Client: Arjun Mehta, 39, founder of a supply chain consultancy, Ahmedabad
Service: Book Formatting (Full Interior Layout + Print and Ebook Formatting)
Genre: Business / Entrepreneurship
Book Title: The Last Mile Problem: What Indian Logistics Gets Wrong and How to Fix It
Timeline: 9 weeks
Outcome: Listed on Amazon India bestseller list (Business category) within 3 weeks of launch; stocked by Crossword Bookstores across Gujarat and Maharashtra; used as onboarding material by two logistics firms
The Background
Arjun Mehta had been in the logistics and supply chain industry for fifteen years. He had built a consultancy from a two-person operation in a shared office in Satellite, Ahmedabad, to a team of thirty-one advising some of India’s largest e-commerce and FMCG distributors. He had spoken at CII summits. He had been quoted in the Economic Times Logistics. He knew his subject better than almost anyone in the room.
What he did not know was how to format a book.
Arjun had written his manuscript over eighteen months, working between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. before his workday began. The content was exceptionally detailed, original, and filled with case studies from the Indian logistics sector that no other book had documented. His editor (hired independently before he came to Write Right) had completed the copy edit. The manuscript was clean, accurate, and ready for the world.
Then Arjun tried to format it himself.
“I watched about fourteen YouTube tutorials,” he told us. “I bought a course. I spent three weekends on it. By the end, I had a document with chapter titles in four different fonts, page numbers missing from every other chapter, and one of my tables had somehow migrated into the middle of a paragraph on page 187. I needed help.”
He came to Write Right with a 312-page manuscript, a self-imposed publication deadline of eight weeks, and a healthy amount of frustration.
The Challenge
When our formatting team opened Arjun’s file, the assessment took less than twenty minutes. The problems were significant, but every single one was fixable.
Catastrophic style inconsistency.
The manuscript had been worked on across three different devices over eighteen months and had accumulated seventeen different paragraph styles, nine heading variants, and four versions of the same bullet point format. Some chapters used Times New Roman. Others had reverted to Calibri. Two chapters were formatted in 1.5 line spacing, while the rest were double-spaced. The document had no master style sheet; it was, in formatting terms, a city built without a plan.
Tables and data visualisations were unpublishable.
Arjun’s book contained twenty-six tables, four process flow diagrams, and eleven charts drawn from industry data. These had been created in a mix of Word’s built-in table tool, screenshots from Excel, and one that appeared to have been photographed from a printed page and inserted as an image. None of them were formatted to print specifications. Several were at resolutions that would render as blurred boxes in a printed book.
No print-ready specifications had been applied.
Arjun had written in A4 with default margins. His target trim size, the physical dimensions of the printed book, was 6 x 9 inches, the standard for business books in India. The entire document needed to be reflowed to this trim size, with appropriate margins (inside margin wider than outside to account for the spine), correct gutter settings, and bleed specifications for the cover interface.
The ebook version did not exist.
Arjun wanted simultaneous print and Kindle publication on Amazon India. An ebook is not a PDF of the print book; it is a separately formatted file (EPUB or MOBI) with its own structural requirements, reflowable text, and linked table of contents. This was effectively a second formatting job.
The Formatting Process: What We Did and Why
Week 1: Audit and Master Style Sheet
Before a single page was reformatted, our team built a complete master style sheet for the book. This document defined every typographic decision: the body font (Palatino Linotype, 11pt, for its readability in print), heading hierarchy (three levels, clearly differentiated by size and weight), chapter opening treatment (dropped cap on first paragraph, chapter number in a contrasting display font above the title), running headers (author name on left page, chapter title on right), and footer placement for page numbers.
The master style sheet was shared with Arjun for approval before any formatting began. This single step — which took one day — prevented every revision cycle that would otherwise have followed.
Weeks 2 to 4: Full Interior Layout
Working in Adobe InDesign, our formatter rebuilt the entire document from the master style sheet. Every paragraph was reflowed to the 6 x 9 trim size. Widow and orphan control was applied throughout — no single line of a paragraph would be left stranded at the top or bottom of a page. Chapter openings were each designed to begin on a right-hand (recto) page, which is standard for business books and gives the reader a visual rhythm.
Special attention was paid to the transitions between body text and Arjun’s case studies, which appeared throughout the book. These were set in a slightly indented, lightly shaded text box — visually distinct from the body without being so designed that they felt like a different book. The effect was clean, professional, and consistent across all eleven case study sections.
Weeks 3 to 6: Tables, Charts, and Diagrams (Concurrent)
This was the most labour-intensive part of the project. All twenty-six tables were rebuilt natively in InDesign to print specifications — clean black borders, consistent column widths, header rows in a navy that matched the book’s cover colour palette, and footnotes in 8pt below each table where source citations were required.
The four process flow diagrams were redrawn as vector graphics by our design team, working from Arjun’s originals as reference. Vector graphics scale to any size without loss of resolution — essential for both print and ebook versions.
The eleven charts were rebuilt in a consistent visual style using data provided by Arjun. Two charts that had originally been photographed from a printed page were recreated entirely from the underlying data Arjun provided from his research files.
Weeks 6 to 7: Ebook Formatting
The ebook version was built from the edited manuscript file, not from the InDesign print layout. This is a critical distinction that many first-time authors do not understand: an ebook is a reflowable document, not a fixed layout. The 6 x 9 print design does not translate; it must be rebuilt for digital reading environments.
Our team built a clean EPUB file with a linked, navigable table of contents (essential for Kindle readability), properly tagged headings for accessibility, all tables rebuilt in HTML (the only format that renders reliably across Kindle devices), and all charts and diagrams embedded at 300 DPI for crisp rendering on high-resolution tablet screens.
The file was tested on five Kindle environments: Kindle Paperwhite, Kindle app on Android, Kindle app on iOS, Kindle for PC, and Kindle Cloud Reader.
Weeks 7 to 8: Proofing Round
Both the PDF and EPUB files were sent to Arjun for a full review. He submitted forty-one change requests. These included twelve content corrections he caught during the proofing read, sixteen formatting preferences (adjusting the spacing above chapter titles, changing one table’s column width), and thirteen queries about how specific elements would render in print versus screen.
All forty-one items were resolved within four working days.
Week 9: Final Files and Upload Support
Final deliverables included a print-ready PDF at 300 DPI with crop marks and bleed, a Kindle-ready EPUB file, a compressed JPEG of the cover at the specifications required by Amazon KDP, and a one-page upload guide walking Arjun through the KDP submission process step by step.
Our team stayed available via WhatsApp throughout the upload process. The book went live on Amazon India on a Thursday morning.
The Result
The Last Mile Problem appeared on Amazon India’s Hot New Releases list in the Business and Economics category within seventy-two hours of launch. By the end of its third week, it had reached the top twenty in the Supply Chain Management subcategory.
Arjun’s existing professional network in the logistics sector drove strong initial sales — but the book’s reach extended well beyond his contacts. Reviews from readers who had discovered it organically praised the book’s clarity and its use of India-specific examples, citing it as “the first logistics book that actually talks about how things work here, not in Germany or the US.”
Crossword Bookstores stocked the book across their Gujarat and Maharashtra locations following an outreach by Arjun’s publisher contact. Two logistics and supply chain firms approached Arjun directly to purchase bulk copies for employee onboarding. One ordered 200 copies, the other 150.
Arjun’s summary: “The content was always there. I just could not get it off my laptop and into the world in a form that looked like it deserved to be taken seriously. Write Right did that. The book looks better than books I have bought from major publishers. That credibility matters — especially when you are selling expertise.”
Key Takeaways for Authors
Formatting is not decoration. It is credibility. In the Indian market, where self-published books are often dismissed as inferior to traditionally published ones, professional formatting is one of the most effective ways to close that perception gap.
Print and ebook are two different products. Many authors assume a formatted print PDF can simply be converted to an ebook. It cannot be without producing something that reads poorly on Kindle devices. Budget time and expertise for both versions separately.
Rebuild data visuals from source, not from screenshots. If your book contains charts, tables, or diagrams, keep the original data files. Rebuilding from source data always produces a better result than trying to clean up a screenshot or a photographed image.
Your deadline is real. Plan backwards from it. Arjun had eight weeks. We delivered in nine weeks, one week over, with his understanding, because the table rebuilding took longer than estimated. Build a buffer into any formatting timeline, especially if your manuscript is data-heavy.
