readers may photocopy or shelve alongside ring-binders.

Two practical consequences follow. First, your word count determines your page count at any given type size, and page count drives the unit cost of print-on-demand. A 90,000-word memoir set at 11pt on B format will run to roughly 320 pages. Second, that page count determines the width of the spine — around 17mm in this example — which your cover designer needs before they can finalise the artwork.

Allow a gutter, or inside margin, of at least 18mm on books of 300 pages or more, otherwise text will disappear into the binding. Outside and top margins of 15mm to 20mm look generous; 3mm of bleed is needed wherever an image runs to the edge of the page. Mirror your margins so that odd and even pages face each other correctly.

Ebooks: Reflowable Text and the Art of Letting Go

An ebook is not a fixed set of pages but a stream of text that the reader's device reshapes. They choose the typeface, the size, the line spacing and often the background colour. Your job is to build a clear hierarchy of headings, paragraphs and emphasised words, and then step back.

This means abandoning a few print habits. Page numbers are meaningless, so navigation relies on a hyperlinked table of contents and chapter breaks rather than blank lines. Tabs and strings of spaces disappear unpredictably; use your word processor's style settings instead. Text boxes, drop caps saved as images, and tables that must sit in an exact position are all best avoided. Add alternative text to every image so that visually impaired readers can follow you, and check the finished file on a phone, a tablet and a dedicated e-reader.

Fixed-layout ebooks exist for heavily illustrated or children's titles, but they are harder to produce and sell. For most memoirs, reflowable is the right answer. Note too that an ebook carries its own ISBN and needs no barcode, and that the cover is uploaded as a separate image rather than embedded as page one.

Audiobooks: Your Book Read Aloud, Line by Line

Audio is a performance, and a narrator will speak roughly 9,000 to 9,500 words in a finished hour. A 75,000-word memoir therefore becomes an eight-hour recording, which is worth knowing before you commit either your own time or your budget. Studio rates are usually quoted per finished hour, and a full proof-listen is essential.

The preparation is editorial. Read your manuscript aloud, or have software do it, and note every place it stumbles: homographs such as lead and read, dates, place names, dialect, and any passage that depends on typography. A family tree, a table of figures or a reference to the photograph opposite simply will not work. Compile a pronunciation guide for the narrator and decide whether chapter titles, epigraphs and dedications are read or omitted — most audiobooks skip the copyright page and dedication entirely.

What Each Format Asks of Your Manuscript

• Print: mirrored margins, consistent paragraph indents, widow and orphan control, sensible hyphenation, running heads, and proper typographic quotation marks and dashes.
• Ebook: one clean file, styled headings rather than manual formatting, no tabs, a hyperlinked contents page, alt text for images, and testing across devices.
• Audio: a script free of mark-up, a pronunciation list, a clear chapter sequence, and a decision about what stays on the page.

Deciding Where to Begin

If you intend to publish in all three formats, finalise the print text first. It is the most tightly constrained, and once margins, hyphenation and page breaks are settled, the ebook follows relatively painlessly. Audio comes last, built from the same final text. If you are publishing only one format, choose the one your readers actually use: memoir and family history still sell strongly in print, practical guides and shorter works travel well as ebooks, and audio suits narrative non-fiction with a strong voice.

Whichever route you take, build in a final read on the format itself — a printed proof, a phone screen, a listen from start to finish. Errors reveal themselves differently in each, and that last pass is where a good book becomes a professional one.