Your Book’s Formatting Lifecycle

Book Formatting from Draft to Published

I've seen what a big, distracting, pain in the butt formatting is for authors in their journey to finishing and publishing your book. This post and the forthcoming posts in this book formatting series will help you understand how to format your book at each stage:

Nobody has mentioned that you're going to have to format your book at least 5 times, right?

What you'll learn in this post

In this post, you'll learn:

• What document formatting standards to follow
• What are the different manuscript formatting phases
• Can you do it all in MS Word
• What fonts, headers, line spacing, etc. to follow
• What editors want 
• What to do if you got lots of paragraphs and font styles
• How to start planning your book production journey

Follow document formatting standards

Document formatting just means making your document pretty and accessible, so you can easily share it and get feedback. This means double spacing, font sizes, headers and footers, etc.

Manuscript formatting phases

There are several times you'll need feedback. Each time you submit your manuscript for feedback you'll need to make sure your document is cleanly formatted. 

1. Your first level of feedback will come from critique partners. This may be a couple of other authors you find who are also writing books like yours, or from members of a writing group. In my critique groups we format our stories, chapters, or entire manuscripts in Word, then copy them to Google Docs so all the feedback is consolidated.
2. Once you get feedback from critique partners, you'll start sharing your work with as many early readers as you can. These are also called beta readers. (This is where you start quietly building your book marketing street team.) If you have a cleanly formatted Word doc you can make PDF, EPUB, and MOBI files and share them with readers using using BookFunnel, StoryOrigin, or ProlificWorks.
3. Once you incorporate feedback from your beta readers, you're ready to hire a copy editor. Editors want a totally stripped-down Word doc.
4. Your editor will fix a lot of things but also may have suggestions. So you'll work in Word to create your final draft, and then it's time to send it for proofreading.
5. Now it's time to make it a book. Authors with simple books often do it themselves using a Word template but you can hire a professional book designer to create it in InDesign.

Can I do it all in MS Word?

... or Apple Pages or Open Office, or Google Docs? Yes. If your book is simple, and you're not going to get fancy with formatting, you can do it all in Word or the other programs I mentioned.

If you do want to get fancy with formatting, you don't have to do it until the end. Then you can hire out a high-quality final-for-publication version created in InDesign. That's the last step though, so do everything in a Word doc first, then get the final design done in InDesign.

What editors want

Editors regularly strip out all formatting before they can start editing, so it's better you do it unless you don't mind paying them to do it. If you've got any styling at all, you're going to want to do it right before you send it to the editor, because it can take them a while to figure out what your formatting is all about. 

Got lots of paragraph and font styles?

If you've incorporated special styling for text messages, pull quotes or italics, it's critical that you use styles to create them instead of ad-hoc formatting. Get my free booklet What Every Author Needs to Know About MS Word Styles or just use Word "help" to figure it out.

Done for you formatting

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