Between 1 cm and 2.5 cm.
How thin or wide you make the page margins for your novel – or other fiction book – is up to you, based on the overall style of the book, but generally page margins should be between 1 cm and 2.5 cm.
Narrower than 1 cm and the page tends to look cramped. Wider than 2.5 cm and the page tends to look too spaced-out and wasteful. It depends on your main paragraph font size too – if you have a larger font size, you generally need a larger margin to give a sense of balance to the layout.
Narrower page margins will allow you to put more text on each page, meaning that your book overall will likely be fewer pages, reducing the print cost, and increasing your royalty for the same list price (if you’re using a print-on-demand system like Amazon KDP). However, the effect is not too large.
Generally books published more recently have larger page margins – going back into the 1990s, 1980s, and further, it was more common for books to have smaller page margins. So if you want your book to have a more modern feel to it, use a larger margin.
A safe choice for almost any fiction book – of the most common trim sizes – is 1.5 cm, 1.75 cm, or 2 cm. For a smaller trim size, use 1.5 cm; for a larger trim size, use 2 cm.
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