Understanding Your Print Book Formatting Options

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

In two of my earlier posts for the Indie Author Series, I covered Understanding Your Ebook Formatting Options and Three Quick Tips to Help Your Print Books Look Professional.

Today I want to return to the topic of formatting—specifically formatting our print books. As the marketplace grows more and more crowded, we need every advantage to stand out and to make our books an enjoyable reading experience. That means we need professional-looking, easy-to-read formatting for all versions of our books.

Formatting Your Manuscript for Submission

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Submitting a manuscript to an agent or editor can be a terrifying experience. We worry about every little detail we might have missed and if that slip up will get us rejected.

Courier or Times Roman? 10 or 12 point? Double or single spaced?

Don't fret. As long as your manuscript is readable and follows some very simple guides, you'll be fine. (Well, your story still has to wow, but that's a whole other article)

Seek and Destroy: Using MS Word’s “Find and Replace” to Save Your Sanity

By Dario Ciriello

Part of the Indie Authors Series

You know the problem: you have a story or novel with a lot of fancy formatting in it, and when it comes to prepping it for print or digital publication, you find that scores, even hundreds, of items will need reformatting. A novel, perhaps, which you’d written for submission to agents and publishers following the old industry protocol of underlining words to indicate italics; or—as has happened to me more than once—a long ms. in which some of the quotes are curly and others straight. You reach for the bottle...

Fortunately, help is at hand. Using MS Word’s Find and Replace feature in conjunction with nonprinting character codes, you can quickly and easily carry out global fixes on just about any formatting problem you’re likely to face.

Three Quick Tips to Help Your Print Books Look Professional

By Marcy Kennedy, @MarcyKennedy

Part of the Indie Author Series

Many self-publishers stress out about formatting their ebooks (my post Understanding Your Ebook Formatting Options explains your choices), but they assume putting together the print book files will be easy. After all, we’re writers because we love books. We’ve read thousands of them over our lifetime. We know how they should look, right?

Wrong.

When we were reading all those books, we probably weren’t paying much attention to the layout, but there are definitely right and wrong ways to format the print version of our book if we want to look professional.

The Great Debate: Italics or Underline?

Forget less filling/tastes great. Chicken or the egg. Big bang or seven days. For writers, how to denote italics in your manuscript tops them all.

What's the right way? Everyone has a different answer (which is remarkable since you'd think there could only be two, right?)

Underlining is the most common, as there are tons of books, guides and sites that back this up. But this comes from the days when you couldn't click a button and change your text to italics. Then later it continued, when fonts were always Courier and italics was hard to read. But today, using a serif font with a clear italic version is available to everyone.

What's a writer to do.