Creating a paperback

I have four books out and all but one of them is enrolled in KDP Select. Since I'm free to do what I want with the fourth, "Which way to love?", I've taken time out from writing to format it for other marketplaces. First, I thought to make a CreateSpace book of it. Easier said than done.

I thought to make things as simple as possible for me. So I downloaded a preformatted template from CreateSpace. It gave me a good notion what the book is supposed to look like, but in the end I didn't use it after all. There were too many designs in it that I didn't agree with and so ended up wasting a lot of time correcting those to my liking. I needed a simpler way. So I downloaded another template, this one without formatting.

I got a single page that baffled me at first. But it had all I needed: the size of the page, margins and other details I wouldn't have come to think of. So I resized my manuscript to those specifics. But that was only the beginning.

I've spent a couple of days making the book look like I want it to. The cover page took ages to design, even though I used only one font - the same I use throughout - Garamond. The chapter headings were relatively simple to format, but I spent a great deal of time adding drop caps at the beginning of every chapter. I think it gives the book a nice look. After that, there were some detailing in the text itself. The story contains e-mail conversations that I wanted to stand out from the main body of the text and I tried many different fonts for those; Verdana won.

After two days, the book looks mostly like I want it to. It only lacks the page numbers. And those proved to be troublesome. Try as I might, Word starts page numbering from the first page, the title page. I don't want that. Nor do I want page numbers on a couple of subsequent pages. I want the numbering to start with the first chapter. I'm beginning to think that can't be done. If you have suggestions, please, share.

So that's the insides of the book - almost - taken care of. Next up, the cover. I'll let you know how that goes.