How to Format your Book in Word: The Ultimate Guide

there are all kinds of programs out there that will help you as a self-published author get your book formatted whether it's for ebook paperback or both most of these are frankly inexpensive it's not a big lift to get one of these programs and if you want to do something really fancy honestly a program like Vellum is a really good option but there are some people who don't want to buy it no matter how cheap it is because why should you have to spend money for that or two you have the money you're not opposed to spending the money but you just you don't want to learn new software it's so exhausting there's so many pieces of software and you don't care how intuitive it is you are done learning new things I feel you on that one I am so sick of new things unironically with that in mind it might surprise you to know that I the nonsense free editor and professional book formatter extraordinaire what do you think I format my books in word why because word does absolutely everything that I need to format a book to get a beautiful novel in a 6x9 trim size ready to go out to the world via Amazon or any other publisher when I tell people this they are baffled confused how is this possible I use word every day and I'm pretty sure it doesn't do that yes it does and I got good news and I got bad news the good news is I'm going to show you how to do it from a manuscript that probably looks exactly like yours does as soon as you're done writing 12 point font double spaced eight and a half by eleven page okay basically just word standard and I'm going to take that step by step and I'm going to make it a publish ready ebook and then I'm going to turn it into a paperback it's going to be a long one get a cup of tea bookmark this video because you're going to want to come back to it thank you all right so you're going to be starting off with something that looks like this you know this is pretty much what word spits out when you open up a document you start typing this is what it gives you we already have the indent we have the 12 point font we have everything that we need for a manuscript so the first thing what you want to do is you want to code all of your chapter titles this might sound weird but I promise this is the best way to do it um so up here we have something called Styles you're going to hit this little arrow right here in the corner and you're going to open this this little teeny box and so what you're going to do is you're going to come over here and you're basically if you're writing fiction um probably only you need normal and heading one for chapters sometimes you know you can do as many as you like but for simplicity's sake we're only going to do normal and heading 1. so you come over here you hit this arrow and you come over here to modify this over here okay so normal is what your regular text looks like and this is open to you know creative decision making all right so if you have a favorite font you can use that I'm not I'm not telling you that you can't as for me I'm just going to go with a basic font we're not going to do anything fancy for this uh demonstration palatino linotype typically I use this for non-fiction but we're going to use it in this instance and we're going to stay with 12 I think 12 is a good font size we're going to keep it not flush to the right we're going to make it Justified um that means all of the edges on the right hand side are going to be straight instead of ragged like they are now then I'm going to come over here to format and I'm going to come to paragraph for special I'm going to go to first line and for me I put 0.2 instead of 0.5 again this is a stylistic choice I like smaller indents versus larger ones this is entirely up to you you're going to come over here to line spacing this is what I do I do multiple 1.15 which is a hair above single spaced and then I put six points after each paragraph leaves a little Gap um and again you can make your own Stylistics decisions but this is how I do it and then you just hit OK and okay so now everything that's already coded is normal unfortunately will not auto update it's the only one that doesn't and I don't know why when we come over here to adjust heading one which is going to be our our chapters we're going to modify this one gives you the option to automatically update so once you code something as a chapter or heading one it will automatically update it if you make any changes to this from here on out so I'm going to use palatino linotype again I'm going to keep it at 16. I'm going to keep it at bold I'm going to make it Center and then what you do with the spacing um you know for me I like a gap so I usually do um 56 before and I do zero afterwards but then for the spacing I just do 1.5 lines and that that gives me a look that I'm I'm generally pleased with and then you just say okay so now you've got these to look that the way that you want them to look you just hit OK and you can close that out now you go through and you code every single chapter title as heading one so we'll start with prologue you just double click it come over here heading 1. the reason we code it just so you know when you come over here to headings it will have them populated over here so everything that we code AS heading one is going to be listed over here that makes things a lot easier including populating the table of contents so to make this go quicker I'm just going to find everything that's a chapter and I'm going to code them all as heading one okay so everything's coded the way that we want it to we can easily navigate between chapters everything's good so now what we're going to do because we're making a novel uh the most common size of which is a six by nine um what we're going to do is we're going to come over here to layout I'm going to come over here to size now 6x9 is not one of their pre-made paper sizes so that's okay I'm going to come over here to custom sizes and we're just going to type in 6 by 9. um right now in terms of margins my rule of thumb for an ebook is about half an inch on either side as you know with ebooks the way it looks depends on what device the reader is reading it on which is why they have Reflow um so this isn't hugely important if you want to play with it I would not recommend keeping it one inch though that that kind of compresses it I'm not a big fan of that for this multiple Pages option for the ebook you're going to leave it as normal when it's time to do your paperback you're going to switch to mirror margins but right now because we're doing the ebook we're going to keep it as normal it applies to the whole document that's important if you have sections so now we've got it sized correctly we don't need to do anything in the layout and we just say okay so that brings us to a much smaller page size as you can see the text looks a lot bigger than it did previously now it's still not tabbed correctly so it looks like we probably need to go through and code this either as normal or you can do control a um yeah that's annoying that word does that so to make sure your chapter text looks exactly the way you want to you're just going to select and hit normal and then it's going to format it the way that you set it to at the beginning so now as you can see we are flush right we don't have any more of that ragged Edge we are indented at 0.2 instead of 0.5 and this is the format that we want for the rest of the book okay so your pages are the right size you've coded everything correctly your paragraphs looks look as they should your chapter headers look as they should um page numbers I'm going to show you how to do them for ebooks I do not add page numbers um because if you're reading on a device it tells you what your location is so that is my preference your preference might be different so the way you make um a page number is exactly the same as you would make it in any other document which is basically you just click here in the footer double click automatically it's going to give you this big ass footer I don't want that and neither do your readers so you can adjust that you come over here to the header and footer Tab and you're just going to make this smaller okay um 0.3 or 0.2 is good especially for an ebook header from the top I usually go 0.3 uh I feel like point two is a little too small for a header um so that's what I do and then you come over here to page number and you want it at the bottom of the page and you want a plain number then you just kind of do what you always do for me I want it centered the font may or may not be the font you want in this case it is but the size isn't so we're just going to drop this down to nine eight is also a popular size when you're making your page numbers it always adds an extra line I don't know why so just make sure you get rid of that and that way it will look as clean as possible okay now obviously we know that when you opened up a book you're not smack dab right there on the first page there's always something called what matter um depending on what program you're using sometimes that they give you the front matter you don't actually need to put it in your word document if you don't want to for instance if you're using uh Kindle create um they give you the option they will give you uh front matter but if you're not using that if you're just going on word uh pretty much what I do is I have a template I keep it saved and that's just what I do with that um goodness where are all these blank pages so what's the name of this book boss stock I think I author here we go by author name um and you could just kind of I would recommend not having these coded as um heading one that could be messy so basically you can just play however you want with the font here so we'll just say 36 I guess usually for author name I will make that smaller than the title name and then you're going to come in here you're going to update this so you want to have the name of the entity that you are publishing under for a lot of self-published authors it's just your name or if you have an LLC you're going to put the name of the LLC right here this is just standard um I got this off of I don't know it was somebody else's template um you do not have to put the cover design I always choose to I appreciate my cover artist I want to you know if someone likes my cover I want to give the artist credit a benefit and business if somebody wants to hire them themselves so I always put that here I'm American and then there's a spot here for your isbns if you publish exclusively through Amazon you do not have to have an ISBN for your ebook they will issue you an Asin so you don't need to have that especially for your ebook for your paperback you do have to have an ISBN but you don't need to purchase it yourself Amazon will issue one but you're gonna want to once they issue it go into this document and update your ISBN once it's uh issued so now with your front matter I prefer not to have the page number on the front matter at all and the way that you get around that if you want to have page numbering that's different than the rest of the document the easiest way to do that is to create a section break so you just put your cursor here wherever you want and then you come over here to layout to breaks and you're going to say section breaks next page and what that does is it allows you to change these page numbers but not the rest so first of all this is something I found out click so now you see this is section two click over here and make sure that link to previous is not selected so I'm going to deselect that right now so it doesn't remove my page numbers um I hate that they make that the default if I wanted it to be the same as the previous I wouldn't be making a new section now would I Microsoft Word so stupid um so now that we've deselected that we are free to come over here and delete these page numbers and it's not going to affect the rest of the pages so now we have our cover page there's no page number we have our you know little disclaimer page there's no uh number and then we come down here to page one of our novel and Bob's your uncle we have page number fantastic another stylistic choice you might want to do is on the header you might want to have your name and the name of the book alternating this very common with fiction how do you do that you're going to double click in the header and as you're clicked inside the header you are going to say for one unselect link to previous so annoying um and then you are going to select different odd and even Pages now keep in mind this applies to the header and the footer so we're going to have to do some some rework here so click different odd and even Pages fine fair enough so let's say on the odd number pages and remember odd number pages are going to be on the right as you're reading it we're just going to have that be the book title name so we're going to type Bostock now obviously it doesn't look the way we want it to so I'm going to double click this I'm going to make this smaller I'm going to make this a 10 I'm going to make it centered and then just because I'm fancy I'm going to come over here to font and I'm going to make it small caps and then okay and that's just going to change the look of it so the chapter title is in small caps and now the headers and small caps but this is just the odd pages on the even Pages you're going to want to put author last name now you'll notice it didn't keep any of the formatting because it's treating these as separate so we're going to do the same thing again we're going to bring it down to 10 point font we're going to center it and then we're going to do small caps okay and then we're going to come down here and as you can see the page numbers on our even pages are gone that's okay though we're gonna do the same thing there bottom of the page plain number my bad Center remove the extra line and what did we make this I think we made it a nine nine and then we're good so everything is all good now if you feel an extra fancy and it's totally cool if you are and you want a drop cap on the first page of every chapter a stylistic choice I approve of by the way uh you're going to come over here and just click anywhere in the paragraph and then you're going to come to insert and you're just going to slip and slide over here to the right and you're going to hit drop cap and it's going to ask you do you want none which is what it is now do you want it dropped which is the way I like it or do you want in the margin like a crazy person the one drop cap um and then you can um change what size you want for me I leave it at 66 I like it if you want to make it smaller you do have that ability and you would just do that with every single chapter part of the joy of publishing is that sometimes in visible formatting issues can mess up your ebook so we want to take a moment to make sure that those steps are complete before we go any further so so on the Home tab come over here and hit replace and the first thing that you are going to do is hit carrot p Carrot P what that looks for is multiple hard returns in a row and you're just going to place it with a single hard return and then you're going to hit replace all okay 52 do it again 12 do it again three do it again two do it again you want to keep going until it's well it's supposed to be zero but apparently it's being difficult ah full disclosure sometimes it doesn't get them and I don't know why but as we'll go through sometimes you'll see oh thanks for those eight hard returns that you chose not to get rid of another thing you want to get rid of is soft returns and that's carrot l place all in this case there are none the big one is tabs you do not want any tabs in your document it makes such a mess on Kindle so what you're going to do is you're going to do carrot tea and that's the symbol for tab and you're just going to have nothing in here um absolutely nothing and you're going to say replace all now because I wrote this document there ain't but the one uh but a lot of people will hit tab to get that paragraph indent and so their documents just chock full of them oh what a mess it makes uh so yeah no tabs get rid of them now we've done all of the heavy lifting for your ebook see how quick and easy that was I mean I turned the camera off some to like make the text pretty or whatever but um you know it's it's pretty quick and easy now you go through and painstakingly make sure it looks the way you want I highly highly highly suggest turning on uh the show hide button and that will kind of reveal if there's problems I also recommend having your uh page size set to whole page you know 200 100 you know just to make it big I recommend whole page so it's easy to do you know just to skim through it and then you're just going to hit page down over and over again making sure that your layout is good you're going to make sure that your new chapters start on a new page see this one's got a blank page we absolutely do not want that so we're going to hit return why I did that excuse me that is not the coding I have for chapter one what is going on DC do you see what I mean okay I got it figured out so what had happened was I had manually inserted page breaks while I was composing and those were on top of the page breaks that were inserted along with the chapter headings and so then I had double paid breaks that's what was going on there um if that happens to you the um if you want to get rid of them carrot m is how you search for page breaks and also how you use the replace function to get rid of them and so now we can continue going through see if anything else looks amiss I'll speed this up unless I find something is that right okay so this isn't a mistake but I'm gonna change this this is the text of a teletype and it looks wrong uh being justified so I'm going to make this centered and I'm going to remove the point to indent it just looks odd no actually okay we're still going to do Justified but then we're gonna scooch we're gonna scooch that's what we're gonna do okay so that looks better to me um it looks more like a teletype thing so that's what we're gonna do there here I want this date marker to be in italics and for date markers I typically don't have them indented so I'm going to fix that too and by the way if you don't have your ruler visible at the top of your window uh that's just a matter of coming up here to view and checking the ruler box I don't know how anyone exists without the ruler it is it's a good tool okay we got to the end of the book and everything looks the way that I want it to look um the next part is optional you don't have to do this but this is something that I like to do I insert a manual cage break you come over to insert you say actually no I won't do that never mind um what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna type this out manually I'm gonna get rid of this show hide button because it's ugly and I'm just going to type out more by the author and I'm going to code that as heading 1 and that's going to put it automatically on a new page the reason I do that and then I type in my other book titles on there I also sometimes like sign up for my newsletter whatever your call to action is where you want the reader to keep reading you could also say you know read the next installment something like that is doing this one it makes it more prominent and two it shows up in the table of contents um so for ebooks that's that's especially important for your paperback not so much because they're flipping uh but for your ebook you you really want that in the navigation because that's your ultimate call to action now for fiction oh for heaven's sakes I got rid of all my page breaks there we go um I'm also going to add another one here uh just for demonstration purposes so for fiction a lot of times we don't have tables of contents but if you want one so if you are writing for younger viewers and you title all of your chapters um or if you're writing nonfiction you probably want a table of contents because that table of contents kind of sells your books it's important so we're going to insert another page break you want to have your table of contents in the um the foreground I highlighted color you can code this as heading one I don't I don't want it in the table of contents because that would be weird so I just pulled it and make it bigger and then I hit enter and then you're going to come over here to references and you're going to select table of contents you can select the automatic table of one but that puts the heading in for me I always come down to custom um you know all of this is good I for me I only want the one level maybe if you have subheaders or if you're writing non-fiction and you have more you can alter how many headers you have and then all you do from there is Click OK and it populates it for you the page numbers are correct everything is good you can alter the font once it auto generates if you like if you want to make it smaller bigger more fancy whatever you want to do also if you go through and you make changes you're like oh direct it's it doesn't look the way that I want click anywhere inside this table of contents it's going to turn gray and you hit F9 and then it's going to ask you do you want to update just the page numbers or do you want to update the entire table so if you've added new chapters if you've changed a chapter name you're going to want to update the entire table but if you have it if just the change just the page numbers have changed then you can just do that and it's not going to alter anything else and you would hit OK and that will auto update all of your page numbers and that's it that's all it's so simple that's it for creating an ebook and I am happy to tell you that to make a file for your paperback is only a few more steps this is your basis so you're you're good with this you're going to want to save a new file so we will say file save a copy and then we're just gonna paperback make sure you label these clearly don't just say vostok1 Bostock 2 don't do that label them clearly ebook paperback hardback it matters okay so now we're in the file that is the paperback and like I said before really the only thing that we are changing is we're coming over here to layout and we're coming to the margins going to custom margins and for multiple Pages we are going to say mirror margins we want to make sure that the whole document not just this section is very important and again you can change your margins a lot of times for the outside margins people like a bigger margin especially that's something where you feel like your reader might want to write and the margins they usually have a bigger one I don't write in my margins I don't write in my books I don't dog year my books um so that's not something that I do so generally 0.5 on both sides is kind of you know what I go with and we're still at six by nine so let's you know what let's let's change it so layout margins custom let's say you do want those outside margins to be a bit bigger so we're going to leave this at 0.5 the inside margins right we don't want to go too narrow with that because of the binding okay so we'll say the outside we're going to go with 0.8 and the inside will keep it 0.5 gutter you don't need to mess with Dot and bottom you don't need to mess with and we're going to say whole document okay so that changed it a little bit okay now keep in mind this is an even page I'm pointing like you can see what I'm pointing at um so the first page of the prologue is kind of backwards right so as you open up your book your prologue is going to be over here on the right and only when you flip you know this is this page right here that's the one that's going to be on your left so this is the inside of the book near the spine right here it's it's kind of confusing I wish you could change the layout so you could look at it as it would look if you opened it up but never fear the Amazon or KDP preview tool does allow you to do this just to make sure and then basically what you're going to do is the same thing you did before I'm not going to go through the whole thing again because it's going to be okay I'm gonna do something that we don't need for this book and we probably won't need for novels however nonfiction might use it Memoirs might use it and that is inserting an image and for some reason it gives people a whole lot of ass pain so we're going to go back to one page all right so let's say you want to use fancy scene break instead of just having like the three stars that I use you want something fancy I respect your choice okay but basically that means is you're going to be inserting an image so you're going to come over here insert picture picture so many pictures all right I've got a fancy divider in here somewhere where is it okay so here's my pretty divider you're just going to select your image and you're going to say insert now you're going to see the edges of this are highlighted that's fine and you're going to make this whatever size you want so if you want this to be a little smaller you're going to click and drag by the corner fine fair enough you want it to be even smaller there we go so that's the size that we want so for position this is important select in line with text this is not optional the reason it's not optional is because you have Reflow with your um with your ebook Okay so if you try to wrap the text around your image oh the stories I could tell you about clients where I formatted their book and they thought that they knew better than I did see even though they paid me all this money they went back and did some did some Mischief in their book file and then uploaded it to KDP call me yelling at me oh it doesn't look good I know it doesn't look good you know why because you wrapped your text around your image sir no full disclosure it's usually a woman who does this um and so since this is a scene break you're going to want it centered um if you're doing it in an e-book always always always have it in line with the text um you can do all kinds but just keep in mind if you have a color image not all devices are color um and in terms of your paperback um color printing is is pricey so depending on what you're doing you know you might you might not choose to make that choice just keep it in mind that when you're printing your paperbacks it's a lot more money to print which means it's a lot less money in your pocket uh for every book that you sell and the last thing that we're going to talk about is okay well I do have a lot of images in my book and you know what else I have in addition to images I have uh foreign languages I have Cyrillic letters I have Greek letters I have Arabic letters and I had to download a special program to get those fonts on my computer and you know when I upload those to KDP it doesn't register them what do I do about that the answer is you can make this a PDF I do not use Adobe Adobe is extortionately expensive I know it's the standard and I don't care okay so I'm gonna show you how to do this on my program which is Fox it it does everything uh Adobe does it's fine and it's cheaper Okay so what you want to do to create your PDF there's a couple ways to do it but the easiest for me is to go to print and if you have any you know PDF program this option is going to be available to you um and you're going to come over here to printer properties once you select your PDF maker as your printer there are two things you want to do this doesn't matter the resolution I always keep it at whatever it is now I'm going to select all fonts because this is something that I created and the way I did that is I came over here to edit and I created a default setting and the way I did that is for fonts I wanted to make sure that all fonts in my word document are embedded that way so if I have Cyrillic or if I have Arabic or something in here it maintains it so you want to embed your fonts in your PDF if you have anything other than just normal English letters it's also important to come over here to layout because sometimes when you create a PDF of a six by nine the text is six by nine but then you have all those big white edges around because the PDF maker thinks that you're going to be printing it on eight and a half by eleven paper so what I do is Page size paperback so I have that already selected and then I just say okay print all pages everything's fine and then you're going to hit print I'm not going to do it because I don't need to but basically that's what it's going to do it's going to create a PDF after you create that PDF you are going to want to upload your PDF as not as an ebook reflowable you are going to want to do a print replica and you can do this in Kindle create Kindle create is a free program um so if you are uploading to Amazon I highly suggest you do this the reason for that and I did this with a client earlier this year he had a lot of images and he it was just very Graphics intensive and the layout was very important it was almost kind of like a magazine um and it really needed to stay that way he did not want any text reflowing he wanted everything to look the way he put it that's great you can do that but it has to be as a um as a print replica in ebook form which means you can view this in the Kindle app on you know your phone or a device but you can't actually read it on a Kindle it's so weird so it's a double-edged sword yes you can make an e-book with a lot of images where they don't Reflow but if you're if you're dealing with Kindle readers like fiction re fiction authors are um you know it's a problem this guy was non-fiction my profound apologies for terrifying you with my makeup free face um my wonderful outro that I had filmed for some reason didn't take descript hates me it's fine but the video is over I am very happy you were here uh if you have any questions about anything that I did in the formatting of Microsoft Word or if you have a pressing question that I just didn't address at all and you're just kind of left hanging let me know down in the comments I will be happy to answer for you if I can and last but not least I would like to let everyone know in case you didn't already know I do have a critique group it is open for new members we take both fiction and non-fiction and likewise you will also find a link to that in the description if you are a writer or an aspiring writer and you would like to get feedback from other writers about your work while it's still in progress so until next time take care and write well

Channel: The Nonsense-Free Editor

Views: 779

Keywords: format a book in word, book formatting in word, ebook in word, the nonsense-free editor

Id: 4EnsTbHnI-0

Length: 36min 14sec (2174 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 01 2023