As a self-publisher, should you standardize your sheet music? I must admit that my creative process follows the structure of a hurricane in that I often find my computer desktop littered with files for title pages, drafts of possible ideas, possible cover images, and much more. Then, as my project continues, my desktop starts to clear, until the end when the chaos subsides and everything’s back to normal, leaving me with a piece of publishable sheet music. While my creative process may be cluttered, I like standardizing my publications.
In modern parlance, I guess I’m a creator; I have my own publishing company, Up-Temp Publishing, through which I publish all of my music. When I put on my publisher’s hat, I want all the sheet music I create to have a particular look and feel, so I’m a big fan of using templates. As a self-publisher, how many templates do I need to have? The answer to that question depends on how many distributors I use to sell my sheet music. For example, Music Notes, Noteflight Marketplace, Sheet Music Direct, Sheet Music Plus, MyScore, Lulu, and Amazon have different specifications you must meet to distribute through their platforms. Some may require different page sizes, image resolution, layouts to avoid watermarks, website-specific credits, and strict margin spacing, especially if providing purchasers with a print-on-demand service.
In my case, I have a set of templates for each unique distributor, one for the title page and another for the music itself, designed to meet that distributor’s guidelines. Using these templates ensures that all my Title pages and music notation have a similar look and feel throughout each distributor’s platform.
My title page template includes the title’s layout, font and spacing, composer credits, the publishing company’s logo and contact information.
My music notation layout includes the text font, styles, spacing for the title, composer, and copyright and their positions above or below the staff, along with the note, staff size, and system spacing to avoid interfering with the distributors’ copyrights, watermarks, and notices.
You, of course, can add any elements you desire to your templates. In addition to generalized templates like the above, I use templates for regular sheet music, sheet music for children, textbooks, and orchestral scores. My templates may also evolve as distributors change specifications, I learn more, popular styles change, and I grow as an artist and simply wish to have a change.
Have fun publishing
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