BOOK FORMATTING IN WORD | Chapter headers and header images

[Music] hi everybody welcome and thank you so much for checking out my channel my name is tammy and i'm an independent author and somebody who just really loves great stories so on this channel i talk about writing books i've enjoyed and lessons i've learned on my publishing journey one of the skills that i've picked up as an indie author is book formatting and that is something that i've actually come to really enjoy especially for print books and it's something that honestly i think i've gotten pretty good at over the years i will pop up some images on the screen so you can see what some of my books look like on the inside i have done the print formatting myself for all of these books and i plan to continue doing that for any books that i self-publish in the future i've gotten several questions and comments about my book formatting and people are usually pretty surprised to learn that i do my formatting in microsoft word i realize that microsoft word is not the best formatting software out there but it is something that a lot of writers have access to already and you can actually do a lot with it if you know how to in this video series i am sharing some tips and tricks that i've learned that hopefully you can use to format your own books if you decide that you want to do that as well today i am going to show you guys how to set up your chapter headers and insert images into your chapter headers if you would like to do that so as you can see if we scroll down i have removed a lot of the formatting that was there in some of the previous videos on the chapter headers because i want to show you guys how i did that the first thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that every chapter is its own section if we scroll down to chapter two these are actually connected i know it starts on its own page over here on the side but if we deleted this paragraph right here we can see that the chapter just moves up it's not in its own section or on its own page yet so we want to change that so we're gonna come right over here to the end of this last line of chapter one we are gonna go over here to the layout tab and we're going to click on where it says breaks right here and we want a section break so right here under section breaks we are going to put that it starts on the next page so insert a section break and start the new section on the next page if we click that then it moves this chapter two over to the next page it looks like we have an extra space here as well so i'm just going to um delete that and bring that up to the very top we're going to scroll down and do the same thing at the end of chapter two um again layout breaks section break on the next page and we do have that extra space again so we'll delete that now we have all our chapters we just have three chapters in this you can tell if you have your section break set up correctly if you go over to home and this little paragraph marker right here if you click that it will show all of the formatting that you have and this is a really helpful way to see where you have your paragraph split up or where you have different section breaks page breaks things like that we have section break right here because this over here is all the back matter so we do want to separate that out and it's the same thing up at the top at the very end of the front matter i have a section break right here so that we start a new section over with the actual body of the text and the book itself now that we have our chapters divided up we can play around with the font if we want to change that if i wanted to have it match more of the title pages i can change it to synzel because i have this setup as a document for you guys to download and play around with some of the formatting i want to stick to fonts that already come with microsoft word so we're going to leave it at garamond i don't want this chapter to be over on the left side like this i actually want it to be centered so we're going to move it over and then i want to start it down the page a little bit so i'm going to hit enter a few times and just bring it down these marks are obviously kind of distracting so you can turn them off if you don't need them anymore but i hit enter five times so i'm gonna go ahead and do that to all of the chapter headers bring them down a little bit and then center them i also have some spacing after the chapter before the book actually starts and if i hit enter from here then it obviously creates a bigger space because that font is bigger but if i do it from here at the bottom where the font is smaller then it will make like a smaller space and you can move that down now we are going to go ahead and insert a fun little pirate image into our headers and the way that i like to insert images is not to do it in the body but if you do it in the headers then we can get it to carry over to all of the different chapter headers and you don't have to do it individually for each one and so that's what we're going to do so we're going to go and click right at the top of the page if you double click that then it will bring us to our header and we are going to insert a picture from this device and we're going to choose this little pirate picture right here and now that is inserted it is a little big i think so i'm going to resize it just a little bit now when i insert this image i actually want to put it first in line with the text and the reason that i want to do that is because i want it to be moved down a little bit on the page and i want that to be the same and be consistent i don't want to be like moving that around myself to where i could make a mistake and move it down too far between different chapters so if i put it in line with the text and then i just hit enter a few times then it will bring it down for me i also want to make sure that that is exactly centered on the page so i'm going to go and center it just like that now that it's where i want it to be i will go ahead and change this back to behind text because there's actually something interesting that i want to do as well on the front that i will show you guys so i'm going to come up here and i want to put like a little page number right in this guy's skull and i want it to be white so that it shows up as white and then you know maybe this will be a different chapter name maybe it has a title or maybe you have a character name that you want to use to show whose point of view that we're in so we are gonna go up here and we're gonna try to kind of find the best place for where that um text can go we're gonna put it right there for now and we're just gonna put a number one i want this to be white so that it will show white on the skull and it's not centered very good i'm going to add a space right there and then i'm going to make this a little bit smaller until we get that centered just right and that's about centered so i'm going to go ahead and change this to black because then it won't show on the skull itself so i know it looks like that is going to show up on the skull but when we actually go to print we can see that it doesn't actually show up there because the image is in the header it will show up as that lighter gray color before it's actually printed but when the book prints it will print the darker gray color and you will see that when we do our headers and footers for the page numbers and like the author name and the book title in the headers and putters as well i actually want this chapter title move down just a little bit more i feel like it's too close to the skull there so we're going to do that and we're going to go ahead and do that for all of them so as you can see the header has now carried over to every section and if we scroll back up here to the top with the headers and footers you want to make sure that you have this checkbox up here different first page so that the first page of every section is going to be different you also want to make sure that you have different odd and even pages check and that is because the headers that we're going to put for the odd pages and the even pages are going to be different maybe we'll put the author name on one side and the title on the other side or maybe you just want something on one side but not on the other so you want to make sure that you have different odd and even pages checked and then if you go over here to this link to previous then it will make it so that the header is the same and then if we scroll down we're going to go down to our second section the other thing that you want to make sure is that this link to previous box is checked because this will link it to the previous section and make sure that the headers are the same that's how we got it to carry over from that first one and i'm gonna go ahead and change this again we're gonna just have another chapter title what i'd like to do with the page numbers in order to make sure that they're placed correctly and that everything looks the same is i will just i want to turn this on because i want to make sure that i copy everything that i need to and then i want to grab all this copy it and then we're going to go down to the bottom and we're just going to replace all of this with that copy and paste and then we're gonna change this to number two and then we're gonna scroll down bottom and we're gonna again just delete all of this stuff and replace it we're gonna change this to chapter three and then we're gonna just change this to chapter title now we have all of our chapter titles and headers set up and they are looking good i also would like to do a sort of drop cap or i'll show you another thing that you can do with your you know the first few words of your book if you would like to do that so one thing that i like to do sometimes is where all of the the first few words are in small caps so if we just go over to font it will pop up this box and we can click this check box right here and that changes all of those to small caps i have seen in some books where they like will italicize the first few words or something like that you can also create a drop cap in microsoft word so we'll go ahead and go to chapter two and do that and we'll just highlight that first letter and then if we go over to insert over here by all of the text box stuff there is this option for a drop cap right here and if we go to drop cap options then we can kind of play around with that so we're going to go to dropped and then i want it to drop like three lines sure that sounds great sometimes i feel like the letters get a little bit too close to the edge here where they're like running into the text the body text and i don't always like that and so if we go back to drop caps you can actually adjust that a little bit so that they're not so close so we'll just change it to 0.1 and then you can see that popped out a little farther from the edge there i think that looks fine the way it is but honestly it kind of just depends on what letter it is that's getting dropped sometimes that looks a little weird you can also like a lot of the time i will have like a quote to start the chapter right a quotation and you can drop both of those letters or just insert the quotation marks back into there we'll go back down here and we'll go ahead and drop this l as well and if we just push drop then see this is the case where the l i feel like it's just a little bit too close to everything else that other l right there so i'm gonna go back into here and i'm going to actually change this a little bit and we'll put 0.1 and then we'll pop that out just a little bit farther so that it's not running into the text so much which means that i also want to do that with this one because i want everything to be the same and as you can see when we did that it actually messed it up i think that's probably because of the quotation so we're just gonna go ahead and delete that guy for now and we're going to try that again okay so that worked and then i will go ahead and add my little quotation mark back in word is kind of picky and finicky sometimes you really just have to play around with things if something goes wrong go ahead and you know use that ctrl undo button to erase that and try something else you just have to kind of play around with it and it does get frustrating because a lot of the times you will change one thing and it will mess something else up that's where this little button comes in handy a lot of the times because you can look and see what you're doing exactly and maybe what went wrong so now we have all of our chapter headers formatted i'm going to go ahead and print this or show you guys a print preview so that you can see what it will actually look like so as you can see those headers that we have set up for the chapter headers they are not gray anymore they are going to print black and that's what we want this is a really helpful way to to look at your book overall and just make sure that everything is going to print the way that you want it to as we can see we have the map on the two pages that's exactly what we want we have these two pages facing each other and then you know this full page image spread that we have we obviously want that as well and then the blank page and then the book actually starts if you look at the description box down below i have linked a sample word document that you can download and play around with some of this formatting yourself it's a document that has already been formatted it looks just like the one that i just showed you in the video if this video was useful to you please hit that like button and be sure to leave a comment down below to let me know what you think or to let me know if there's other things that you want me to cover in this video series be sure to subscribe and ring the bell if you want to be notified as soon as i post more videos thank you guys so much for watching and i hope you have a fantastic day bye [Music] you

Channel: T. A. Hernandez

Views: 9,229

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Id: rJGgJkIJl40

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 25 2022