Full-Color Book Publishing Requirements

For the Xlibris Full-Color Publishing service, there are a few publishing requirements that your manuscript must comply with before Xlibris agrees to publish it.

Please read the following requirements and check that your manuscript complies with these guidelines. If you have any questions, please contact an Xlibris publishing associate at 844-714-8691.

Generally, we do not publish:

  • Manuscripts with less than 24 pages, or more than 160 pages
  • Manuscripts with embedded images
  • Scanned images of less than 300 dpi
  • Manuscripts written in foreign languages
  • Manuscripts that employ True Type fonts
  • Manuscripts with manual footnotes, manual headers/footers, or manual page numbering

Furthermore, we will definitely not publish any form of hate literature, books that are pornographic or nonsensical, or material that infringes upon another's legal rights. Please read our Author Agreement for details.

A Note About Interior Formatting

Manuscripts that require extensive text formatting stretch, and sometimes break, the boundaries of our interior templates, and therefore require extra work and quality assurance from our staff. These manuscripts can usually be published in the Custom, Premium, Executive, or Platinum packages, depending upon the type and extent of the formatting involved.

Examples of extensive formatting include the use of subheads, screenplay format, end notes, repeated indented quotations, and so on. Occasionally, Xlibris will need to evaluate your manuscript and recommend the service level required to comply with your manuscript's formatting requirements.

Due to the formatting required:

  • We recommend that plays, screenplays, and cookbooks be published with either the Custom, Premium, Executive, or Platinum packages
  • We recommend that encyclopedias, dictionaries, how-to books, workbooks, etc., that require highly page-specific formatting such as columns, text boxes, or sidebars be published with the Premium, Executive, or Platinum packages

We're always happy to learn about your unique needs and discuss possible solutions. If you have any questions about these requirements, please contact an Xlibris Associate toll-free at 844-714-8691.