Okay so many of you will find this boring but, if like me you’ve spent hours on trying to get this to work you’ll appreciate why it’s important to me at least. So this isn’t so much a blog post as an aide de memoire.
Every print book needs page numbers and the industry standard is for the numbering to begin on the start of the first chapter, which is all very well if you’re a typist but for the rest of society it’s a puzzle worthy of Mensa.
This is Ideal Girl, my second book and probably my second favourite. I probably wouldn’t have bothered with Createspace to be honest except that in December it was best-selling for a while so off I went all geared up and wham bam I came across the page number problem. I’ve searched Google, YouTube and other bloggers posts on this issue in addition to Createspace forum and pooling the information and through trial and error I’ve come up with this set of instructions. But thanks first to all those sites I’ve visited. I can’t list them all as there were hundreds but Jo Robinson’s post was perhaps the most helpful, so thank you Jo.
- Write your book in Word
- Include all the usual preambles and chapter headings
- Save and use for Kindle
- Clean up doc by going to view and then outline. You need to remove any page breaks or section breaks. Save as new doc
- Open blank word doc. This will be your Createspace version that you’ll need to populate with your clean book, but not yet! First…
- Pop into Createspace and check the size of your book. Then go into Page Layout, and size drilling down to more paper sizes and enter. You can do this after if you like but it proved to be a real pain with the breaks I’d populated my doc with.
Now we have a blank doc of the right size but with no words or the important sections. You need to accommodate the waffle pages that won’t have numbers like title page, contents etc. Count them up, in my case 5. These first 5 pages
- These each need a section break = page layout, break, next page
Chapter 1 (or prologue if you have one)
- On the first page of what will be the first chapter insert page break ( insert, page break)
- Click the header, footers tab as ‘Same as Previous’ must be unchecked for each of the previous pages in your doc
You’re now ready for page numbering – yippee. Go to the page you want the numbers to start, on mine it’s page 7. Double click and insert page numbers starting with 1 ( number formatting)
You now have a completely formatted document to copy and paste first your preamble and then, from the first numbered pages your story.
That’s it, hope you find it useful.
Ideal Girl is awaiting Createspace’s final tick before appearing on Amazon. In the meantime just for today it’s free
Jenny O'Brien HQ 