Book Formatting | BookBaby

What is book formatting?

A well-formatted and designed book is critical to your success as an author. Even though you worked hard on your manuscript, it may not get the attention it deserves without professional formatting. BookBaby will help you provide the best possible reading experience for your book’s audience. Our staff of professional book designers will work with your input and create a custom layout to match the theme and message of your book. Our book designers don't use templates to design your book. Each book is custom designed by a real life professional book designer right here in our New Jersey facility. And best of all, we send you proofs of your designs to review and approve. We stand behind our work with the book publishing industry’s only 100% quality guarantee!

Interior Book Design (Manuscript Formatting)

Professionally formatted text is an important part of book design. A clear hierarchy and readable typeface help create a layout that is inviting to your reader. Every section you include in your manuscript (foreword, dedication, chapters, etc.) will be custom formatted to create a polished book. We will send a PDF proof for approval before printing. We offer both eBook manuscript formatting and Print manuscript formatting (Black Text or Color Text Design).

Black Text Design includes:

Customized layout that meets industry standards and provides the ultimate reading experience for your book audience.
Ideal for Novels and other general fiction, Biographies and Poetry books
Black text printing only. If images are included they will be printed in grayscale.

Color Text Design includes:

Combination of text, graphics and color photos for the greatest visual impact.
Best suited for Art & Photography books, Cookbooks and Children’s books.
Text and Images will be printed in full color.

After you've selected the design options that are right for you and saved your quote, you will be asked to complete a short design questionnaire. It will give you the opportunity to share your ideas about the mood of your book or the style of the inside pages. You will also have the opportunity to upload images of your own for us to work with. BookBaby designers will combine your input with their expertise to create a custom designed book that you'll be proud to show off.

IMPORTANT: Interior book design and formatting does not include editorial services and is strictly a design service. BookBaby does offer stand alone editing services. You should upload your fully-edited and final text. Non-design related text edits after uploading will incur additional cost.

Get started

You can use the chart below to get an idea of your page count for some of our most popular trim sizes. Factors such as numbers of images in the book and amount of chapters make it difficult to pinpoint. There is no guarantee your book will fit neatly into the projections below, but it will help you to obtain a ballpark figure. Word count can be obtained in Microsoft Word under the "Tools" menu. If you have overestimated, we will refund the overages when we have a final formatted page count. If you underestimate, customer service will contact you to discuss the balance due on your order.

Word Count	POCKET BOOK pages	DIGEST pages	TRADE pages
10,000	30-75	25-50	25-50
20,000	75-100	50-100	50-100
30,000	100-150	75-150	75-150
50,000	200-300	150-250	150-250
70,000	250-375	250-350	200-300
100,000	400-500	350-450	300-400
150,000	550-650	450-575	400-500
200,000	700-800	600-700	550-650
225,000	N/A	700-800	650-750
250,000	N/A	N/A	700-800