In a Pinch Cont'd: The Dreaded Header

I see you're back again. Couldn't get enough of me, eh?

Well, I'm assuming you have your basic formatting for ebook in hand by now, and you're just looking to finish up the print book. That requires a handy dandy header, though, doesn't it?

Put your butt in the seat and hang on for dear life. Shit's about to get real.

This is where things get completely FUBARed. The blogs I read tried to coach this via either Adobe Acrobat Pro or MS Word. Let me be clear: NEITHER OF THESE WILL WORK THE WAY YOU WANT THEM TO.

Adobe gouges you ($15/mo or $500 for life), and on top of that it has only one simple way to format headers--page numbers and a single heading (book title). You wanna get fancy on it? YOU'RE FUCKED. Either you do it manually page by page, or download another program to use in concert with Adobe that will supply a wider range of options. BUT WHY? We aren't made of money. And the kicker? Once you finish doing your headers, YOU CAN NO LONGER EDIT THE BOOK. Just...fuck no.

And as for Word? HA! I gave it the ol' college try...FOR TWO DAYS.  I scoured the Internet basically to be told, "LULZ, Word doesn't have the option to format like that anymore." Nothing works because Word is a TWAT. Have I mentioned this? Oh...I have? Let me just reiterate this: WORD IS A BUTT SMEAR OF EPIC PROPORTIONS.

But what about the stuff for OpenOffice? Holy crepes, man... It's like reading a manual for a time machine. I'm not a techie just because I dick around with the computer a lot. When I'm over here scratching my head after a dozen attempts, the manual sucks.

Enough of that, though. Down to brass tacks. Your nuggets of wisdom are as follows:

Go back over to the "Format" option on the ribbon. Click it and scroll down to "Page." I know; Here? Again? ALAS. Go over to the "Header" tab in the dialogue.

You want to turn the headers on. Notice that little box below it that says "Same content left/right"? Depending on what you want your header to look like, you will either leave that little bastard alone or unclick it.

If you want the general header with book name at the top and pagination at the bottom, leave it. If, like me, you want something a little different, where your headers alternate between page and author name, or book title and page...unclick it. Know this, however: YOUR ROAD WILL BE A TOUGH ONE.

Let's start with the easy stuff. You just want a general header/footer scheme as mentioned above? Cool. Leave that bad boy clicked on. Go over to "Footer" and turn that little monster on, too. Click "OK."

Well shit the bed... See that skinny gray box at the top? That's your header. We don't want it mucking about on the title pages and the copyright page, however. It's time to kick that freeloader to the curb.

You should still be in the "Styles and Formatting" option on the right hand toolbox. Across the top there, you'll see five icons. Click the fourth--"Page Styles." You're going to be in and out of here a couple of times.

To repress the headers on ONLY certain pages, you have to format them differently. Right click on the "First Page" option and modify it. You'll have to reset your margins to CreateSpace specs, click the "Mirrored" option under "Page Layout," and make sure the header and footer are turned OFF. Then, click "OK."

Place your cursor anywhere on the title page and double click the "First Page" Style.

Interesting. No more header. But we still have one on the copyright page and the second title page. No bueno.

Remember that "Breaks" option I mentioned earlier? Yeah, time to get into that. Go to your copyright page and place the cursor anywhere in the first line of text. On the side bar, click back onto the "Paragraphs" tab (first one across the top) in the "Styles and Formatting" option.

It should automatically show the Style that paragraph has been formatted with. Now, right click on it and select "Modify." Go into the "Text Flow" tab. Now...on your breaks, I pointed out the "With page style" option. Click it.

It will bring up this dialogue. You've already optioned this with a page break BEFORE this page. Specify the style as "First Page." Do this again with your second title page. It will format these pages as "First Page" and remove the header and footer.

Now, you've come to your first actual page of the document, where you need your page numbers to start (maybe). Before we can do that, however, we need to reformat a smidge. If you attempt to insert a page number, it won't start at 1, but rather 4. That's not right. The front matter doesn't count.

Before we can fully fix this, we have to backtrack a little. Highlight your "Chapter One," and right click the paragraph style. You want to create a new modified chapter heading Style. Just add "Mod" at the end when you name it. Go over to "Text Flow" and remove the break we put in earlier. Yeah, yeah, this backs it up onto the title page, again, but bear with me.

Next, insert a manual page break. Place your cursor BEFORE "Chapter One." Go to your top ribbon and select "Insert," and then "Manual Break."

It will bring up this dialogue. You want to specify it as "Default" and select the "Change page number" option, allotting the first number as 1. Click "OK."

Click into your footer and select the center justification option from the top ribbon. Go over to the "Insert" option and click on "Fields." Then click on "Page Number."

Almost done. Now, click into your header box and choose the center justification option on your top ribbon, then type the name of your book. You can play with the font and font size for the header and footer, but that's up to you. Boom. You're finished.

Pretty snazzy, right? Hmm...maybe not. Let's say you decide you don't want the header and footer on the first page of the chapter. Looks a little cluttered or whatever.

Okay, place your cursor anywhere in the text for your first chapter page. Go back over to "Page Styles" tab (fourth across the top in the "Styles and Formatting" option) and click "First Page." Great. No more header or footer.

But uh oh, when you go to try this on the next chapter, it doesn't work. Remember that adjusted chapter heading Style and the manual page break we inserted? Yup, you got it.

Highlight "Chapter Two" and double click the modified heading style to apply it. Next, place your cursor at the very end of the text for chapter one (after the period on what I've circled below) and insert the page break. You want "default" and don't mess with the page numbers this time.

Next, place your cursor anywhere in the text for the first page of chapter two and apply the "First Page" style again.

FUCK YEAH! This shit looks good.

Okay, but maybe not good enough. Let's say you want to do the alternating headers. This gets a little trickier.

Go back up into your "Format" option from the top ribbon and click "Page." Right here, in case you've forgotten.

Now, go over to the "Header" tab. You want to unclick the "Same Content Left/Right" option. If you're following this from what's already been done, you also need to go over to the "Footer" tab and make sure it's turned off.

IMPORTANT NOTE: When you open a print book, all of the even numbered pages should fall on the left side. Go check all of the books you have. Yup. What we've done with the basic formatting here (full title page [right], copyright page [left], half title page [right], chapter one [left]), this can become an issue. Depending on the amount of front matter, your book's even pages may fall on the wrong side. You can just insert a manual break after the full title page (creates a blank page) to make sure your pages are placed correctly.

This is important because when you format the alternating headers, all even pages should have the header placed on the left hand side (away from the binding, right? RIGHT!).

Now, you should only have the header box showing on the subsequent pages following the first page of your chapters. Click into the header on the second page of chapter one. Select the left justification from the top ribbon, then go back to the "Insert" option and insert your page numbers.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Sometimes OpenOffice will try to force a ghost page on you and no matter what you do, your numbering will be off for no apparent reason. The ghost page only appears on the "Page View" option (what I've circled below). Seriously? The fuck is this shit? It counts the ghost page as 1, which throws off every page thereafter. No bueno.

Now, seemingly, no matter what you do, you can't get rid of this sumbitch. I found this post from the OpenOffice help desk. Didn't work. BUT...this one did.

Anywho, your name should appear on all left hand headers. You can either keep it justified with the number, or put it in the middle of the page. The easy way is to keep it to the left hand side. Just hit the space bar, type your name, and voila.

Now, go onto the third page of chapter one and click into the header. Choose the right justification from the top ribbon. Type the name of your book, hit the space bar. Click "Insert," "Fields," and "Page Number." BOOM! Fuck yeah, man. Is that the most beautiful thing you've ever seen or what?

If you chose "or what," you suck, but this is YOUR book. I understand you want it to look good. So let's say you want to do a segmented, alternating header. You want your name and the book name to show up in the middle of the header, while your page numbers show up on the outer edges.

Pretty simple stuff. While in your header for page 2 (and after deleting any previous information), go up to "Table," "Insert," "Table."

It will bring up this dialogue, which you need to format like so. Make sure you unclick "Border."

Now click into the leftmost column. Go up to "Insert," "Fields," and "Page Number." It should automatically have the left justification selected. Click into the center column, select the center justification from the top ribbon, and type your name.

Now go over to page three. With your cursor in the header, insert another table with the same specifications. It will automatically name itself. On the rightmost column, select the right justification from the ribbon, then insert the page number. In the center column, choose the center justification, then type the name of the book.

And there you have it. The finished product will look something like this:

So...no melting down, my lovelies. This unholy shite CAN be done, and--what's more--it can be done for FREE.

*tips hat*

In a Pinch Cont'd: Formatting Like a Beast

Okay, so it's come to my attention formatting sucks. No. Seriously. I jokingly talk about pulling my hair out when it comes to my struggles all the time, but I'm shedding more hair than usual over the stress here.

You can find all kinds of nifty shifty blogs on the Interwebz that talk about how to format a book from different word processors, but you know what the uniting factor in all of these little bastards is? They never conclude with an easy button that just lets you take care of it in one fell swoop. It's always one more thing, get one more program...and worse things. Ugh.

So what have I learned from all of this--other than formatting is an unequaled evil? Basically, there's not a comprehensive tutorial on how to handle this shit. Rather than let fellow indies melt down like me, I'm going to supply you with more nuggets of wisdom.

First off, if you're using Microsoft Word for your book... Oh, you sweet, summer child. I will send sacrifices to Odin in your name. Hopefully this blog will stave off some of the frustrations I've dealt with in the past two months. If you haven't started formatting, DON'T. Just go get OpenOffice from Apache right meow.

BUT, let's assume you're a naive yokel like me and you used Microsoft Word to write your book. First off...smash the formatting. NO. Seriously. Get rid of it. ALL OF IT. The only thing MS Word is good for is your ebook, but you need to start from scratch.

So, smashing formatting. To do this? Simple. Copy/pasta the entirety of your novel into the notepad. It will nuke almost everything. Paste back into Word, then go through and remove any remaining bits and bobs, reformat your italics, etc. You can follow steps 1 and 2 from this blog for this part.

It's helpful to save your ebook formatting as a new file to reference back and forth for reapplying italics. Also, this first blog is fine to follow in its entirety for ebook, but print is a different beast entirely. And, honestly, I've come to prefer Styles. If you want to attempt Styles in Word, take a gander at this blog. But don't say I didn't warn you when it comes time to do your headers.

ALSO NOTE: If you are using a newer version of MS Word and insisted on formatting via this processor, you will need to revert to .doc (Word 2003) in order for your spacing to be preserved via Styles. For whatever reason, newer versions of Word are an absolute TWAT when it comes to this. ANOTHER thing I had to research when I couldn't figure out why my spacing wasn't working like I wanted it to.

In order to do this, click "File" on your ribbon while the document is open.

Click "Export" on the toolbar.

 Click "Change File Type" in the options box and select ".doc".

Now, that blog I linked and my quick notes SHOULD handle all of your most basic formatting needs for ebook.

For your print book, you'll need to do a little research on CreateSpace or wherever you publish through to find the exact specs you need, and then format your document accordingly. For CreateSpace, the most commonly used is the 6x9--what I chose--and  you can find the specs here.

So, let's get started on the OpenOffice piece of the tutorial. Fire 'er up and click on the text document.

Next, take that unformatted version of your original book and slam it into an OpenOffice file.

Formatting the size of the document to the CreateSpace specs is a good place to begin. The easiest way to do this is to open up the "Formatting" tool and click "Page."

This will open up a dialogue that allows you to edit a whole host of things. For right now, just concentrate on the "Page" tab. Notice where I've set these specs? Under "Paper Format" you will need to supply the inch measurements of your book. Adjust margins accordingly for the size of your book, but make sure "Mirror Margins" is selected for "Page layout", as well as the "1,2,3" formatting (these are important later).

IMPORTANT: When CreateSpace refers to your "Gutter" margin, that will be the "Inner" option under "Margins."

Next comes the fun part with Styles. Now, I've just ripped a REALLY old beginning RP post to sub in for this tutorial. Notice there's no extra spacing there, however. Everywhere a paragraph should begin, we would hit return ("enter" on the keyboard) and then tab over, right? I backspaced that stupid tab. Styles will take care of the indent so this shit looks good.

So pop on over to the right hand toolbox and click this little bubbly icon thinger for your "Styles and Formatting" options.

NOTE: If you already did your print book formatting in Word, Styles will mostly transcend any hokie shite that goes on from switching processors--MOSTLY. Be prepared for some tweaking and hoop jumping if you import from Word, however. Just refer to the rest of this tutorial for an idea of how to tweak as needed.

Once you have your Styles selected, you're going to set up your spacing and fonts, headings, etc. I generally only fuck with the "Heading" option and the "Text Body" bit to build my styles, however.

So let's take it from the top. Your title. Right click on "Heading" and choose "New." It'll bring up this dialogue. Name it "BookTitle" or something along those lines so it's easy to spot.

Next, hop over to the "Indents and Spacing" tab. This is where you control where and how the text is placed. I've left the "Indent" option alone as this is for your title--no indents necessary. The spacing on the other hand is something you'll want to mess with. I've just thrown 3 inches in there as a reference. That means 3 inches will appear at the top of your page before the title is printed.

Next, move over to alignment and click "Center." The "Text Flow" tab is where things start getting a little weirder. See that "Breaks" section? Take note of it. You'll be back here a lot later on. Unclick the "Keep with next paragraph" option.

Now move over to the "Font" tab. You can adjust a lot of stuff in here. Whatever you want your title to look like. I've just picked some shit at random, but you'll want to play with this until it's pretty and up to your standards.

Skip "Font Effects" and go over to "Position."You can adjust the kerning in there by condensing or expanding by a certain amount, but that's up to you. It won't always show up with some fonts. Not necessary to mess with it anyway, so you're safe to skip it. Click "OK" when you're done and move on to the next part.

Highlight your title text and double click your new Style. If it's too big or small, not spaced properly, etc., just right click on the Style and hit "Modify." Go back through the tabs and adjust as necessary.

Next, go back over and right click on "Heading" again. Click "New." This time you'll be creating a subtitle Style. Repeat the previous steps with this one until you have it as you'd like it. Highlight your subtitle text and double click the new Style.

NOTE: If you end up with a massive amount of space between your title and subtitle, you can fix this by highlighting the title, right clicking the Style, hitting "Modify," and adjusting "Line Spacing" under the "Indents and Spacing" tab. If you notice, in the previous picture, there's two inches of space beneath "The Murky Prophet." While I didn't specify space beneath the Style, it's there. I just adjusted the "Line Spacing" to "Fixed" and specified 1 inch of space to get the look below.

Repeat this process with your name.

HUZZAH! Now we're getting somewhere. Okay, now we've got to create a page break for the copyright page. We don't want that on the same page as our title. SO, go over to "Text Body." Right click and select "New." Repeat the previous steps, but on the "Text Flow" tab, you need to get into the "Breaks" area.

Click "Insert." It will automatically position the break before the highlighted text. Keep that in mind as we move forward. You see that "With Page Style" option up there? Remember that. You'll be  using that a lot in the near future. When you've got your general body font chosen, just hit okay. It'll look something like this without any fancy bells and whistles.

You've got another title page after this one most likely, so just right click your title Style, select "New," and create a slightly modded title Style based on the original. You'll need to include a break with this one, just like for the copyright page. Reuse your subtitle Style. It'll look like this.

Alright, now we get into the actual body of the book. Create a new style based on "Heading" for your chapter titles. Same basic stuff we've been doing, also with a break so it isn't cluttering up that title page. You'll probably want to put space above and below the chapter heading so it isn't crammed at the top of the page or right on top of your body text. Will look a little like this.

Now...the actual manuscript. You'll want to right click on "Text body" and click "New." This is what the majority of your book is going to go under. Granted, it's the same basic stuff with your fonts and things. The big difference is that we finally get into the indents.

On the "Indents and Spacing" tab, you'll want to specify that the first line is indented by either 0.3 inches or 0.5 inches. Either is acceptable. In the "Alignment" tab, choose "Justified." In the "Text Flow" tab, make sure "Keep with next paragraph" is unclicked. Click "OK" and apply.

Will look something like this. Pretty little indents, all in a row. And none of that crappy MS Word formatting that messes things up.

Highlight the next chapter and double click the already prepared chapter heading Style. Do the same with the body text. Wash, rinse, repeat. You get the idea.

And that's basically all it is. Your end result will come out looking something like this.

Heh...guess you noticed the header up there. Another tutorial on those little bastards can be found here.

In a Pinch: Forboden Characters, Making Images, and Formatting

Hello again, friends. I greet  you this fine Thursday morning with more nuggets of wisdom.

Are you publishing soon? Going the self-publishing route? Formatting your book yourself? Here's some junk you should probably know...because I found out the hard way and it sent me into an apoplectic fit trying to figure out how to fix it.

Okay, so, Amazon--the behemoth. You'd think these guys would up their ding-dang-darn game already and have pretty much every character set known to man as a "supported" format when you publish with them. Sadly, this is NOT the case.

For those of you not in the know, when I speak of "characters," I am not referring to those beautifully crafted people in the novel you wrote. Not this time. This time, I'm referring to the actual freaking LETTERS you use when you clickety-clack-type that novel.

Now, most of you are probably smarter than me and only used the predominant Latin alphabet we see in the English language. A through Z, yeah? Keep it simple. More power to ya. This part of the blog probably won't apply to you, but skim down to the images part if that's the case.

The rest of you: hunker down over here and listen real close. If you wrote fantasy, sci-fi, etc. and thought you were going to be tricksy by using character sets from other languages sprinkled through your manuscript, you might have screwed yourself. Take a look at this guide to see if the character sets you used are supported; you'll notice both a visual guide and a list there. CHECK THEM. Be sure. If you publish with unsupported characters, you will end up with blank boxes, weird script, or question marks to indicate said characters.

In my case, I've got two areas where this comes into play--the Maltese alphabet and the Elder Futhark. In the Maltese language, the barred H (ħ) character indicates a different phonetic sound than the Latin H, which lent itself well to a divergent culture of gods and their progeny. The Elder Futhark, the runic alphabet used in ancient Scandinavian and Germanic cultures, was my creative attempt at scene breaks. The Futhark was also used in rune-casting, where each letter indicates certain aspects of fortune or misfortune, and I decided to use three runes to include hints as to what was happening in the chapters. Clever me, right?

Now, there's not much I can do about the barred H character except get phonetic on the spelling. The Futhark was a different ballgame, however. This is where the images part of the wisdom comes into play.

In my search for a way to circumvent Amazon's bastard limitations, I came across a blog that detailed how to create and embed images into my manuscript. All well and good, except it said to do screen shots. Now, I don't know what programs this blogger was using, but I spent an ungodly amount of time ripping my hair out because this shit just DID NOT work. I could create screen shots, pull the image into GIMP, crop the desired runes and all...but I could not make these assholes the same size for each scene break. Plus...the image deteriorated and was grainy. EW.

If you're a little on the OCD side--or even just want your book to look slightly more professional--this shit is a no go. In my quest to figure out how to make it look nice using limited freeware, this was my alternative process.

First off, go download GIMP if you don't have it. It's Photoshop for the poor man, freeware that allows you to manipulate images. You can find it from the GNU project, and it's virus free. Once you've done that, this is how it goes.

You want to create a new project, like so:

Next, you're going to want to decide how big this bastard canvas needs to be. As you'll be working within a word processor, use inches as your measurements. For me, I needed something smaller, so I went with a 2 inch width by 1 inch height. Super simple ratios.

Once you have your canvas size selected, you need to "color to alpha." This makes your base canvas transparent, so when you upload the images, it doesn't create funky gray/white washes against the manuscript. You ONLY want the text to show up.

Should look like this:

Next comes the fun part. You need to create a text box layer that lines up with your base. Little time consuming, but it should work out fine if you mess with it a bit. Click the "A" on your toolbox.

You'll get the general text cursor (looks like an I). I try to click as close to the left edge of the base as possible when putting the text box in. Saves a little time in lining it up. After that, you'll see the yellow boxes at the edges and corners of the text layer when you move your mouse around. Use these to stretch it around the base until it lines up.

And voila! All lined up. 

Next, you'll need to copy the text from the manuscript that you want to make an image. 

(SIDE NOTE: I freely admit I got really lucky here. GIMP supports the Futhark runes, so it was a simple matter of copy and paste. Barring that, you'll have to download a free font and unzip it in GIMP. Keep in mind, when I say "free font," I mean free for COMMERCIAL use. If you intend to publish, you have to make sure the fonts you use have a free commercial license or you can be sued for using them on a project you intend to profit from.)

You'll notice my runes are centered (top to bottom and left to right). I did this the easy way, by copying the blank line above and below the text in the word processor (top to bottom alignment). To get center justification, you merely need to choose it from the dialogue in the toolbox (beneath the tools, the dialogue contains options for font, font size, color, alignment, etc).

You have the hovering dialogue for text you can utilize for the font, size, and color, as well. Play with this until you get it the size you want. Best to avoid colors other than black unless you're printing a colored book. Colors don't show up on ebooks anyway.

From here, you want to export the file.

After you've clicked the "Export" option, this dialogue will appear. Remember to save it as a JPG file. This preserves the transparent base, and also helps to reduce deterioration. Kindle only supports JPG and GIF, but GIF is balls for clarity.

(NOTE: If you have to create more than one of these images, DO NOT close the original box/base/text you have created. Merely paste the new text into the same box, replacing what was previously there, and export under a new name. This will save you a lot of time and keep each image to the exact same specifications.)

From here, you upload the file into your manuscript. This is different for each word processor. I only use MS Word. Just a matter of clicking "Insert," "Pictures," and then selecting the saved file.

You may end up playing with the size ratio a bit to get the image to look right when situated with the text. I deleted the blank line above and below where I inserted it, as well. To get the dialogue options, right click on the photo and go to "Size and Positioning."

Make sure your ratios are locked in that dialogue before you mess with anything else, and that you choose the text wrap (in-line) option. From there, you should only need to adjust one ratio (width or height) to get the image the size you want. For me, these scene breaks looked best at a 0.7 inch height and 1.4 inch width.

And there you have it. The final, viable product will look something like this:

Or, in my case, something like this: 

See you on the other side, guys. This publishing junk is a pain in the ass, but there's always something to be learned. Hope this helps you.

And, as always, write on.