Self-Publishing Your Novel With Deckle

Self-publishing a novel is really a sequence of smaller, well-defined steps: draft, style, package, and export to whichever platforms you're targeting. Deckle covers every one of them, and this is the order that actually works.

What You'll Need

• A finished manuscript, and a decision on where you're publishing (Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, Books on Demand, or more than one at once), since each has its own formatting requirements.

Step-by-Step

1. Finish and structure your manuscript. Get your chapters, scenes, and any front/back matter (title page, copyright, dedication, acknowledgments) into place in the Binder, using Deckle's special page types rather than plain chapters for anything front-matter-related.
2. Fill in your book's metadata. Open Compile → Metadata and enter your title, author name, publisher, and any other details your export formats need. This feeds every title page automatically.
3. Choose and customize your styling. Pick a style preset close to your genre and trim size, then adjust typography, chapter headers, and scene breaks to taste. This is also where your trim size gets set, which matters for print requirements later.
4. Prepare your cover and any interior images. See Preparing Images for Export; cover/title images render differently across formats, and PDF/DOCX don't compress images the way EPUB does, so check your source file sizes here.
5. Preview before you commit to an export. Use Device Preview to check how your book actually looks on Kindle and in Print, since both render through Deckle's real export engines.
6. Export EPUB for ebook platforms, checking the specific requirements for where you're publishing: Amazon KDP's EPUB requirements or European EPUB requirements if accessibility compliance applies to you.
7. Export PDF for print platforms, again checking your target: US print book requirements or European print book requirements (IngramSpark, Books on Demand, and similar).
8. Run Deckle's preflight check before finalizing. Compile flags external image links, missing local images, and documents that ended up in the wrong place in your structure, so you catch these before they become a problem in a live file.
9. Save your setup as a Project Template once you're happy with it, especially if this is the first book in a series. See Setting Up a Series Template so Book 2 starts from the same styling and structure.

Common Mistakes

• Styling before your manuscript structure is settled. A late structural change (splitting a chapter, adding a Part) can affect how your styling looks in practice. Get your structure right first, then style.
• Assuming one export format's requirements apply to all of them. Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, and BoD each have their own specific requirements (especially for print trim sizes and margins). Check the specific one for wherever you're actually publishing, not just a generic export.
• Skipping the preflight check because the manuscript "looks fine." It catches things a visual read-through won't, like an image referenced by an external URL instead of an embedded file, worth the few seconds it takes.
• Not previewing before committing to a final export, especially for print. Device Preview reflects your real trim size and margins, so it's the fastest way to catch a styling problem before it's in a file you're about to upload.