As The Man in the Window was prepared for print through Amazon, I took it upon myself to handle the print layout work. It was an interesting ordeal and I figured I would record it here as notes to myself and for others who might find it useful.

Overflowing the Margins

The one thing that caused the most problems was when the text overflows the margin. One simple check before you start makes all the difference and avoids the problem.

Step One: Choose your font and size.

Step Two: Type lowercase versions of F, Y, P, J, G, T, L, one per line, and change the styling to italics.

Step Three: Adjust the Hanging Indent until the descenders are inside the margin.

In the image, I am clicking on the adjuster for the Hanging Indent, which is the bottom arrowhead. The top one adjusts the first line indention, and the bottom one adjusts the indention of the remaining lines of the paragraph. Even if you have no italics, this is still a good option to implement so you are never surprised. Doing this at the beginning also helps you avoid have to adjust individual pages once the work is done, which is what I had to do. In many instances, I had to adjust multiple pages in order to make them visually consistent with the one page with one line that had the overflow; it’s a small difference, but the eye will see it.

At the time I was doing the print layout, there was an issue with Amazon’s tool that does a series of preflight checks, of which the margin overflow check is a part. Amazon’s tool knows what those inside margins, towards the spine, should be. So do you. Unfortunately, it does not consider adjusting that margin to fix the problem. To clarify, the formula says your inner margin needs to be 0.875″. If you adjusted the margin to 0.89″, that would be enough to clear the problem for the actual printer or binder. It doesn’t matter what you set the magic to; it will flag it if it is still crossing that margin line. All that said, at some point, Amazon might fix their preflight check to account for this.

There were other things, but nothing as big or as aggravating as this. I’ll look at my notes and see if there are other things I could add in future edits.