How to Format a Book in Word | A Step-By-Step Tutorial 2022

hey guys i'm dave chesson of kindlepreneur in  today's video i'm going to show you exactly how   to format your book using microsoft word now it  can be a little bit difficult and there are some   limitations using word but following my steps  you will be able to turn your word document   into a professional looking book but before we  begin if you'd like to learn more about book   writing publishing and book marketing be sure to  hit that subscribe button as well as the little   bell icon to the right so as you get notified when  my next video comes out and with that let's begin   okay so in order to turn your manuscript into  a professional looking book we're gonna cover   four areas preparing your document for formatting  applying the right formatting settings to include   page size margins line spacing and indentation  chapter styles and page numbers and header styles   checking and improving your book with formatting  rules and finally advanced capabilities also it's   important to note that as i'm going through the  steps in this tutorial you may find that your word   looks a little bit different than  mine depending on the version you have   in most cases the feature will probably be in or  around the same location as yours but if not just   do a quick google search with the feature name and  the version of your microsoft word and you should   find it so i'm going to start off using a word  document that i created in my last video which   was how to write a book in word and we're going to  use the text from alice's adventures in wonderland   you'll notice that i already have a title page  copyright page and a table of content i won't   go into details on these individual pages and all  the other possible types of pages you could add to   your book but i do have other videos on my channel  which you can locate here that show you how to   not only write them but format those special  pages specifically since each are very unique   next you're going to want to decide on how you  want the text to go all the way to the right of   the page as you can see we have all these spaces  on the right there are two settings we can apply   justified and or hyphenations to add one of these  or both just select your text and go to the home   tab and under the paragraph alignment section  select the justify button to make sure you have   your hyphenations on or off go to your layout  tab and select hyphenations and choose whether   you want none automatic or manual now that we have  our document looking better let's look at layouts   and viewing options for formatting to help me with  seeing the overall look while formatting i like to   set up my view like this where i can see multiple  pages and how they look all at once you can do   this by going to the view tab selecting multiple  pages you can also zoom your document in and out   to either see more or less pages i also like to  have the navigation on the left so i can see the   different sections as well to do this just select  the navigation pane box if you use header styles   for the different chapters or pages the pages  and page names will show up automatically but   if you don't know what that is don't worry we'll  cover that in a bit next i want to make sure that   each different section type and chapter ends with  a page break this is important because as we make   changes to formatting changes in previous chapters  won't break or affect sections or chapters later   in the book okay so now that we've laid it out  correctly and we've got the right viewing options   set up let's go ahead and move into the right  formatting setting when it comes to picking out   your page size you're going to want to consider  the style of book you are writing here are some   of the most popular page sizes that are accepted  by online stores like amazon and i'll include a   link to this page in the video description but for  the purposes of this video we will be using one   of the most popular paperback fiction dimensions  5x8 to change your page size you will go to layout   margin and then custom margins depending on what  version of word you have yours may look a little   different however with this version we're  then going to select page setup from here   we can see some of the most common printing sizes  and if we select manage custom sizes we can go in   and insert our five by eight size next we're going  to set up our margin now when it comes to margins   there are a couple of things you need to keep in  mind first when you open up a physical book notice   that the size of the outside margin is different  from the size of the inside margin furthermore   the appropriate margin size that we should use on  each depends on the number of pages of your book   this is because of how a book is constructed and  the larger the number of pages the more chances   the words can hide behind the bend of the page so  to figure out the potential margins we should use   going back to kdp we can see what they typically  recommend when it comes to your page count   however i would just advise to use these  numbers as a guide and do whatever you think   fits and looks best based on our book we're  going to go with 0.375 inside and .25 outside   to change our margins we're going  to first go to our layout tab   and select margins and custom margins from here we  will want to select mirror margins under the pages   section this allows us to see our margins  in a left page right page view just like   opening a physical copy of a book would be going  off of the kdp guidelines we will first start   with an inside margin of 0.375 and an outside  of 0.25 applying this to the entire document   you can see that those margins are a bit too small  so after a few more adjustments i ended up with an   inside margin of 0.375 and an outside margin of  0.35 now we're going to move on to line spacing   line spacing is really important because in it  it can make or break the readability of your book   when setting your line spacing a typical rule  of thumb is to aim for around 30 lines per page   depending on the style of book that can change  so feel free to mess around and see what feels   best for you to show you the importance of  line spacing we're first going to select   all of our text on a mac that shortcut is  command a and set our spacing to a single line   as you can see there is a very tight feel and  almost looks like your typical college essay   going up to 1.5 now gives it a bit too much  space and still doesn't feel right so let's   try something in the middle and try line  spacing exactly and at 15. now you can   see that our text has a little room to breathe  but not too much that our pages are dragging on   now between each of the paragraphs you  can see that there is additional space   that isn't necessary to change that we're again  going to make sure all of our text is selected   go to our line settings and under spacing  before and after we're going to select zero now   all that extra space is gone and you have a much  cleaner looking text for indentation the most   common mistake we see authors make is just hitting  the tab button before a paragraph or hitting the   space bar multiple times this can lead to an  inconsistent indentation throughout your book   and later on when formatting can cause many  spacing issues so do not use the tab or the   spacebar to create your indentations for the  proper way we're going to command a our entire   text and go to our line spacing settings again  under indentation we're going to choose first line   and let's just see what maybe 0.5 does for us as  you can see this isn't too bad however it could   be better and a bit less aggressive so instead of  0.5 we're going to try point three with that we   are able to easily see each of the paragraphs but  not have too much of an indentation that your book   looks amateur and not formatted by a professional  the entire purpose of the indentations is just   allow the reader to track along each of the  paragraphs next up is chapter styles the easiest   way to quickly track all of your chapter  headings and ensure that they are the same   is to use the style feature here if we highlight  our chapter one text here and go to our style pane   we can select new style name our style say chapter  heading example and then select the font we want   give it a little bit of a bigger font chapter a  little bit of space helps our eyes have a little   bit of a break in between when you're done editing  you can click ok and your chapter style will then   be saved in your style selector board we can then  find any of the remainder chapters in the book and   quickly adjust them to all look the same when  it comes to setting page numbers we will have   to go up to our insert tab and go to page numbers  we're going to set our position to bottom of page   alignment center and make sure that show number on  first page is not selected if you had a specific   page number you want your account to start on you  could select format and choose which page here to   start on double clicking on the page numbers you  can edit their text style and size just remember   that whatever you do to an odd number will not  translate over to your even number pages when   setting up headers we could simply double-click  on the top of your page to bring up the header   settings here we're going to write out the name of  our book however we don't want this to appear on   every single page throughout the book so instead  we're going to select the box that says different   odd and even pages on our even pages we may  want our author name to be included instead   okay so now that we have the right formatting  settings set to our document let's go over some   of the things that you need to check over  to verify so as to make sure it's clean and   looking professional first go through each of the  chapters and for the first line in the beginning   of each chapter or each scene break remove the  indentation you can do this by clicking control   tab for pc otherwise you can just click delete  second now that you have those corrected we need   to look for widows and orphans widows are where  the last sentence of a paragraph begins on the   first page an orphan is where the first sentence  of a paragraph is the last line on the page   word does have an automatic system for  correcting them but it doesn't look great   i'm going to turn it off and show you why it looks  bad plus tell you how to correct it first go to   your home tab and select line click line spacing  options and go to the line and page breaks tab   make sure we deselect widow orphan control and  click ok now as you can see here the end of   the chapter has the remainder of a sentence  all by itself on this page and it doesn't   really look good however what you can do is  just select the content on the page before   and adjust the line height by the smallest amount  until that particular line is applied to the last   page now check over your document for any more  to fix finally now that everything is set you   need to ensure you've ended with an even number of  pages because this is required by most companies   if you have an odd number of pages you'll need to  just add a page perhaps a blank page before you're   about the author or somewhere else okay so up to  this point we've created a basic looking book that   markets like amazon would accept and if you're  only looking to make one book or perhaps this   basic looking book is good enough for you then  word can do the trick however there is so much   more an author can do to make their book look that  much more professional and unique using a software   like atticus you can just drag and drop your word  file into it and if you have the chapters broken   up using the line breaks and styling themes that  we discussed atticus will automatically separate   it into the different chapters with names going  into formatting you can then select professional   looking themes or design your own you can use  full bleed images and create books that look   like these there is no need to be techy and  atticus is actually much easier to use than   word for formatting you can easily select change  your chapter headings how your paragraph will look   add custom ornamental breaks to make your book  look that much cooler and more unique choose   print settings select for a large amount of trim  sizes and a whole bunch more the best part is you   can also select to see how your book will look on  different devices and with the click of a button   you can export your paperback and ebook thus  saving you a lot of time and effort something like   atticus also includes all the different special  formatting styles for all the different types of   pages to include copyright table of contents and  so much more alright so there you have it through   this process you can turn your word manuscript  into a professional looking book and then submit   it to market such as amazon and now that you  have your file you can go ahead and check out my   next video which is how to properly upload your  documents into kindle direct publishing and get   them set for the best launch and with that i'm  dave chesson of kindlepreneur signing off cheers

Channel: Kindlepreneur

Views: 122,890

Keywords: Kindlepreneur, How to Format Your Book in Word, How to format with word, formatting with word, microsoft word formatting, how to write with word, how to format word, how to write a book with word, how to format with word

Id: LVgWMibhLhY

Length: 13min 22sec (802 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 16 2022