Making Your Novel Into A Book

As writers, we all have the dream of seeing our stories on our bookshelves one day -- whether it be through traditional or self publishing.

But what if you want to have your book on the bookshelf... without having it published? Just so you can read it for fun and look at your words on page?

You can make that happen for under ten dollars. BOOM. And I'm going to show you how. (with rambling, because that's how I do things)

There are so many websites where you can print your book nowadays. Createspace and Blurb are popular ones. I've found that Lulu is the cheapest and easiest option to use. This post will be about Lulu.

As you can see above, you can order both hardcovers and paperbacks. Since the paperbacks are a lot cheaper, I just went for those since I don't have much of a preference.

Making the book itself is very self explanatory. You're able to choose a bunch of different sizes (I just went for the standard 6x9), cream or white inside color, glossy or matte finish...

After you choose all of this, you'll want to upload the book's file. I uploaded it in a simple word file, but a PDF works as well. Before you upload it, make sure you edit your Microsoft Word pages to match the size of the print book. I went to page layout >> size >> more paper sizes >> and edited in the correct lengths. I also set the margins to "0.66" all around, since then you can fit more words in each page.

I was a dork and forgot to think about this thing called fonts. So three of my books were printed in normal Arial, and I printed the last one in Palatino Linotype. (font 11) I like that one a lot better -- it's not quite as bold and eye-killing.

Once it's uploaded... then comes the fun part: the cover. I just used my covers with images from Pinterest and plopped the text on them using Picmonkey. Do not use images from Pinterest if you're going to sell these books on Amazon or self-publish them. Since these were only for personal use and I wanted to print them for fun, I'm going to go ahead and assume that there's no harm in this. :P

The cover was SO much fun... but also very time consuming. And frustrating. *grumbles* It was a very difficult process figuring out where the spine was and how big the text should be. It's not perfect, but since I printed my first drafts... they don't really need to be perfect.

I used the advanced one-piece cover designer. They'll tell you all the dimensions (as you can see below). Picmonkey was great for making specific sizes, though it took a lot of fiddling. Make the cover when you have lots of time and patience. xD

On the back of the cover, I placed in small(ish) text when I wrote the book. It's almost like a timeline of sorts -- I'm super excited to add more to the collection. *happiness*

Lulu has the handy dandy option of "making this book only available to me." So you don't have to worry about it accidentally being published to Amazon. (My worst nightmare ever.)

Click submit, wait for everything to upload... And you're good to go! Each book cost under ten dollars for me, though it might be more or less depending on how long your book is.

They're actually heavier then I expected. They weigh 67.97 ounces, or 4.244 pounds. (because this is obviously an important fact that you want to know. Ha.)

A picture of them on my head. Because, why not? 

ALL FOUR OF THEM! They're positioned below in the order I wrote them from top to bottom. The first one I wrote in January, 2014, and I just finished A Twisted Star in April of 2016. All the excitement. *happy sigh*

SINCE these are first drafts, I went ahead and put The Music Master on the cover instead of Song of the Desert since that's what it was originally called in that stage. It's weird seeing it that way, but ahhh, the memories... ;)

My reason for ordering the first draft is so that I can read them, make notes in them, and then once I edit them (If I will EVER finish editing), I'll order edited version.  This makes it so I can compare them to the originals and see how the story has changed. And I can 100% guarantee that these stories change. A lot.

But SINCE they're first drafts... They have a lot of first-draft lingo. I make things interesting as I write them... as well as 100000x harder to edit. For instance, when I DO remember to put in chapter breaks, this tends to happen: 

And then little comments of despair. #firstdraftproblems

The Sand Dragon's Song is my favorite cover by far. It just makes me super happy and flail whenever I see it. :D

A Twisted Star is my second favorite. The twisted text (heh, see what I did there?) stands out awesome against the night sky. 

Basically, if you get anything out of this post at all, make your novel into a book if you can. It's encouraging to see your Microsoft Word document with a blinking cursor into an actual form that you can hold. (and throw against the wall when you get frustrated with editing) The whole process took me about an hour for one book (which was mostly me fiddling with the cover), and for under ten dollars? That's an insane deal.

// katie grace

I basically threw a bunch of information at you... so any questions? Do you ever find any amusing things in your first drafts?