Okay, so you’re sitting at your keyboard pounding away, working on your latest work in progress. You get to the end of a section, hit Enter a couple of times and then type the subhead for the next section of text. You’re an experienced word processor—hey, you’re a writer, right?—so you grab your mouse, select the text of the subhead and start formatting it. Maybe you want your subheads to be Helvetica Bold, 12 point, all caps. (I’m not recommending that, by the way, just using it as an example.) You quickly select Helvetica from your font menu, change the size, change the alignment from fully justified—which you’re using for the text—to flush left (left-aligned), which is what you’re using for your subheads. Maybe, if you’re nitpicky, you also add a little space above and below the subhead, either by using the Enter key or going into the Paragraph formatting palette and setting values in the “Spacing Before/After” boxes. The Problem with Formatting That was a lot of work to format a subhead, don’t you think?
We walked through about 6 steps to get the formatting right. And you’ll have to repeat these steps every time you come to a subhead in your manuscript. Some people realize this is a lot of repetitive work and invent shortcuts like copying the last subhead, which copies all the formatting with it, then pasting it where you want the new subhead, and then deleting the old text and replacing it with the new text. That saves time, doesn’t it? But the fact is that all these methods are bad choices.
Format a Book in Word: Kindle Formatting. By Colin Dunbar. It seems the feature to remove page numbers is not available on earlier versions of Word for Mac. I checked this on my son’d Mac (he has version 15). The option is available on that version. Format Book in Word: Publishing to Smashwords April 21, 2015.
Over the course of a long book, can you really be sure you’ve input exactly the same formatting values every time? Did you remember to add that “Space/After” every time?
Maybe you should check, since there’s no other way to be certain. Wait, didn’t you try a couple of subheads in the Verdana font? Did you remember to go back and change those? What about if someone mentions that your 12-point Helvetica bold subheads would look a lot better in 11 point?
What are you going to do then? The Answer to the Formatting Problem No professional typesetter or designer would face these same problems. Would you like to know why? It’s because professionals are getting paid for their work.
The longer it takes to do a particular task, the less money they will derive from a project with a flat fee. Therefore, they will use the tools built into professional-level software to automate and standardize this process as much as possible. And that’s what you should be thinking about also, if you plan to do your own book interior in Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word and most other robust word processors now contain a few of the same tools found in high-end layout programs. These are the tools that will make your life easier and your work more efficient. The one you really want to learn right now is.
A style in Word is simply a way to capture all the formatting for a particular piece of text so it can be named, edited, and used for all other similar pieces of text. For instance, in my example, we could do all that formatting once, then capture it as a Style and call it “ Subhead.” When you get to the next subhead in your manuscript, instead of reaching for the mouse and starting to format it, you just assign the “Subhead” style to it. Bingo, your text is completely formatted in one simple step. If you learn to do this, the time you spend working on your manuscript will be a lot more enjoyable and contain a lot less of the routine, mind-numbing repetitive work it takes to do these tasks manually. But using styles has three other crucial benefits:. All the similar pieces of text—like all the subheads—will be formatted exactly the same way, because they are all assigned with the same Style.
There is much less margin for error, so you can be sure your book’s formatting is professional and consistent. You can change the definition of your “Subhead” style—for instance, from 12 point to 11 point—and all the pieces of text with the “Subhead” style will change instantly and uniformly. Your path to eBook conversion will be greatly simplified, because your eBook files need to have all text assigned to a style, and the styles will enforce consistency on the final eBook files. One of the great things about using word processing software to prepare our manuscripts is its ability to harness the power of our computers to easily and quickly produce manuscripts and books that are consistent. And knowing that you don’t have to go back and check hundreds of subheads to make sure they are all perfectly consistent? Well, that’s priceless. The World Up Until Now Of course, trying to create a book in Microsoft Word is no easy task.
I’m pretty sure it would drive me crazy, but that’s because I’ve never had to do it. I’ve been spoiled by great tools like InDesign. But I know there are a lot of authors out there who confront this problem, and I have a message for you. The world is about to change. In a couple of weeks I’ll have a solution for your problem that I think you’ll really enjoy. It will take away the pain and frustration of trying to get something that looks like a book out of your word processor. And in order to use it, you’re going to need to know these styles.
So take a few minutes to study your word processor’s styles. It will repay you many times over.
Originally published in a slightly different form at CreateSpace as. Thanks, Joel. After I left that message I wondered if it was leading up to announcing your Word templates. They really are splendid.
Last winter, when I edited “The Storyteller’s Anthology” for my favorite nonprofit writer’s group that was (well, still is) in need of funding, I contacted your people and received a donated theme for it. Everything, including the contents, editing, Word theme (thank you so much), cover photo and art was donated, and the book is selling well. You can see the print version on Amazon and the eBook will be available next week. Thanks for your quick response here and again for the great template.
Very valuable post, Joel, and not just for self-pub or ebooks. As a typesetter, I charge for my time, and a consistently-styled Word document takes only a fraction of the time to convert to typeset format than inconsistently-styled or unstyled documents. The in-house XSLT we use to pull the content out of Word’s XML is smart, but not so smart that it can’t be fooled by an author using bogus styles, or simply using the wrong styles because they look the same as the right ones. One of the drawbacks of wordprocessor marketing is that everyone now believes that “looking pretty” is the same thing as “being right”. A colleague once said that every author nowadays believes they have the right to design their own layout; this may be true for self-pub, but not with an established publisher who has a house style. They are the ones who should be ensuring that the document is styled correctly (but hey, I charge them for putting it right ? And I do know some authors who have used their demonstrable skill in styling to bargain for an extra advance or percentage royalty, on the grounds that the typesetter (me) will charge less for easier work, which is true (our rates for XML or LaTeX are lower than normal, unlike with most typesetters).
Very valuable post, Joel, and not just for self-pub or ebooks. As a typesetter, I charge for my time, and a consistently-styled Word document takes only a fraction of the time to convert to typeset format than inconsistently-styled or unstyled documents. The in-house XSLT we use to pull the content out of Word’s XML is smart, but not so smart that it can’t be fooled by an author using bogus styles, or simply using the wrong styles because they look the same as the right ones. One of the drawbacks of wordprocessor marketing is that everyone now believes that “looking pretty” is the same thing as “being right”. A colleague once said that every author nowadays believes they have the right to design their own layout; this may be true for self-pub, but not with an established publisher who has a house style. They are the ones who should be ensuring that the document is styled correctly (but hey, I charge them for putting it right ? And I do know some authors who have used their demonstrable skill in styling to bargain for an extra advance or percentage royalty, on the grounds that the typesetter (me) will charge less for easier work, which is true (our rates for XML or LaTeX are lower than normal, unlike with most typesetters). Another typesetting nightmare occurs when someone selects a heading Style, then hits SHIFT-RETURN and keeps on typing, only to realize that everything is coming out in the heading style (Bold Italic, for instance).
This is because the SHIFT-RETURN they hit (and didn’t see because they don’t have INVISIBLES turned on) carries the previous paragraph’s formatting with it. So they select the paragraph and turn it into ‘regular’ text by setting a font and size from the menu bar, while beneath the surface hidden and waiting to pounce is the underlying header style. But all looks OK to the author, so he keeps going.
Sometimes he hits RETURN, sometimes SHIFT-RETURN. When stuff doesn’t look right, he fixes it on the surface. But to him the document looks fine. The headings are bold italic flush left, his text is 12 point justified.
At this point, he decides to hire a print book and ebook formatter and sends off his masterpiece which is a disastrous mix of styles, both Word Styles and local formatting, indiscriminately applied. I say ‘indiscriminately’ not to be pejorative, but to point out that most people who use Word don’t know about Styles and if they do, they don’t know how to use them. As someone pointed out earlier, Word doesn’t make it easy to use them. So far, I haven’t found a quick keystroke combo that will invoke a style.
Word used to have this feature, quite a few versions back. In the late 1980s when Styles first came out (I’m on a Mac) I seem to remember a keystroke combo (OPTION-SHIFT-S, maybe) that brought up a small dialog box; you then typed the first letter or two of your Style and Word applied it.
Nice and quick and no need to take your hands off the keyboard. Back to the nightmare formatting job. I have one here at the moment and on the surface it’s nice and clean and very simple.
A Q & A, block-text style, with speakers’ names in bold and a lot of italic book titles sprinkled through the questions and answers. But no matter how I try to fix this mess changing the Style parameters, putting it all in ‘normal’ or whatever, I still end up with a mess. Italics will switch to roman and vice versa, or I lose all italics, depending on which ‘fix’ I attempt.
I leave it to your imagination as to what happens to this file when I import it into my page layout software and even worse, convert it to HTML for ebook production! Is it time for wine/whine yet? Maggie, fantastic. “No need to take your hands off your keyboard.” Reminds me of the character mode vs graphic user interface wars, and how WordPerfect ruled because (as Grace says, above) you could control the entire program from the keyboard. But we’re all slaves of the GUI now, yes? This is nowhere worse than the iPad, which is intentionally dumbed down to resist control from a keyboard, meaning you have to constantly poke the screen then return to the home row.
Oh, don’t get me started! David Bergsland chimed in this week on Word also, but from rather a different perspe tive. Thanks, Roger. I found myself using Word a lot more in the QuarkXPress days, when we could pre-format text and just pour it in to the layout program where it would pretty much auto-format.
I’ve switched sides in the battle with Word, though. I ranted about it for 2 years and then gave up because the plain fact is that hundreds or thousands of authors are creating books in Word. I now see my job as making those books look better, as good as they can, and be properly constructed. And I think I have a way that will work. I began years ago with Word Perfect. Knew it backwards and forwards.
Used it for the transcription I did. Then I got published traditionally and was told I had to do it in Word.
I hated Word for years and fought against it and then upgraded from Word 2000 or so to 2007 and had a rush job I had to do. Needless to say, I was ready to pull my hair out. Where was everything? Fast forward.six months ago, I came across a tutorial for epubs. I wanted to get my eBooks on Smashwords and do it myself in a competent manner. The tutorial showed me the value of styles. Now I use it for the beginnings of all my eBooks, Smashwords and Kindle and today used it for Createspace.
Word has had named styles since the late 1980s. The problem is that Microsoft makes it so difficult and clumsy to use that most users never discover it.
And odd as is seems, at least on the Mac version styles are getting more and more hidden. Microsoft also seems to be the only software company around that makes its products harder to use with each subsequent generation.
Besides, for all but the final stage of formatting and layout, there are far better apps that Word, apps intended to make writing and editing easier. Scrivener is one of the most popular, particularly since it has Mac and Windows versions and will soon release one for iPads and iPhones. My own book production workflow is to write until I have a near-final version in Scrivener. Then I transfer it to InDesign for the layout and final edit. Once you get past the steep learning curve, the sheer power of ID makes it a joy to use. With the latest version, ID lets one text flow drive multiple outputs: PDF, ePub and Amazon’s Kindle.
In today’s world, that saves a lot of time. When I first got into publishing, I tried to use Word but gave up in disgust. It’s a memo/letter creating app that works poorly for long-document writing and for the final layout. That’s not something that can be fixed by tacking on a few more features. It’s embedded into the core design of Word.
I did comparison pages with Word and ID. Neither one was the clear winner. I’ve published more than 30 books with Word and see no reason to change. Good books and bad books can be done with many programs — and I doubt that there is any advantage to using ID for an e-book.
Joel said, “Typesetting with a word processor is never going to give you the smooth color, sophisticated hyphenation, and fine control over your type that you can get with a professional-level program. But by picking the right typeface at the beginning, you’ll ensure that your book can be readable and conform to long-standing book publishing practices. And that’s no small thing.” My new book about formatting books with Word. Joel and newbie’s everywhere about to self-publish! I WISH, WISH, WISH, I’d read and understood this post about 6 weeks ago when I started my self-pub process. In spite of following The Book Designer religiously for a couple of years, I totally missed the difference between FORMATTING the interior and CONVERSION to e-pub.
And, since I decided to buy conversion services, I naively thought I could ignore posts on Formatting. I know you know, the rework (and stress) that caused when my MS didn’t pass conversion inspection due to a mix of TABS, Spaces, or Paragraph formatting for normal indentation and/or alignment. Lesson learned, I will study Styles and read everything you post on formatting! Hello Joel Don’t you think it’s a matter of something being “difficult” before we start it, but when we have it mastered, we look back and think: “Now why did I get all stressed out?” I started with the old PageMaker (that is what InDesign was called:-)), and as Word was the standard for technical writers, we had no option but to master it.
Something about using Word, I believe, is that most people use it in their work environment, and as such, it becomes “easier” to master. For a newcomer, InDesign can also be somewhat of a nightmare. Thanks VERY much, Joel. I’ve produced more than 30 books with Word but never saw the point in using the styles feature other than for hyperlinked chapter names in e-books. Because of your suggestion, which I read at 3:10 a.m., I set up a style for subheads in a book I’m working on.
I love being able to make an instant change that affects dozens of occurrences in a book. Styles are wonderful and I feel like an idiot for not using them more often before. Marcus NEW: self-publishing company parody, NEW: reviews of books for authors.
Do Microsoft Word for Windows and Apple Pages work together and can I open the same files with either program? I’m getting a new Mac but don’t know if I want to buy the Mac version of Word just to work on documents I send back and forth to myself from a PC. A., Apple’s word-processing program for its iOS and Mac operating systems, can open files but. While fonts and certain types of formatting may not translate properly, Pages can probably handle basic Word files from the PC if you open and edit them on the Mac. When you are finished editing on Pages, you can before sending them back to the Windows computer.
If that sounds tedious (or seems as if it poses the potential for scrambled formatting), taking advantage of a free online service might make for an easier and more convenient experience in bouncing the documents back and forth between different platforms and programs. However, if you are creating the documents in Microsoft Word on the PC, just staying in Word might be the smoothest approach.
Microsoft’s free apps (including ) work right in the web browser — as long as you sign in with a. If you use Hotmail, Skype, Outlook.com or another Microsoft service, you should be able to use the same Microsoft user name and password for Office Online. With Office Online, the files can be stored on or in a connected account. You can edit the files online on the computer or on mobile devices — or download them. And if you find that the online version of Office is not robust enough for your needs, Microsoft’s various subscriptions and software offer better compatibility for a monthly, annual or one-time price. Using open-source software with both Windows and Mac versions is another approach if you are not fully tied to Microsoft Word on the PC. And are two such suites.