Size Matters: Who Knew? (Self-Publishing Advice)
When I was working for a small publishing company, one of my jobs was to build relationships with bookstore owners. That way I could get information about what they liked to see, and I could try to sell them the books we were publishing. I learned a lot that way about what bookstores want to buy. One of the things that often came up was size. I had no idea before talking to bookstore owners that size was such an issue. It used to be that you could only publish books in certain sizes because that's what the presses could print. A typical trade paperback is either 5.5 by 8.5 or 6 by 9. Mass market paperbacks tend to be 6.75 by 4.25. Non-fiction books are printed in different sizes with certain genres or subjects conforming to a standard. Non-fiction books are often published in hardback, and those are usually Today you can self-publish books in any size, but using the wrong size will make your book stand out as self-published. Bookstores don't like that, and you will hav...