I can’t imagine why there’s a controversy around the use of the em dash, but there it is. My position? Use em and other types of dashes liberally, but accurately.
Like so much publishing terminology, the term “em” in “em dash” derives from the old days of printing and typesetting. The length of an em dash, far from being arbitrary, was equal to the width of the letter “m” in whatever typeface was being used. Simple.
The bigger question is when to use em dashes. That’s pretty simple, too, but also a bit sublime. I find that em dashes are all about pacing — (note the em dash) guiding the reader through your text. This is really useful in fiction. Storytelling with em dashes at just the right points is almost like being there — listening to you tell the story audibly.
Less-experienced writers sometimes use the ellipsis (the three-dot thingie) where they should being using an em dash. Ellipses indicate missing text: “His boring speech began with a joke…it ended with mild applause.”
There is also the “en” dash, which, you guessed it, is equal to the width of the letter “n” in the typeface. En dashes are used by rule to separate the elements of a range, as in pages 12–15, a connection, as is in the date 12–19–2025. It’s sort of like a hyper hyphen, which is just a shorter dash.
How do you insert em and en dashes? Your word processing tool may let you use the commands Insert and then Symbol. A faster way is to hold down Alt and type 0151 for an em dash or 0150 for an en dash. These numbers are part of the ASCII range of codes, but that’s another post.
For more on any of this, just consult your favorite search engine, AI tool, or Wikipedia. And have fun going crazy with dashes until you get them under control.
The picture shows my perfect summertime scenario. Reading on the beach, shaded, with a tall, cool one close by. This aspirational reading scene is my hope every year around this time.
As a self-published author, you could be the name on the cover of the book enjoyed by the summertime reading enthusiast. How would that feel?
Maybe Touchwood Press Publish-It-Yourself resources can help you toward that feeling.
I like detective fiction best as a summertime read. Or that classic that I’ve been promising myself I would finally get to. I’ve been trying to finish Moby Dick since high school. I’m re-reading Slaughterhouse Five and launching a project to read all the Vonnegut books I read but didn’t understand in college.
The New York Times, Goodreads, Kirkus Reviews, and other sites with book reviewers all see summertime, and especially vacations, as reading time. Rightly so. But if you’re not getting away to the beach or wherever on vacation any time soon, find a summertime reading spot and while away a few hours a week working on that stack that’s been growing on your nightstand, or trespassing on valuable desktop real estate. Open your mind and make space for new content. Wander in your thoughts in a summertime sort of way. I mean what is summertime for?
Do you just love books? Me, too. To carry a love of reading with you for a lifetime is to never be without friends, faraway places, and fascinating stories. And books are so much less expensive than practically any other form of entertainment or lifelong learning. What a deal.
I read my first book, all the way through, when I was seven. The book was Peter Pan. Shortly after that, I sat down at the typewriter early one morning to write a book, a novel. The story of that project is for another time. But I see one thing at least in that now.
Writing starts with reading. If you do love books, stories, and learning, you have probably at least thought about writing a book of your own. A diary becomes a memoir; a special skill becomes a how-to or self-help book; a hobby becomes an expert guide; your business writing becomes a guide for new entrepreneurs and leaders; your photos or watercolors become a coffee table book; a recipe box becomes a cookbook. The possibilities are probably endless.
But how do you journey from an idea, or a diary, or random notes, or a recipe box, to a book? Find out more about that here on our website. Ask for a 1-on-1. Read one of our books. Get the story. Tell your story. It all starts with reading.
Here is Amazon’s May 30, 2025, announcement: For the first time since starting print operations almost two decades ago, starting June 10, 2025, we are changing the royalty rate for books priced below certain list prices (e.g. less than 9.99 USD) from 60% to 50%.
I have been in and around publishing long enough to understand that printing and binding a book is not cheap. In the pre-POD (print on demand) days, printers and publishers were compelled to produce print runs as large as possible in order to reduce per-book costs to a level that they and their customers could handle.
Back when I was in the textbook publishing business (the 1980s), tiny changes in the commodity price of lumber (used to make paper) and manufactured paper caused great angst in the C-Suites of the major publishers. These same economics usually made it impossible for authors to self-publish because the print runs that printers demanded were way beyond what self-publishers could spend. We are thankful that POD technology made it possible for us to self-publish and Amazon to re-invent book selling. Note: The economic travails of the 70s and early 80s also sent US publishers as a rule to Asian printers, where labor costs were much less. This spelled the deaths of American companies and industries with long-standing stakes in book printing and binding. That’s another story.
I am impressed with how creatively Amazon configured the price increase. Lowering the commission rate for books priced below USD 9.99 is definitely a price increase for authors with books below that price level, but Amazon figured out how to give us a choice. When I received the first notice of the change, I dropped everything, logged into KDP, and raised the prices for all my books priced that were below USD 9.99 to that level. By acting fast, I was able to avoid losing any sales and avoided the lower royalty rate ahead.
When I raised my prices, I did not notice initially that there are new thresholds for most of Amazon’s non-US markets as well. So, I had to make a second pass and re-set prices for the UK, Canada, etc.
Take a quick look at this analysis of the costs of printing and binding a 200-page paperback book. Thirty-five to 45% of the total cost of printing and binding can come from paper and ink. A five ot ten percent increase (tariff or otherwise) will play havoc with the bottom line.
Cost Component
Typical % of Total Cost
Paper
25–30%
Ink
10–15%
Labor
15–20%
Binding
10–15%
Overhead
10–15%
Other(margin, packaging, etc.)
10–15%
But wait, there’s more.
It seems pretty transparent that Amazon bundled a cost reduction with their price increase to soften the blow. …we are reducing color printing costs for paperbacks in some marketplaces to help authors adopt color printing…
Color printing generally requires better-grade (thicker, denser) paper than black-and-white printing to avoid “bleed-through” and ink dispersion effects that degrade image quality. This costs more. So, by lowering the cost, Amazon has either found a workaround or is able to handle reduced margins for color printing as compared with the margin increases that they will realize from the price increases described above.
Either way, I will re-think whether I have books that will benefit from color printing. Note that the cost reductions impact both standard and premium color jobs. At Touchwood Press, we’ll be looking at the viability of creating color versions of our 50 Fun Facts print books to match the color we can include in the eBook versions of those books for readers using phones or tablets.
Publishing, being based around printing, and printing, being an old thing, has given us many terms and concepts that carry on in use today. Two of these are verso and recto, denoting the left-hand and right-pages of a two-page spread.
I remember these because verso suggests the reverse side of a page, and recto starts with “r” like right-hand page. Silly but effective.
If you had never heard, much less used, these terms before, well, now you can. Let your designer or artist or formatter know that you know what these words mean in context, saying, “The copyright page will, of course, be on the verso of the title page.” Impressive.
Most important, embrace the ageyness of publishing. You love to read because generations of printers and designers and publishers built the foundations of what we do when we self-publish and made beautiful books with verso’s and recto’s all over the place. Live it.
I have a story to tell about my life, my trials, my breakthroughs. How do transform my memories into a book?
In my Publish-It-Yourself Course, I meet many writers with a strong impulse to share their life experiences and help others find a way through struggles of their own. Humble, maybe desperate beginnings, traumatic childhoods, young adult crises, adult failures. But somehow they found their way to better times, hope and healing, with support from people, faith, or inner strength.
Writing a memoir is hard. The place to start is to decide the one message that you want to pass along and maintain focus on that. Begin unpacking your memories and experiences, crafting them into clear, compelling stories. Compile the stories around a central structure and journey through your life. Forget being chronological; be thematic.
Will I offend? Will I be criticized? Will I pay for my honesty? These and more questions will challenge your resolve and eat away valuable time better spent just writing.
As you begin writing, read what others have said about the writing of memoirs. Here is a short list of the best of the best:
The Art of Memoirby Mary Karr. As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past. Anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.
Bird by Birdby Anne Lamott. Agonizing over the seemingly impossible task of writing a school report on birds, Anne’s father counseled “bird by bird. Just take it bird by bird.” For a quarter century, more than a million readers—scribes and scribblers of all ages and abilities—have been inspired by Anne Lamott’s hilarious, big-hearted, homespun advice and learned how to approach writing memoir.
Educatedby Tara Westover. About a young woman home-schooled and isolated by survivalist parents to age 17. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her to Harvard and to Cambridge University. Only then would she wonder if she’d traveled too far, if there was still a way home.
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craftby Stephen King. Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, this bestseller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work.
“Begin at the beginning,” the King said gravely, “and go on till you come to the end. Then stop.” — Alice in Wonderland
“Start with the end in mind.” — The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.
Take time to imagine your finished book—in your hands, handing “thanks for your support” copies to relatives and friends, on the book shelf of someone you’ve just met, in your favorite book store and library, on an e-reader or tablet, as an audio book. How does that feel?
Publish-It-Yourself is just like “Do-It-Yourself” before computers. Back when I was a new homeowner, I spent many off-work hours doing it myself—our household plumbing, our garage, basement, and backyard. I gave this up when I got hooked on doing computer stuff because I discovered I was less likely to cause damage to myself and others and because all those trips to the hardware store—to pick up what I forgot the last time or replace what I’d broken—got expensive. Like the guy in the picture, I exchanged my DIY’er tools for PIY’er tools.
Luckily, I knew my way around a word processing program and loved to read, so the transition was fairly painless. And I’d had some experience working for an actual publisher, so I had a basic idea of how books are made.
Enter print-on-demand. Now, the economics of making and selling books became doable because you did not need to use up your life saving printing a garageful of books, hoping you could find someone to buy them. Print-on-demand means you can print books one at a time, as you sell them.
You can absolutely learn and accomplish everything required to publish your own books on your own. And the first time around, you should keep at it until you succeed. You will then be able to say you are a published author. How about that?
Sooner or later, you will see that publishing is a collaborative art form and craft, like movies. There are freelancers and professional groups all around, and at every price-point, who can help. A good place to start looking is Reedsy.com or just by searching book editors or book printers. When you’re ready, getting a little help is the way to go. Maintain your independence, but with some help from experts. Join a community like ALLi, the Alliance of Independent Authors. Commune with other self-publishers as a supporter of Joanna Penn on Patreon. Help is all around. But publish-it-yourself first. The experience and thrill of meeting someone for the first time and saying “Oh me? I’m a published author” can’t be beat.
Now, you can do your own book yourself, get your creative out, and dream of fame and fortune on the best seller list…or not. But the first step is getting inspired. Read on.
You can save yourself a lot of time, hassle, and potentially money if you clean up your manuscript prior to editing or review by a professional or friend. Here are some manuscript formatting guidelines to follow as you get your book ready for publishing.
Use these standard manuscript formatting (SMF) guidelines to create a cleaner manuscript that will make you or someone helping you more productive. SMF helps authors produce ready-to-edit manuscripts without unnecessary characters, spacing, and formatting that only needs to be deleted and re-done later. Professional editors or formatters you may use will spend less time and save you money. A manuscript created using SMF leaves formatting to the formatting phase, where tools such as Word, Adobe InDesign, Atticus, or Kindle Create can do what they do more efficiently.
SMF formatting specifically in a Microsoft Word file format (.doc or .docx) is required by many publishers including Touchwood Press as a pre-requisite for accepting a manuscript for review and evaluation. The best way for you to implement these guidelines in your manuscript is to make use of Styles in Word. If you don’t know how to use Styles, ask someone, take a course, or proceed without Styles until you learn how. This is a really key way to up your authoring game.
SMF Guidelines
Times New Roman, 12-point throughout.
Double spaced lines, but DO NOT double-space with carriage returns. Just proceed with default line-spacing until you can learn how to double space automatically in Word.
Paragraphs indented 1/2″, no lines between. Use tabs, not spaces, if you must. Again, learn how to automate this and include in a Style.
Margins = 1″ on all sides.
Scene breaks: Use 3 #s, 3 *s, or 3 ~s only with a space between each one. A “scene break” is often used in fiction within a chapter to change the setting or break to a new scene like in a movie.
Chapter titles: Begin 1/3 of the way down the page, flush left. Then, leave a blank line between the chapter title and the body of the chapter. Make the CHAPTER TITLE all upper case.
Headers & Footers: Author last name / BOOK TITLE—all flush left. Page numbers: top right.
These guidelines will dramatically improve the usability of your manuscript for an editor or designer.
AVOID
Adding spaces or lines between paragraphs or around scene breaks
Adding extra indent at left or right margins.
Using spaces or tabs to indent or center text.
Using other fonts for titles, chapter titles, or in body
Using Enter to go to next page. Use INSERT PAGE, Ctrl/Command Enter to insert a page break.
If you’ve spent much time around personal computing over the past 40 years, you have never stop hearing about formatting. Formatting floppies, formatting hard disks, formatting pictures, formatting documents, formatting books.
What is formatting?
Consider the cupcake. A cupcake is formatted batter. I bet you didn’t see that coming. Stick with me here. You’re consulting your favorite cookbook or recipe blog looking for something to make as a snack and you come across a recipe that sounds delicious and will only use ingredients you already have, including some fresh blueberries that need to be used up soon or, you know. The recipe is for a blueberry quick bread or a loaf pan cake. But you had your heart set on cupcakes. Solution? You re-format the recipe and just spoon the batter into cupcake molds instead of pouring it all into a loaf pan. Reformatting. Changing the way you package the goodness.
Your writing goodness starts out in a word processor. Formatted so it looks the way you think it should look so you can read it comfortably, like the way a book should look — or to print it out to read or for someone else to read. Like a book. Except on 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Except for a one-page-at-a-time screen reader rather than a 2-page spread like a book. Different from a book. This means your writing needs to be re-formatted to make it look like a book, or actually, become a book.
Formatted for a word processor, and depending on your skill level with that word processor, you may have used tabs for indents, tabs and/or spaces for centering, carriage return characters to provide spacing between paragraphs and to start a new page, etc. To re-format a document so it will be print-ready can take you hours, or many hours, of learning, trial and error, and frustration. I know.
Why You Should Care about formatting
Formatting is really important and may make the difference between getting your book published at all. And you thought it was only about the writing. Some publishers will not accept a manuscript for consideration unless it conforms to their version how a document must be formatted—their own Standard Document Format. I’m going to talk about SDFs in a separate post, but understand that there isn’t just one standard.
Most writers are self-publishing these days. Many, after fooling around with formatting themselves and failing repeatedly to get their manuscript uploads accepted by a print-on-demand vendor’s quality checks, decide that maintaining their sanity is the better part of self-publishing, will hire a professional designer/formatter to help. Professional book designers are graphic artists who’ve been to book design school. They are skilled in the art and craft of book design. They can make a beautiful book out of your document—one that will pass the quality checks that Amazon KDP or any other print-on-demand service will require. In the scheme of things, it’s not expensive to hire a pro. Search “freelance book designers” to start searching.
So, yes, you should care about formatting because it is part of making a quality book that will make you proud. Sort of like those cupcakes.
