On Writing and Publishing: A Writer Shares Her Limited Knowledge!

Ebook Formatting

This section is where you’re going to be really grateful that you used the formatting as outlined in Section 1. It will save you a bunch of time in undoing formatting for your ebook. If you haven’t done that, you can undo all formatting by clicking Home>Styles>Clear All. Keep in mind, though, that this will remove your bold, italics, and other special formatting that you may want to keep. The better way is to go through and remove all formatting by hand (make sure you turn on the show formatting marks to see what you’re doing). You can use the Find and Replace feature as well. For example, ^t is the symbol for tabs. So you can Home>Replace, type ^t in the find box, and leave the replace with box blank to remove all tabs. (Don’t know what the symbols are? They’re easy to discover. Replace>Special gives you formatting options to remove.) Leaving the replace with box blank deletes the specific formatting, or you can replace it with a different kind of formatting from the same place.

Ebook formatting is completely different than any other formatting. The reason for that is that the words show up completely different on an ereader. If you’ve ever read anything on an ereader you know what I’m talking about.

Most ereaders give an option for making the font larger or smaller (which is great for those of us too lazy or prideful to get our glasses out when reading). Obviously, if a document was formatted with full justification it would really look screwy, because it can’t reformat itself and continue to retain the full justification. What that means is that when the font size is changed, you might have one word on a sentence by itself because it’s pulled part of the previous sentence down to make room on the previous line for the justification. So for an ebook, it’s always going to be left justified.

You cannot have any breaks between chapters, because if someone has the font enlarged, this will create many blank pages. You don’t want someone so frustrated by trying to read your book that they either don’t finish or leave you a bad review. This is also why you use returns to create new paragraphs, and not the “tab” key. It is suggested to not have more than 8 returns to stop from creating blank pages, but it is suggested to only use 4.

Cutesy, unusual fonts won’t translate, and neither will drop caps. If you prefer something to make the beginning of the chapter stand out, bold the first three words. Use a basic text such as Times New Roman (recommended), Calibri, Arial, etc. Centered text will also look strange, so put your chapter headings to the left. If you have something such as a letter or dream in your book that you’ve formatted to be indented, un-indent the right side. You can leave the left side indented, however I suggest you keep it small (.2) so that on an enlarged text screen, it won’t be pushed so far to the left. If you have a poem, you can keep it centered, though on enlarged text it might only have a few words per line.

Here is the specific formatting for your ebook in Word. As always, begin with a copy of the original manuscript, and turn on your show/hide to make sure your formatting is correct.

1.       Turn on the hide/show feature!!! Otherwise, you may as well be formatting with your eyes closed.

2.       Front Matter: The only thing you should have at the beginning of your ebook is your title page and the copyright page. You can add a few short reviews also if you want to try to appeal to those who are downloading the sample, but keep them short and place them before the title. Make sure these are true reviews, never falsify unless you have a desire to destroy your career. Move ALL other front matter to the end of the book, including author’s notes, acknowledgments, about the author, etc. Nothing annoys ebook readers more than having to shuffle through a bunch of pages to get to the book

a.       Your copyright page should be different for each format as far as reflecting the platform you are uploading it to: “Smashwords Edition” for a Smashwords ebook, “Kindle Edition” for a Kindle ebook, etc.

b.      Make sure you are using your ebook ISBN, not your printed book ISBN

3.       Page>Page Layout

a.       Margins: 1”

b.      Paper Size: Letter

4.       Justificaton

a.       Left justify the body of the text

b.      Center your title and copyright page

                                                              i.      Change your © to read copyright, as some converters may not be able to read the code correctly, and will put a question mark in its place.

5.       Font

a.       Body: 12pt Times New roman

b.      Title, chapter titles: 14pt Times New Roman, Calibri, Arial, etc.

6.       Paragraph Formatting You can choose whether to keep your indented paragraphs (auto indented, never with the tab key) or you can choose block-style paragraphs where there is no indent, and there is a space between paragraphs. Both look equally well on an ereader. However, if you’re going to do the block style, don’t use a return to create the space, use Page Layout>Spacing. Set either the before or after (not both) at 6 pt minimum and 10 pt maximum. Never use both types of paragraph formatting together. It looks really strange.

a.       Block Style Paragraph

                                                               i.      Home>Paragraph

1.       Alignment: Left

2.       Indentation: 0 on all

3.       Spacing: Before: 0, After: 10, Line Spacing: Single (or 1.5 max)

4.       When formatting a poem, for example, for this style change the spacing to 0, and change the indentation to .5 - .75 to center the poem.

b.      Indent Style Paragraph

                                                               i.      Home>Paragraph

1.       Alignment: Left

2.       Indentation: 0 on all

3.       Spacing: 0 on all, Line Spacing: Single (or 1.5 max)

4.       Tabs>Default Tab Stops: .25 or .3, Alignment: Left, Leader: None

5.       When formatting a poem, for example, for this style change the indentation to .5 - .75 on left and right to center the poem.

7.       To Separate 2 paragraphs, simply return twice or use something such as **** or ­­^^^^

8.       To Separate 2 chapters, use 4 returns (more, and you risk leaving blank pages, definitely 8 is max)

9.       Remove all headers and footers

10.   At the end of your ebook, feel free to link to other versions of your book, or to other titles you have available, including your website, blog, FB, Twitter, etc.

So, now you’ve formatted your print book, and your ebook. What next? Well, now it’s time to publish. But, we’ll save that for next time. :o)

Use the links below for further and more comprehensive instructions on formatting for your ebook. And, as always, have a happy week!

http://www.cjs-easy-as-pie.com/

http://www.smashwords.com/books/download/52/1/latest/0/0/smashwords-style-guide.pdf

http://daiya.mvps.org/bookword.htm

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/

http://www.isbn.org/

                          

On Writing and Publishing: A Writer Shares Her Limited Knowledge!

Formatting: And You Thought Editing was a Nightmare!

Part II: Formatting for Your Self-Published Physical Copy

This section assumes you’ve decided to publish yourself, and it’s time to get your manuscript ready for print. Of course you’re formatting one of your copies, right? Leave the original as is—always.

For the sake of ease, let’s also assume the trim size you’ve decided on is 6” x 9”, a pretty standard paperback size. This is also given as it would be used in Word 2010. If you have an earlier version, you may have to search a little to find the same commands, but I promise you will find them. You will now be turning back on many of those things we turned off in the first section of formatting—plus some you’ve probably never even touched.

1.   Page Layout>Page Setup (Make sure you've already selected all text and changed it to full justification)

a.   Paper: Width: 6”, Height: 9”, Apply to: Whole Document

b.   Layout: Section start: Odd page, Headers & Footers: Checkmark both boxes. Leave them set at .5” (you can change this later if you want it different)

c.   Margins: .5” on all sides, Gutter position: Left, Gutter: .75”.** Multiple pages: Mirror margins

** Whichever POD you decide to go with, read their specific requirements for trim size and page count

2.       Page Layout>Paragraph

a.   Indents and Spacing: Alignment: Justified; Line spacing: Single

b.   Line and Page Breaks: Everything UN-checked, except for Don’t Hyphenate (unless you don’t mind having hyphenated words in your book, in which case you will also uncheck this)

3.       Page Layout (Setting your section breaks)

a.   By now you should have your title page, your front matter, dedication page, and any other pages that you wish to have included in your book.

b.   In this area you will see a button called “breaks”. Click on the arrow to the right of that and you will see all of your break options. You will always use section breaks. Anywhere you have a “page break” you need to delete it and change it to a “section break”. If you went with multiple returns, you will also delete those and replace them with a section break. The section break is placed right after the final period or letter of the page which you are breaking from. Below are the specific breaks you’ll use for each section.

                                    i.  Facing title page: If you choose to have a facing title page, under “section breaks” choose “even page”. It will place a blank page first then your facing page will be on the backside of that blank page.

                                    ii. Title page: The section break before this will be “odd page”. Formatting font for your title should be larger than your name, and this is where you can get fancy with your fonts and design. Generally the title font will reflect the title font on the cover. You can add a line or design after the title, a border . . . whatever you want, just make sure you don’t overcrowd the page. The title should be centered horizontally, and either centered vertically or just above center with your author name just below

                                    iii. Copyright page: This will be on the backside of the title page, and so should begin with “even page”

                                    iv. Dedication page: “odd page” puts this opposite the copyright page

                                    v.  Contents page: “odd page” put this on the right side, with a blank page on the left

                                    vi. Preface or acknowledgements: “odd page” whether at the beginning or end of the book

                                    vii. First page: always “odd page” to begin your book on the right side. Never have it begin on the left—it will look and feel odd to your readers.

                                    viii. Following chapters: this is a personal choice. I prefer each new chapter to begin on the right side, so I always choose “odd page”. If you don’t care which side your chapter begins on, then choose “next page”. It is essential that you use a section break between each chapter in order for your page numbers, headers and footers to appear correctly.

** Make sure that at the end of each paragraph you’ve deleted the page break or the returns you’ve entered. The new break always goes at the last word of your paragraph.

4.       Font

a.   Home>Font: This is where you can play with the font, and decide what you want your text to look like. It’s suggested you never use larger than 12pt for a chapter book or smaller than 10pt—and only use that if it’s a larger-type font. You’re not going to want to use anything too fancy, or difficult to read. Keep it fairly basic: Times New Roman, Calibri, Cambria, Arial, for example, or another serif font. Definitely do whatever font you really love—as long as it’s readable at a small font. Not sure? Print a single page and see how it appears.

5.       Chapter Titles and Headings

a.   If you want to add chapter titles, make them all uniform font and size.

b.   If you want to add drop caps at the beginning of the chapter, this is done on the “insert” tab under “drop cap”. Make sure you use dropped, rather than in margin. It defaults to 3 lines, but you can make it as many or few as you want with the options. Make them all a uniform font size.

6.       Returns at the Beginning of a New Chapter

a.   There’s probably an easier way to space all your chapters the same distance down the page, but I don’t know what it is. This is how I do it: After you’ve added a section break, it will place your cursor at the top of the next page. Hit return however many lines it takes to place your chapter beginning about 1/3 of the way down the page (I use 8). Make sure you use the same amount on each chapter beginning.

7.       On Orphans and Widows

a.   Orphans are when there is a single sentence from a larger paragraph left at the bottom of a page; widows are when there is a single sentence from a larger paragraph sitting by itself at the top of a page. This is not speaking of a single sentence that is not part of a larger paragraph. Those are fine, no matter where they land. Orphans and widows, in this case, are unattractive and generally considered a no-no. How to get rid of them? Let me begin by telling you how not to get rid of them. Earlier, in basic formatting, this is one of the boxes in Paragraphs>Line and Page Breaks that you were told to make sure is unchecked. Keep it unchecked or you will have pages with uneven sentence numbers, which looks even worse than orphans and widows. Once you have completely finished all other formatting, and you’re happy with the layout, go to the beginning of your story. If you see an orphan or widow, add a few words, an extra sentence, something that will push the widow or orphan back together with another sentence. This little thing can become quite time consuming, as getting rid of an orphan on one page may create one on the next page. So be very careful with this piece of formatting. The reason I tell you to wait until the end is that if you don’t, and then decide to change some small aspect of your formatting, you might create new orphans and widows after having rid yourself of them all. If they don't bother you, then just skip this whole step (other than making sure that you keep the Orphan/Widow box unchecked).

8.       Numbering Pages

a.   Word has many options for numbering your pages, which is great for those with a creative bent. Under “Insert” you will find a tab called Header & Footer, with a button called Page Number.  For a book, you will generally want the page number at the bottom, though again that’s a personal choice. Page numbers should not begin until the very first page of your actual story—in other words, no page numbers on any of the title page, front page, dedication page, etc.

b.   When you add the page numbers, it will open up a design tool for the headers & footers.  Set how close you want the footer to the edge of the page (.5 works well)

c.   Make sure all 3 boxes (“different first page”, “different odd & even pages”, “show document text”) are checked.

d.   On the navigation tab, click on “link to previous”

9.       Header Title/Name

a.   Some books have nothing in their header, some have the book title on one side and author name on the other, some will have book title on one side and chapter name on the other. This is another one of those personal choices. Pull out some of your personal novels and see how it’s been done in some of them, and which look you like the best.

b.   Double-click in the header area, and this will again open the design tab. Make sure it is set as explained above, and decide how close you want your wording to the top of the page. I set mine at .1

c.   This is where it’s extremely important to have those 3 boxes under the options tab a checked, and to have section breaks rather than page breaks in order to have no header on the first page of each chapter, and a differing text on your odd and even pages. If you use page breaks, you cannot format your headers and footers correctly.

d.   On the very first page of your story (again, not the title or any of the other pages), don’t type anything. This will keep the first page of every chapter blank, which looks much better than having some random typing on the top of the page, taking away from the clean look. On the second page of your story, type whatever information you want to show up on all of the even, or left side, pages. For example, say you want your title to be on the left. Type it on that page and it will show up on all of your even pages. Type your name on the right, and it will show up on all your odd pages.

If you have somewhere in your book a letter, for example, or a dream, or any other text that is indented (excluding chapter headings), then select all of the text of it, left justify it, then move it over by going to Home>Paragraph. There you can indent both the left and right sides by however much you like (.3 is a good number for this). This gives it a cleaner, more uniform look in the PDF. Centering should be used for chapter headings and poems only, though the poems should also be indented as explained above, and not by using the "tab" key.

Now that you’re all formatted, you’re ready to save it as a PDF. This is the required format for publication. This is simply done with the "save as" feature under File. Change the Save as Type to PDF. Once you have the PDF you need to go through the whole thing, word by word. Check for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and particularly formatting errors. Your manuscript looks completely different in this format, making it easier to see things you may have missed before. Once you’ve gone through the whole thing, walk away for a few days, then go through it again. See if you can get extra sets of eyes to go through it for you as well.

There are some templates that you can use to format your book. I have never used one so I can’t give an opinion as to how they work. I’m sure there are also services to do this for you. For me, I prefer to do it myself, so that if it’s wrong, it’s on my head. Either way, there are options available, so I wanted to give you a few links for that.

Self-Pub.Net

Self-Pub.Info

BookLoops

Adobe

Scribus

Wizards for Word

Also, here are some sites with great info on formatting, which you may find more clear and concise than what I’ve written, or complements what I have here.

12 on 14

Pothi

New Self-Publishing

Daiya MVPS Bookword

Daiya MVPS Index

As always, joyous formatting, and have a happy week!

On Writing and Publishing: An Author Shares Her Limited Knowledge! Part IV

Formatting: And You Thought Editing was a Nightmare!
Part I: Basic Formatting

As I was writing this section, I realized how long it was getting when I'd hit 6 pages on Word and had only gotten as far as formatting for your paper book. So I decided to divide it into 3 sections to make it an easier read.

I: Basic formatting  II: Formatting for your self-published physical copy  III: Formatting for your ebook

Now that we’ve covered the absolute joy that is editing, we can move on to formatting. Insert big, dramatic sigh here.  Why? Because formatting can be frustrating, and time consuming. However, there are some tricks that will help make this less painful. Unfortunately, those tricks are something you needed to do before you began writing.

Thanks for telling me now, you’re thinking. But I figure you have already completed—or at least mostly completed—you manuscript before you began searching out information about editing, formatting, and publishing. Just to keep everyone happy, though, I’ll go back and add a note to the first of these posts letting future writers know to come here first.

The main thing is to begin by removing most formatting rules before you begin writing. This is because once you’ve finished your manuscript then you go in and remove all formatting it also deletes all of your italics. Then you’ve gotta try to remember where they were, or make a copy of your manuscript before removing formatting, then go back through and add them back in. The other option is to go through and remove each piece of formatting. I personally think both would be just as time consuming as the other.

The reason for using loose formatting when you begin writing is that it’s much easier to go back and add formatting than to try to remove it. I’m going on the assumption that now, or at some point, you will be submitting as an ebook. It requires a very different kind of formatting, so that’s why we begin with the loose formatting.

Let me begin by saying this all refers to Microsoft Word. This is the program I use, am familiar with, and is probably the most used program by writers because it is so accessible. Of course, if you have a Mac, then this section may not help you—other than that most of the rules are probably the same. If you have a PC, and don’t have Word, invest in a copy now! Notepad just isn’t going to do it for you. This is also mainly for those of you who think you may decide to go the self-publishing route.  If you plan to try to find an agent, and then a publisher, then formatting may not be quite as important, other than you’ll want it to look as good as possible when someone does read it. If it’s a mess, it may hit the slush pile before the potential agent/publisher gets to the good part of your story.

So, here are the nuts and bolts of how you want to set up word before you begin. We’ll get to re-formatting soon enough.  If you’re doing this on a document which you’ve already started, then place your cursor somewhere in your document, and hit CTRL+A. This selects all of your text, and will apply changes to the whole document.

Before you do one single thing on formatting, turn your formatting marks on, otherwise you may as well be formatting with a blindfold on. Sometimes Word is tricky—what you see is not always what you get. No matter what step in the formatting process, you should always have this on. Of course you won’t want it on when you’re writing—that would be annoying. But you MUST have it one for anything formatting. How do you do that? you ask. Easy peasy. Find the little button at the top of your page that looks like a little paragraph mark. On Word 2010 it’s in the third pane over on the home page. On all you can find it under “options”. On all of them it looks like this: ¶. Keep in mind you need to set everything like this, no matter what size of book you’ll do later. We will go over specific formatting later.

1.       Paragraph (in 2010 this is under Home)

a.       Indents and Spacing: Alignment: Left, Indentation: Left, Special: First Line, by: .25 or .3, Spacing Before and After: 0, Line Spacing: Double

b.      Tabs (bottom corner of dialog box): .25 or .3, Alignment: Left, Leader: 0

c.       Line and Page Breaks: Everything should be unchecked except: Don’t hyphenate

2.       Page Setup (in 2010 this is under page layout)

a.       Margins: 1” all sides, Gutter: 0, Gutter position: Left, Multiple Pages: Normal

b.      Paper: 8.5” x 11”

c.       Layout: Section start: New page, Headers and Footers: everything unchecked, both set at .5”, Vertical alignment: Top

3.       Proofing, or Word Options (in 2010 this is under File>Options)

a.       Proofing: This is something of a personal thing. Whatever auto corrections you want Word to make as you type can be set here.

b.      Save: You can set your Auto-Recovery here. I suggest it be set for no longer than 10 minutes. 10 minutes of work lost is better than 10 hours of work lost.

c.       Advanced: Again, most of this is personal preference. The exception is for Cut, Copy, and Paste. On this, I suggest you change Pasting between documents and Pasting from other programs to: Merge Formatting. That way you don’t have to reformat something you’ve copied & pasted from somewhere else to match your formatting.

d.      This is also where you can customize your ribbon and toolbar.

4.       Specialized formatting: If you have somewhere within your text a letter, or note that you’re showing, you’ll want to italicize it, then highlight the specific paragraph and format it as follows:

a.       Paragraph: Indents and spacing: Indentation: Set Left and Right the same, usually 1” works well

If you have a dream sequence, you should italicize it, but keep the paragraph boundaries the same as the rest of your text.

5.       Extras: Make sure you’ve added all of your extras (which should probably be done when the manuscript is completed and not before):

a.       Facing title page: this is where you can list previous works. If you have no previous works, you can omit this and just begin with the title page

b.      Title page: Full title and author’s name. If you are self-publishing, and have created a “publishing company” you can list that at the bottom of the page. The title should be centered horizontally. No punctuation on this page, unless it’s a specific part of the title, or your name (example: M.D.).

c.       Copyright page: This is an important page! You don’t have to go out and apply for a specific copyright. Books are considered the intellectual copyrighted property of the author and/or publisher without any official copyright. Make sure you use the © symbol, year, and your name. Example ©2011 Cindy C Bennett.  You also put your ISBN on this page. Your ISBN will be different for a paper book and an ebook, so you will want to just put the letters for now, and add the numbers later as your format for each type of book. Any credits for the cover design or cover photos belong here.  Most books will also use this page for “Printed in the United States” or wherever you are having it printed.

d.      Dedication page: This is where you dedicate your book to the nice person who wrote a blog teaching you how to format!  :o)  All right, fine, go ahead and dedicate it to someone you love/admire/are grateful to.

e.      Contents page: This is completely optional, and will depend on whether you want it in your book, or not

f.        Preface or acknowledgements: If you want a preface, it goes here. You would then want to put your (optional) acknowledgments page at the end. If you have no preface, you can choose to put an acknowledgments page here, or at the end. Or nowhere, if you don’t want one.

6.       ¶ You’ve turned this little guy on, right? If not, do it now. You page will suddenly be filled with all kinds of strange marks. This is good; it means you’ve done it right. Now, you need to go through your entire manuscript looking for inconsistencies in your formatting if you’ve already finished the manuscript, or are even just a few pages in.

a.       The beginning of each paragraph should have this exact same mark ¶ (called a pilcrow, if you care). It should never have an arrow. An arrow is caused when you’ve returned/entered, then manually hit tab rather than having your document formatted to automatically tab for you. If there is an arrow, you haven’t set up your formatting correctly. Set up your Indents and Spacing (below) then back space all those arrows out. A note: if you are using numbering or bullets for something, it will show an arrow between the letter/number/symbol and your text. That’s the way it should be for that.

b.      There should be no more than ONE dot between each word. It looks like this:  · sort of a period hanging mid-air. If there is anywhere you have two or more, remove those spaces. Former college student who was taught to put two spaces between sentences?  Change those habits now! It looks bad in a book to have more than one space between words and/or sentences.

c.       The end of each chapter should have no more than 8 hard returns. This will show as 8 of the pilcrow (or paragraph) marks. DO NOT put in page breaks, section breaks, or anything else at this point. If you can’t stand not having the page breaks, that’s fine. Just know you’ll have to go back and undo them all when you are formatting for ebooks, and change them to section breaks when formatting for a paper book.

d.      Keep this feature turned on as you are doing specific formatting as well.

So now you have your basic formatting. And that truly is basic formatting. Save** your document then make a copy of it (you’ll have to go to your documents folder for this step). The basic formatting is going to be the preferred formatting of most agents and publishers. However, if you are going to submit, read their specific formatting requirements first then format your copy accordingly. Once this is complete, you’re ready for specific formatting.

**A note on saving: Give your doc a name at the very beginning, when you first start, and train yourself to hit CTRL+S as often as possible, preferably every 10 minutes. Save yourself the heartache of a crash or shutdown that loses your manuscript!

Have a happy week, and a joyous formatting experience!