Formatting a Manuscript

I’ve self-published five books through CreateSpace and helped several of my friends publish books they’ve written. So I consider myself an expert – able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, so to speak.

But I was stymied recently when a friend asked for help with a book he’d written. Everything worked fine through most of the formatting process. I even figured out how to insert the custom title page that another friend had done for him.

But when I tried to set up the copyright page, my software kept inserting a blank page. Despite all my computer smarts, I couldn’t solve the problem. I started thinking that I’d have to hire a formatting service ($200 and up) to fix that one mistake – or abandon the book project. (There’s no way he could pay that kind of fee.)

And then I remembered that Word often embeds hidden codes when you hit the Enter key at the end of a paragraph. I deleted the paragraph break (also called a “hard return”), and the blank page vanished. (Good riddance!)

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My point is that formatting a book requires discipline. You have to use the Styles feature in Word. You can’t blithely keep hitting the space bar or tab key to get the look you want. If you throw that advice to the winds (or never learned how to use Word properly – my friend’s problem), you’re likely to end up with a mess that only a wizard can straighten out.

I consider myself – ahem! – one step closer to wizard status. But I hope I never find myself in that situation again.

enter-key-pixabay

 

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