By: Kimberly Hitchens. Well, as you all know, I originally promised to blog, two
weeks ago, about the ISBN monopoly controlled by initially the ISBN.org and
then, here in the US, Bowker. However,
that post was delayed by an unforeseen “cat-astophe,” when The Amazing Zep (“Zeppelin,”
properly known as Suncoon Tucson), a 7-month old Maine Coon kitten, decided he
could fly off the top of our 7’ cat condo.
Obviously, I’ve allowed him to watch entirely too many Marvel Comics
movies. He leapt from the top of the
Condo, aiming at a nearby artwork niche, and the results were, shall we say,
not good; he nearly came to be known as Hindenburg. Half a house-payment and 5 exhausting days
later of caring for him 24/7, he’s fine, the little monster, but I apologize
for missing the blog. His nefarious face
is shown here, so all will know the miscreant.
(And, yes, because most people look at kitten pics and go, “awwwwwwwwwwwwww…;”
I’m shamelessly exploiting your weakness for kittens.)
But yesterday,
Editor Extraordinaire Jodie Renner dropped me a line, and asked me if I
happened to have a list, or a link to a list, of tips for preparing your Word
document for e-publishing, whether you’re going to use an eBookformatting company
like mine, or DIY. She suggested it
would make a good blog post—and I’d do anything to oblige her. So today’s topic is What NOT to do in your
Word document, either to keep costs down, or to make it easier for
yourself/your formatter, to create your book in a gorgeous style.
1.
Everybody already knows #1; use Word’s built-in
styles whenever possible. Use them to
automatically indent your paragraphs; don’t use the tab key or the space-bar (5
times or however many). Now, an
experienced formatting won’t have difficulty with this. But if you’re using someone new, or doing it
yourself, this will cause you problems.
Moreover, if you use Word’s built-in styles for all your regular
narrative paragraphs, you shan’t have a problem, when you upload to the KDP, with inconsistent paragraph styling—which
you will have if you “style” every paragraph differently, not deliberately, but
through misadventure, by not knowing and understanding Word’s styles. If you don’t have a basic understanding of
how these work (and how to see how they are working), take a few minutes and
watch this video (not from my company, but we think it’s nice and clear enough
that we host it in our Knowledgebase) on our Knowledgebase (you can enlarge it
to full-screen for easy of viewing): http://booknookbiz.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/182863-video-on-word-styles
Our Tutorials section also has a video on the TOC and how to use headings (just
click the “Tutorials and Videos” breadcrumb to take you to that section, or
click “Home” above the article header to rummage around to your heart’s
content.
2.
Speaking of…Header styles. Very few people seem to know about or use
what used to be called the “Document Map” in word. If you use “Header Styles” to create your
chapter headers, you’ll be able to easily navigate through your document by
simply enabling the “Navigation Pane” on the left-hand side (In Word 2007-2010, “View—> Click “Navigation
Pane”). If you’ve used header styles for
every chapter head—lo! Right there in
the Navigation Pane, you’ll be able to see (and jump to instantly) the
beginning of every single chapter. An
even bigger “freebie” side effect of doing this—you can auto-generate your
Table of Contents. This is
incredibly handy for those of you determined to “DIY.” For the video on how to do this, please see
our second Knowledgebase video: http://booknookbiz.desk.com/customer/portal/articles/182864-video-on-headings-and-toc-in-word
If you don’t like the LOOK of the header styles that are available to you, you
can change that with a simple click—but that’s generally covered in the first
video, so by the time you get to the second video, you should already know how
to fix that. This can also save you some
ducats at the formatters, depending upon how their pricing lists are
structured.
3.
Lists.
Ironically, for either price-savings or
saving yourself DIY brain-damage, don’t use numbered or bulleted lists, IF they
are indented. If you must have a
bulleted or numbered list (yes—like the one I’m using here, hence the irony),
and you’re going to publish to Amazon, it’s a giant pain. If you can live with the bulleted or numbered
list at the left-margin, it will work fine.
However, if you are attempting to indent them, what will happen is that
the wrap-indents will NOT align perfectly. This is due to the ability of the
Kindle e-reader (of all kinds, excluding the Fire, which can do this quite
nicely) to rescale fonts. The “wrap,”
inside the secret-sauce code of a kindle book, is set in (either) a percentage
(of the available screensize) or “ems” which are relative to the font, unlike
text measurements—which are absolute.
What this means is that your text wrap will, on an indented, bulleted or
numbered item, look perfect at one font size—but will creep, ever so slightly, left-or right, as
the font-size changes, relative to the selected font-size, if that makes any
sense. To wit: if you increase the fontsize, you increase
the amount of the second-line “indent” in the wrap. However, the first line remains as it was set
up (don’t ask), so your second line creeps left or right. If this doesn’t faze you, then rock on. If you have bulleted lists, and want them to
align as perfectly as possible---well, you know where to find us. ;-).
Making them perfect can’t be done in Word.
4.
Return-itis.
This one may seem obvious, but, I kid thee not, we get at least one
manuscript a week in that is actually typed with a “return” keyed at the end of each LINE. Not paragraph, but LINE. Seriously; we have authors who don’t
understand that Word wraps automatically, nor how to set line-spacing, so in
order to make their manuscript “submission-ready,” they type to the right
margin, and hit “enter” twice.
Please: for your sanity and mine,
don’t do that.
5.
Don’t create a dedicated STYLE to italicize or
bold your text. Simply highlight the
text you want to italicize, and use the “I” button at the top of the
ribbon/menu. Same for Bold. If you create styles, but also use the
buttons, you can create inconsistencies in your work, and if you’re not a
Styles-Genius, it can get confusing.
6.
Fonts! If
you ever read what I write here, you know that you have to license any
copyrighted fonts you use. That’s the
first thing; the second thing, however, is equally important. If you use fonts in your book, to set apart
various types of content—for example, the interior FP thoughts of your killer—be
aware of the following: the Kindle e-ink
devices, as well as the majority of all e-ink devices, like the Nook e-ink
readers and the Kobos—do not support more than a single font. In the Kindle legacy devices—still the most widely-used
of all reading devices, of any brand—they have a single font, called “Caecilia,”
which is a Times New Roman clone.
Therefore, although you can license and embed fonts that will work
spiffily in ePUB readers and in the Kindle Fire, be aware that firstly, that
second font, despite your wishes, won’t show up on the Kindle legacy devices
and second, if you’re trying to do this from Word on a DIY basis, it won’t
work. Despite your best efforts, as
far as I know, if you endeavor to upload a Word file with multiple fonts in it,
you will not obtain the desired result; font embedding has to be done from
within HTML or XHTML (HTML you used to be married to) to work correctly. On a Kindle you can use a second font—a Courier
monospaced font—if absolutely necessary, but it doesn’t reflow like the TNR
font, and it’s not very attractive. You should,
if you are going to DIY, consider using a fleuron or some other graphic device,
to set that “other font” or inner thoughts, or whatever it is, apart from the
rest of your regular narrative flow.
7.
Poetry, song lyrics, and other miscellaneous material
that is indented and somewhat “columnar.”
For ease of formatting, both for yourself and any formatting company, don’t
use “enter” at the end of the line; use a line break, which is SHIFT+ENTER, as
opposed to the usual “enter.” Don’t use
this coding pair to create a new paragraph, but if you intend to display poetry
or song lyrics, this is the combo to use at the end of each “line.” At the end of each STANZA, however, you would
use the usual “enter” key, twice, as you would for a scene break. (Yes—there are better ways to do this, using
Word’s built-in Styles, but this will work “okay” for both DIY and for any
formatter worth his/her salt.)
8.
Spelling.
Yes, I know—how obvious is this? But you would be shocked at the huge
number of manuscripts we get in here that are chock-full of spelling
mistakes. I think that authors invent
character names and places, which Word, naturally highlights with the
ubiquitous red line; and they get so accustomed to seeing that, they ignore the
REAL errors. If you have invented names,
places, etc., in your ms, tell your spellcheck to “Ignore” those, so that you
stop being “spellcheck blind.” Correcting
spelling errors that your readers find, post-production, is embarrassing for
you; and if you’ve used a formatter, it’s expensive, as editing in HTML isn’t
like editing in Word.
9.
Hyphenation and Track Changes: (A Twofer!). First, if you’ve used hyphenation
throughout the document, for line endings (optional hyphens), you should do a
search and replace, and remove all optional hyphens. If you don’t, they can show up as regular,
non-optional hyphens in the finished eBook product, which you obviously don’t
want. Use FindàAdvanced FindàMoreàSpecialàOptional Hyphen, and
replace with nothing. As far as Track
Changes goes, ensure you’ve “accepted all changes” in your document. If you do not, the edits that are now
invisible to your eyes—all your additions, deletions, etc.-- will show up in
your ebook, just as if they were typed in the text. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of
these two “pre-flight” items.
10.
Explicitly marking your scene breaks. If you are going to use a formatting service,
ensure that you explicitly mark your scene breaks. If you haven’t been a religiously neat
typist, and occasionally have extra “enters” between paragraphs, a formatter can’t
infer when you want a scene break used (a flush left paragraph with vertical
whitespace above it) and when you do not.
If, like some authors, you have multiple types of scenebreaks—one that
uses a flush-left, and one that doesn’t, due to whether or not it’s simply a
passage of time, or a POV shift—then be sure you mark them differently and
explicitly. EBook formatters don’t read
your book and can’t read your mind, so be sure to tell them what you want. At Booknook, we have our clients use the old
convention of *** to indicate any scene break where they desire the visual cue
of a flush-left paragraph with vertical whitespace above. Alternatively, of course, you can use a
graphical fleuron—but be aware that using fleurons requires extra coding for
use in Kindle, as the e-ink devices will try to grossly enlarge them (that’s
the default Kindle behavior.) If you use
a formatter, the cost will be higher; if you try to do it yourself from Word,
the results, on the actual e-ink Kindles, may not be what you expect.
11.
Broken Paragraphs: If you’ve used any form of conversion
software, (please see Tip #12, below), or perhaps typed the file on different
computers, over a long stretch of time, make sure you diligently scan your
document for broken pararagraphs. If you’ve
converted it from any other format, or had it scanned & OCR’d, the
incidence of broken paragraphs will be quite high. To find broken paragraphs, turn on your
Pilcrow icon (if you don’t know what this is, please see my blogpost here
called “Pilcrow
A Go Go,” from last October), and scan the right-hand-margin. If you see a Pilcrow mark hanging out in the
right-hand margin, in the middle of what should be a paragraph, that’s a broken
paragraph, and that’s the way it will convert in an eBook—as two separate
paragraphs, broken right where the Pilcrow is sitting. If you see one sitting there, highlight it
and delete it, and fix any formatting around it (usually, a space is needed
before the ensuing word). For additional
information on the “end of line” pilcrow problem, please see my post on “Pilcrow
No-No’s, Part II,” from last November, which addresses this exact problem.
12.
Don’t Convert! Okay.
Here’s a tricky one. This will
sound contrary to everything you’ve read, on the KDP forums, etc.: but don’t convert from Mystery Format A into
Word. If you have a PDF of the interior
of your print book, just find a competent eBook Formatting company and hand it
to them. If you have a Wordstar File
from the dawn of time, hand THAT to them.
WordPerfect? Pretty much the same
(although later Wordperfect files convert very nicely, but some don’t, and you
end up with a manuscript full of “@” signs where you should see
left-hand-quotes, and a host of other glitches). We get roughly 2-4 manuscripts a week in from
prospective clients that know that we have a higher charge for PDF than for
Word (as do all formatters that are serious), and they’re all the result of
either using Calibre, or some online “You can convert your PDF file to Word,
Easy/Free/Cheap!” website. Here’s the
actual truth: It does NOT work, not
at all. What comes out looks, on the
surface, like a pretty good Word file; but lurking beneath what your eyes can
see is a disaster waiting for a place to happen. Believe it or not, it’s cheaper, in the long
run, if you simply hand a PDF file to a converter, who, quite frankly, will
scan it, OCR it, and proof it, just to get the same starting point as a Word file—because the results from that are
100x better than what you’d get by using Adobe Acrobat X Pro and attempting to
export the file as a Word file. If you
have an endless amount of time, and knowledge of HTML, you can use the “auto-convert” method; and spend days or weeks cleaning
up the ensuing HTML. But if you hand a
file like that to a converter, like us, they’ll charge you for all those man-hours. Honestly, the scan option is probably
cheaper.
And there you go. An
even dozen items for you to use in creating and “pre-flight checking” your book
for e-formatting. We have other
frequently asked questions, along with the two videos I already pointed you to,
in our Knowledgebase, which you may find by clicking here.
Not many are actually about formatting, but we do have some nice links
about marketing, Retailers, and a few hints and tips on Social Media.
(And yes, for those of you
who’ve emailed, tweeted, and asked: yes,
it’s true. We have Jackie Collins
in the house; you should expect to see “Chances,”
her first Lucky Santangelo novel, in
eBookstores around the end of the first week of June!)
Hitch
K. A. Hitchens is the owner of
Booknook.biz, an eBook formatting and production company, specializing in producing affordable and professional conversions for every author--from first-timers to NY Times Bestsellers. You can follow us at Twitter ( @BooknookBiz ), Facebook (
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Booknookbiz ), Pinterest (
http://pinterest.com/booknookbiz/ ) or LinkedIn (just search for us).
Jodie Renner is a freelance fiction editor
and the award-winning author of three craft-of-writing guides in her series An
Editor’s Guide to Writing Compelling Fiction: Captivate
Your Readers, Fire
up Your Fiction, and Writing
a Killer Thriller, as well as two clickable time-saving e-resources, Quick
Clicks: Spelling List and Quick
Clicks: Word Usage. She has also organized two anthologies for charity, incl. Childhood
Regained – Stories of Hope for Asian Child Workers. You can find Jodie at www.JodieRenner.com, www.JodieRennerEditing.com, her blog, http://jodierennerediting.blogspot.com/, and on Facebook and Twitter. 
