#book formatting

Page setup

Typography

Font: 11pt Garamond — a widely cited typographic guideline puts the ideal line at 45–75 characters, with 66 as the sweet spot, and 11pt Garamond in a 6×9 book with standard margins typically lands around 60–68 characters per line

Line spacing: single — published fiction is never double-spaced (that convention is for old-style manuscript submissions, not finished books)

Paragraphs: first-line indent (0.25"), no blank line between paragraphs, justified alignment

First paragraph after a chapter heading or scene break is not indented — standard house style

Scene breaks: centered glyph (• • •) rather than a blank line, which can get lost across a page break

Sourcing note: trim sizes and margin minimums above are drawn from Amazon KDP's publishing help pages; the character-count-per-line and spacing conventions come from established typography/self-publishing guidance (Bringhurst's line-length rule, industry formatting guides).

Here’s an example.

Did you see it?

Yes, it’s the extra space between paragraphs. Maybe not THAT much space, but enough to break things up.

The impression I get is that people are more and more used to breaking things up into easily digestible chunks of text. That’s how things are formatted online, and unfortunately, people are increasingly taught in terms of passages from books rather than full books.

So if there’s just a little extra space between paragraphs, making it easier to visually split up points than the standard indent, would that potentially be worth doing?

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