Things To Consider Before You Turn Your Ebook Into Print

Creating a printed book is somewhat different from cranking out information products, because there are certain time-honored conventions to laying out and structuring a book. First of all, you’ll need to be cognizant of your page numbering and what pages your chapters begin on, you’ll need to pay attention to things like “widows” and “orphans”, and you’ll have to pay attention to how your pages flow within the context of your book.
For example, it’s customary to have all first pages of new chapters begin on the right-hand (odd-numbered) side of the book.
You’ll also need to include things called “front matter” and “back matter,” which you may not have much of (or even need) in an eBook.
Front matter appears in the front of your book, prior to the content. It includes your title page, copyright notice, dedication, forward, preface, acknowledgments, illustrations list, abbreviations,introduction, table of contents. Blank pages are used as “filler” to take up space between front matter that needs to appear on the right-hand (odd-numbered) pages.
Back matter appears in the back of your book, after all the content. It includes endnotes, bibliography, glossary, index, information about the author, ordering info, forms and/or coupons.
The front matter and back matter are very important for a printed book. They also follow certain conventions for which page they appear on. Pick up your favorite book and take a closer look at the front and back matter. Chances are, you’ve never given it much thought, but you should start thinking about books a little more carefully, to fully appreciate how they’re put together.
Just keep in mind, not all eBooks or white papers or PDFs lend themselves well to book conversion. If your eBook PDF is only 20 pages in length with wide margins to begin with, you probably don’t want to go the printed book route. Shorter works won’t “translate” well, as their page length doesn’t provide enough width in the spine to hold the glue evenly. A book of about 30 pages which is perfect bound (the pages glued together with the cover at the spine), can end up with lumpy glue and an uneven finish. Even the best printers can have difficulty making a thin volume look good in perfect binding. And a lumpy, clumpy binding on a thin book makes a lousy impression on reviewers and interviewers, not to mention your reading public.
Of course, you can always make your margins super-wide and your fonts super-large. I’ll discuss those options later on. Or, you can put in the extra work to expand on your content and fill it out for print readers. That may be a good exercise, in any case. But no matter what you decide to do, you definitely want to produce a book of a reasonable length — no less than 50 pages, with a minimum of 100 pages being ideal (in my opinion, that is). They don’t call it “book-length” for nothing!
Now, structuring and formatting your content for print publication can be a very different story from putting it into digital format. First of all, there are the popular conventions of book layout which have been standardized over centuries of book publishing. And then there’s the basic physical fact of accommodating a certain paper size and setting font sizes and margin widths so that the book is readable. Whereas you can type your content into a word processing document, add graphics, and export it to PDF — and voila! — you have an eBook, creating a printed book takes a different kind of focus.
Whereas eBooks may be hastily constructed digital products which are put out for sale before they’re polished to a shiny gleam, a print book requires closer attention to certain details. A print version of a work may need to have a more “solid” tone, a more staid approach, than its electronic “sibling” eBook. White papers have certain conventions, such as using the passive voice to sound more professional, but that may make a book version sound stuffy, so that writing style may need to change, as well. Think about how other books similar to yours do it — and copy their approach. “Talent copies… genius steals,” says the adage. But in this day and age, when plagiarism is so strongly discouraged, you may be better off aiming for talent, than aspiring to genius. Bottom line is, other people have paved the way with book production — corporate people, rich people, highly literate and connected people. You can learn a lot from their examples, so study others who have written print books like your eBook or white paper, and make your edits accordingly.
In addition to stylistic changes, you’ll need to make physical changes to the layout of your work. You’ll need to put in blank pages to make your different book elements be properly ordered. It’s a good idea to add “fluff” like dedications and acknowledgments and references, for the sake of looking more formal in print. Studying the books on my bookshelf, I’m always amazed at how much “stuff” they include in the front and the back of them. Tables of contents, dedications, testimonials… glossaries and bibliographies and auxiliary information, oh my! You, too, can load up your book with lots of extras that make it look like a big press put it out. Especially if you’ve got testimonials… you can load them up at the beginning of the book (just make sure they’re really yours, not automatically generated “testimonials” that some software programs will crank out. Remember, when it comes to print, credibility is everything. A little extra work, filling out your book with “extras” like the big book boys do, can go a long way towards making you look good in print.