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Format It Yourself!: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide for Authors. A Master-Class with over 60 Screenshots.: Publish It Yourself!, #2
Format It Yourself!: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide for Authors. A Master-Class with over 60 Screenshots.: Publish It Yourself!, #2
Format It Yourself!: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide for Authors. A Master-Class with over 60 Screenshots.: Publish It Yourself!, #2
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Format It Yourself!: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide for Authors. A Master-Class with over 60 Screenshots.: Publish It Yourself!, #2

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The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide for Authors. A Master-Class with over 60 Screenshots.

Format It Yourself is a Step-by-Step guide, specifically written and illustrated to help authors format their books. Whether you are publishing through CreateSpace, Kindle, or any other outlet, one of the greatest challenges is preparing and typesetting the book. This formatting manual is an in-depth typesetting Master-Class with over 60 Screenshots for guidance.

This logical, sequentially presented handbook teaches readers exactly how to typeset according to traditional convention. Speed up your normal workflow, and reduce frustration. The information will lead you to a quicker and smarter way of writing. Would you like to spend less time wrestling with formatting gremlins, and more on penning your next novel?

This book doesn’t promise the impossible. It delivers on what can be done by the reader. You cannot typeset your book in sixty minutes, or in an afternoon — if you want to do it properly. Learn all the tips and secrets straight from a professional. Let me walk you through the right way to Format It Yourself!

Let’s face it; if you knew how to code a proper e-Book, you wouldn’t need a formatting ‘bible’. Discover how to implement simple tweaks in your electronic book’s HTML code. Familiarise yourself with the most common and frustrating formatting errors, and how best to avoid them. I will warn you about which elements will fail to convert properly. I find these same issues with many of my clients’ manuscripts.

While Format It Yourself focuses on Microsoft Word, the theory and solutions can be applied to any word processing software. Numerous links to free software and useful websites will assist you in finalising your book.

Here are just a few of the topics covered:

* The word processing document;

* Custom Shortcuts;

* Smart Styles and Rogue Orphan Styles;

* Widows, Orphans, Columns, and Rivers;

* Page Breaks;

* Hyphenation;

* Table of Content;

* The NCX TOC;

* Images and Inserts;

* Hyperlinks;

* Indexes and Footnotes;

* Macros;

* Automated Chapter Numbering;

* Common Punctuation Errors;

* Traditional Front and Back Matter;

* The Conversion Process;

* The ePub and Mobi/Kindle Formats;

* Page Setup;

* Copyright;

* Headers and Footers;

* Page Numbering;

* Typesetting;

* How to Proof your final PDF print format.

Other Books by the Author
* The Book of Life
* Happy Now!
* Recycled Thoughts
* Publish It Yourself! (Book 1 of Publish It Yourself!)
* Format It Yourself! (Book 2 of Publish It Yourself!)
* Viral WordPress SEO
* Twitter for Humans
* Six For Seven (A South African Dinner)
* The Scandari Saga - Aeonosphere
* The Scandari Saga - Back To Christmas
* Bermuda Phoenix

LanguageEnglish
PublisherJo Roderick
Release dateJan 23, 2018
ISBN9780992242633
Format It Yourself!: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guide for Authors. A Master-Class with over 60 Screenshots.: Publish It Yourself!, #2

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    Book preview

    Format It Yourself! - Jo Roderick

    Introduction

    At first, formatting a book might seem either like a daunting task, or effortless to perform. The truth lies somewhere in between the two extremes. No matter which side of the equation a reader is on, this book has been designed with you in mind, and it will show you why formatting is neither that difficult, nor that easy to accomplish.

    The reality is that if a book takes mere hours to format, then the person has not done a professional job. Many people confuse the terms, layout, format, and typesetting, and then use them interchangeably. This is where the misinformation sets in, and people erroneously believe that mediocrity in publishing is acceptable. I believe we should follow the good practices of the established publishing world, but brush aside what no longer suits our needs.

    A layout is merely setting your document to fit between a fixed page size. Formatting is more involved and sees some styling applied to the document. Typesetting is a time-intensive process that requires numerous passes through the entire book, scrutinising and analysing each line, paragraph, and page as a whole. There is no shortcut to producing a handsome book, fit for a king — or a self-published author.

    While reading this book, you will be presented with material that is going to challenge how much you truly know about typing, and in particular, your word processing software. I urge you to set aside any ego conflicts, and learn new ways of doing things. The aim of this book is to speed up your workflow, not to insult you, the weary author.

    We live in a modern age, and therefore, we must adapt or learn to deal with endless frustration. Which do you prefer? I believe we must take the best of the past and combine it with the convenience of the present. Just because things were always done in a certain way, it doesn’t mean we need to continue in the same manner.

    There are new ways of performing old tasks, and this book will guide you on your way to spending more time on writing, and less on wrestling. I will show you a quicker and easier way of producing modern documents that conform to recognised publishing standards.

    There are many books out on this subject, but I have found some to be overly — and needlessly — complicated, and others to be sadly lacking in essential knowledge. When you understand the ‘why’ of a method, you will adopt it more readily. My techniques are designed to be efficient, and reduce the margin for error.

    This book focusses on MS Word from the Microsoft Office suite because this is the intended market. However, all the information and techniques included within these pages are easily adaptable to any other word processing software, such as OpenOffice from Apache. This is not any sort of endorsement of the various software mentioned.

    In places, there are varying ways of performing certain tasks outlined in this book, and it’s not possible to cover every conceivable version of MS Word. If your older software package varies from what is described in the text, please perform a simple search online to ascertain how it’s done in your version. Largely, the steps described will be similar no matter which version you are using.

    It’s best to read the entire book as presented because the material is sequential. It will save a substantial amount of time to follow the order of chapters and sections, as some of the information overlaps but is not repeated. In order to produce a great electronic or print format, the bulk of the work begins in the original manuscript.

    Since part of the work you need to do for an electronic book is the same as for the printed equivalent, it makes sense to do it once. Whether you ultimately choose to create separate documents for each version is your choice, but my recommendation is to avoid too many copies. Making typographical and grammatical corrections soon becomes tedious with multiple variants of the book.

    Unless you need to do some radical styling to the print version, there is no need to create more than one well-formatted document, with a separate copy for the electronic version. With extreme formatting or styling, it might be prudent to save a new copy, and create the print format last, on this duplicated document.

    By the end of this book, you will understand why the prevalent adage of write first, and worry about formatting later is actually a luxury you cannot afford. You will learn how to set up your document for successful formatting from the outset, improving your writing workflow, and reducing unnecessary changes later.

    Some of my ideas might seem a little pedantic or redundant, but I can assure you that I have solid, time-saving reasons for implementing them. I’m not only an author, but I also provide many services to other authors. It has been in my best interest to ‘learn the ropes’, and work smarter. Even as I am beginning this new book, I am already implementing much of what you are about to read. This preface already resembles the final printed book.

    Watching your book take shape as you type is very uplifting. It imparts a sense of progress and achievement. On slow days, when your written words are few and possibly incoherent, they still look like a well-formatted book. It’s a little like cleaning your house when in a foul mood. There is a sense of accomplishment even though all you did was clean. A beautifully laid out template can encourage similar morale and inspiration.

    If you commence with a clean slate every time you start writing a new novel, why not do so with a productive head start? Once you realise how much time you save by practising some simple tasks and changing your habits, you will never subscribe to the philosophy of ‘worrying about it all later’ ever again.

    Finally, always create a physically separate copy of your manuscript before, and after you make any major changes. Remember that there is no further ‘undo’ once you save and close your document. Multiple file backups allows for the luxury of reverting to an older variant.

    I make several copies when formatting, and at least one new backup at the end of each writing session. May you never need all your backups, but if you do — I hope you remembered to create them regularly.

    Your Manuscript

    Get your original document into great shape!

    Title Page Image

    1

    The Word Document

    This seemingly mysterious ‘file’ is not particularly enigmatic at all — once you peek inside. How do you take a look inside your ‘dot.doc’ without firing up your software? What lays inside, and what can you learn from the content? Is it Pandora’s Box, or only something rather simple in nature?

    At a very base level, a doc or docx file is little more than a compressed archive, much like a zip file. It might surprise you to learn this, but try it for yourself. Create a new document, or a copy of an existing doc file, change the extension to ‘dot.zip’, and pop it open with your preferred archive-managing program.

    What do you see? It’s interesting, isn’t it? There are a series of files, folders, and an odd assortment of bits and bobs. So what is all of this? What do all of these objects inside your word processing document do?

    C01-01-DocContents.png

    These files within the archive are a form of web code, for lack of a better description. In fact, most of what is seen on computers, tablets, and smarty-pants phones is based on what you have just discovered. It’s used to display the content on a screen, in this case, the window of the word processor.

    At this point, you may be scratching your head, wondering why I am asking you to crack open your documents to have a poke around inside. There are many reasons for you to understand how the document file structure works, and what you can do with this knowledge. Some will become evident as you study each chapter.

    For the interim, it’s important to know what is really happening in this archive you might call, ‘MyBook.doc’. When you create a new document, it sets up the internal structure as you have seen, and neatly zips it up. The developers knew it would be a recipe for disaster to leave all those loose files, so they placed them all into an orderly package.

    For our purposes, think of your document as a long web page in a zip file, because largely, that is what it is. When you open your manuscript, the software tosses all the content out onto the table and pieces it all together to show you what you previously saved. This is partly why you have all those strange files in your ‘Temporary’ folder on your computer, and they are left behind when the software is not properly closed.

    When you add a pretty photograph into your document (an ugly one will do just fine too), a copy of it is stored inside the archive, ready to be pulled into place when next you open the same document. There are other folders — and they grow in number as you add various elements to the document — but for now, be aware that they are there. You won’t need to fiddle with most of these folders. In fact, the less meddling the better.

    At this point, I would like to remind you again to make backups of your documents before you open them up. If you corrupt the zip archive while modifying the contents, you always have your previous originals you can restore. Renaming the document’s extension to zip and then back to doc/docx will not cause any issues, but what you do with the file during modification could result in a damaged archive. Now, don’t panic! If you open it up as a zip file, and save it the same way, MS Word will be none the wiser.

    In this chapter, you are purely looking at what is inside, and what it all does. If you are questioning your sanity in purchasing my book, rest assured; there is madness in my method — erm ... sense, that is. In order to understand the following sections, it’s important that you understand a little bit of the magic that happens when you type and press the various buttons of the software’s interface.

    The most important aspect of this chapter is to understand the concept of Cascading Style Sheets. While you are welcome to read up more about it on the Internet — and I encourage this — all you need to grasp is that your manuscript is one long text document with lots of styling code attached.

    Every time you alter the look of your text, a new ‘Style’ is created in the code. I want you to stop this at once! Smack your knuckles with a ruler when you get this urge. You will thank me later. What you want to do is learn to use built-in ‘Styles’ (click for definition) and create your own new ones. This will radically reduce the amount of formatting work all the way to the presses.

    I’ll go into more detail about this in later chapters. For now, just remember that less is more. Not only will it reduce the physical size of your ‘web page in a zip file’, but it will also minimise the amount of bugs and errors in your document. Consistency is absolutely key to successful formatting.

    Now, close your zip file, and let’s continue. I will ask you to crack open your document once or twice during the course of this book to replace some of the images in order to sidestep complications with printing. It’s imperative to keep in mind that your manuscript is a fluid web page, as you have just seen for yourself.

    TakeawayIcon

    Takeaways:

    A doc file is little more than a compressed zip archive.
    The archive is a form of long web page with your content.
    All inserted items are stored inside the archive.
    It’s important to understand about Cascading Style Sheets.
    A new ‘Style’ is created in the code for every variation in the text.

    2

    Press Smart Buttons

    Some people take offence when I say that it’s important to learn to use software correctly, but it’s in everyone’s best interest. You waste far more time repeating needless steps or wrangling with formatting, only to have it revert with annoying regularity. It’s more efficient to learn to operate the

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