How to write the text of your first book

by Dr. Jozef Kozár · Published October 23, 2022 · Updated September 21, 2024

Now we will talk about writing your book.

In the previous articles from the series – “How to publish your first book” – I have introduced you to the first basic rules about making your own book.

Your own book: The writing process

Now, let’s jump into the writing process. You may have already started writing the first paragraphs of the content of your book. But the question is – where and how are you doing this? Remember, you are working on a book, not just an essay for school. This means, that your final product will be much larger than you may think now.

Write your book easier

Many people are making one basic mistake – they are writing in some non-standard environment (smartphone, tablet, etc.). Some people even use mobile applications for taking notes. Yes, you may argue, that it is their business -and this is completely true – but let me explain my advice based on my own experience.

When you write a lot of text on some non-standard device, it will end up with too much “material” that will need some further complicated processing and formatting. This is something that you will have to do later and I can tell you – you will get mad at that. Can you imagine formatting and correcting mistakes, changing styles – in 100 or more pages of raw content? Yes, it can be done, but why not make it much easier from the very beginning and save your time and energy?

Use templates

The best way to write a book is to use a ready-made template file. When writing a book in free Open Office software, you can find many templates with ready-made formatting. You just need to download a template and start writing directly into it. The same is with other kinds of software – I mean the paid ones (like Microsoft Office, for example).

Templates from the self-publishing sites

One of the ways how to self-publish your own book is to find a self-publishing service. You can find many of them on the Internet. Their websites usually offer ready-made and pre-formatted book templates. You just simply download them for free and use them.

It is a good solution, but sometimes it binds you to use the services of the self-publishing service, from where you have the downloaded template. We will talk about the pros and cons of these services in one of my next articles in this series.

What template to choose?

I am sure that you know the topic of your book and the kind of book you are writing. Is it fiction? Is it a collection of poems? Book with recipes and cooking advice? Or is it a kind of professional literature with some photos, diagrams, and charts?

Every kind of book has usually its recommended “standard” or “technical norm”. It is simple, when we are talking about a fiction book, this will contain mostly the text and very few images (if any). This kind of book will need to be in a classic medium format (the European size A5 or similar in other countries). It is just because of the use of this book – the user (reader) will want to take this book to the bus while traveling, read it in the bed, in the park – so it should meet the criteria of the size.

Too big means limited use when carrying in the bag and too small means problems with reading long text because the letters/fonts will be too small to put it all into such a small-sized book. I know people may argue just because of “electronic” versions (e-books), but we are talking now about classic printed books here. Later in my next articles, I will mention also e-books.

I will also mention the bigger formats of the books – imagine the books about nature (full of images), atlases, technical books – all these need to be larger than the fiction books. It is not expected that anyone will be using them at a train or a bus stop. So if you are preparing this kind of book, go this way and choose a larger format.

In my next article, we will continue on this topic and we will also look at the preparation and use of your book template. Isn’t it better to stay independent in this, so you can choose any other way of self-publishing?

See you in a short time with my new article, dear colleagues authors, and writers!