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.
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