Find a print-on-demand publisher like LuLu or Amazon's Book Surge (see References). Compare the services and the prices of these companies and determine what they will do and what you will do for the cost per book. Once you decide which company you will use to print your book, find and study the requirements for manuscript submission.
Decide the size of your book. A standard for fiction is a 6-by-9 paperback. You will also have to decide the binding you will use. Perfect binding is when the pages are glued to the cover's spine. Other binds include a saddle stitch, a spiral binding and hard back binding.
The cover is an important part of the process and should receive careful consideration. You may want to hire a graphic designer to help you in the cover design. The print-on-demand publisher will also require certain specifications for the cover design. Follow the directions of your publisher
Pull a paperback book off your shelf and take a look at the layout. Do the chapters begin on the right or the left? Notice the margins; is one side of the book margin wider? How are the author's name, the book title and the page numbers formatted? What kind of font is in the book, and how large is it? Remember what you see. Once you have determined your book size, set up your document to these dimensions.
Continue with the book formatting by setting your margins. You need a 1/2-inch margin on the top, left, right and bottom of each page. You will also need a gutter of 0.3 inches for the edge of a perfect bind. Book templates for Word or InDesign can help you with correct placement of the gutter.
Use this guideline for setting up the first few pages of your book. The first page will be a right page, and it is your title page. The title page contains the book's title and the author's name. The title page does not have a page number.
The next page is the copyright page and is on the left side. This should have your copyright, ISBN, credits and rights. The third page is a right page on which the dedication or thank you is printed mid page. The back side or the fourth page is blank, and the fifth page is another title page with only the book's title.
The next page (page six) is blank, and chapter 1 begins on an odd page (page seven) and does not have a page number. Start page headers, footers and numbers on page eight, but do not number it as page eight; it is numbered as page two.
Fonts seem like a small detail but are important to the size and look of your book. Books are normally written in a serif font like Times New Roman. Fonts that are sans serif, like Arial, hinder fluid reading. Keep the font size between 10 and 12 points. A smaller font is hard to read, and a 14 point font looks like a children's book.
Each chapter begins halfway down the page and is on the right side of the book. Check that the heading, footer and page numbers are not on the chapter pages but are on every other page after page two.
Although you can download book templates in word formatting, you will do better to learn how to layout your book in InDesign. According to David Carnoy, a blogger who self-published his book, "If you're a novice at book formatting, Microsoft Word will become your worst enemy." Layout is labor intensive, and every detail must be considered.