Formatting 101: Preparing your Manuscript for e-Publishing

One of the hardest habits for an author to break is the overwhelming desire to design while working on their manuscript. Authors want to “see” the final product – the font, exact spacing, all the little features that make their book “pretty.”

Unfortunately, this ‘help’ makes converting the file for offset, print-on-demand, or e-book, a lot harder.

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Keep it Simple.

Authors need to decide what they are preparing their MS for: PDF file, or e-book / print. We’ve all become accustomed to “designing” our manuscripts, adjusting the headings, tweaking spacing, using a variety of fonts and colors. And this is fine when you are planning to create a PDF file, but NOT for print or e-book.

Remember, you aren’t designing the book, you are only preparing the text for layout.

Preparing the Manuscript

Push aside the desire to design your book. Don’t use any special fonts in your MS; don’t tweak sizes or modify color. Don’t change anything. Use the built-in styles from a fresh document, if possible.

The bulk of the page is normal text, the chapters are headings and you can add bold or italic text to words. That’s it. Done.

Each time you change a text in your MS (font size, style, alignment) it creates another “style” in your style list and many of these “tweaks” will not convert properly. I have seen style lists with 35 or more styles when you only need a few.

Clean Formatting is key…

• Use “Normal” or the built-in font for the body of the manuscript.
• Use Heading tags (heading1, heading 2, etc) for Chapters and subheads

Paragraphs

The bulk of your MS is made up of paragraphs. So what do we know about paragraphs?

• Chapters are larger, and aligned left, right or centered
• The first line of every paragraph is commonly indented
• Text is justified, except for lists, poetry
• Some words are italic, bold or underline

First Line Indents
NEVER use spaces or the tab, or a combination of the two to create indents. Use the built in function to indent each paragraph.

Many word processing programs have the first line indent function built-in. The following are the locations for the indent feature (depending on your program version.) Setting this will indent every first line of every paragraph throughout your MS.

• Word: Format > paragraph: Indentation: Special
• Open Office: Format > Paragraph: Indent: First Line

Alignment
I recommend you only use the center alignment when needed. Leave the remaining text at the default, which is commonly flush left. Your designer will assign the preferred alignments in the style sheet, which will apply to every page within book.

Bold, Italic, Underline
Pretty easy to apply and transfers well for layout.

Chapters

As we discussed in Formatting 101: Terms, use the Built-in Heading tags for chapters and subheads. The built-in style is designed to convert correctly when creating your digital e-book.

Do not adjust the font style, the size, or even the color. Your designer will make all adjustments to the style sheet (CSS) when formatting your e-book file.

To set the Heading 1 tag highlight each chapter name and choose Heading 1 from the built-in styles. (To find the style menu for your program, refer to your user manual.)

Your final output in HTML will appear like this:

<h1>Chapter 1</h1>