I get asked a lot how you format a book as a self published author.

Formatting is how you take words on a page (a manuscript) and turn it into a physical or ebook.

The traditional thinking, the one fueled by the Big Book Lie (the belief you must do everything the same way publishers do), is that you hire a formatter.

This costs between $500-$2000 for most books.

I use Atticus, a $150 (one time fee) book creation software that I can format a book myself in 1 hour.

Here at the 5 things I do inside Atticus to Format my book.

1. Create individual chapters

2. Set all points inside the chapter to H2 & change subpoints to H3 (font size)

3. Check PDF print preview to make sure pages don't end at the beginning or a section. (if it does I do a page break)

4. Choose and if needed edit a theme in the Atticus software

5. Fill out the copyright information (preset) inside Atticus

That's it, click export and you have a book that looks professional... because the hard truth is, it isn't formatting that makes your book professional or not.

It is the ideas inside.

The job of formatting is to make the reading easy so it doesn't distract your reader from the message inside.

Don't overcomplicate this, especially if you are writing non fiction books.

Now you can do more, I added images as my chapter titles, you can link to other books in your series etc., but those 5 things will make it so your book is formatted, the rest is just decoration.