“The non-fiction price is so much more than the fiction price. Isn’t a book just a book?”

Yes and no.

Don’t you hate answers like that?

Similarities

• praise for the author section
• title page
• copyright page
• acknowledgment
• dedication
• content broken into chapters
• about the author section, including head shot
• other books by the author section
• correct layout for page margins, page headers and footers, and chapter breaks
• a few fiction books, particularly anthologies, will have a simple table of contents
• a few fiction books will have a glossary or cast of characters

Differences

Fiction

• scene breaks, sometimes with ornaments
• content that includes letters and etexts between characters, newspaper clippings
• excerpts from other books by the same author

Non-fiction

There are two main categories for works of non-fiction.

Memoir, biography, narrative

• an introduction
• content broken into parts, chapters, and sections reflected in:
  • custom heading formats to show the breakdown
  • a complex table of contents showing all the heading levels
• photographs
  • with captions
  • of casual quality that need to be:
    • colour-adjusted
    • sharpened
    • cropped
    • need the horizon line corrected
  • provided in colour that must be converted to gray scale
  • inserted throughout the document or in a gallery in the middle or at the end to allow colour printing

Self-help, instructional

• a foreword
• additions to the copyright page for permissions granted for citations
• content broken into as many as ten levels, each requiring
  • custom heading formats to show the breakdown
  • a more complex table of contents showing all the heading levels
• as well as photographs, the content may include
  • tables
  • lists
  • graphs
  • charts
  • forms
  • side bars
  • lines or spaces for reader notes or exercises
  • Most of these will have captions and will need to be manipulated in some way to fit among the text.
  • The captions can be used create a list of figures.
• citations and quotations in the text with special formatting and links to a bibliography, footnotes, or endnotes
• reference list
• index with links to the content, this can take a lot of time and will be priced separately

Image courtesy of worradmu via freedigitalphotos.net.
© 2018, Joan Leacott