Checking out the forest
After having my writing interrupted by an emergency formatting job, I got a chance to think about the bigger picture in formatting. It’s so easy to get lost in the details when you’re formatting because it’s really paying attention to the tiniest details which make a book look professionally published.
The book I needed to format wasn’t exactly ready to go when it was given to me, in fact, I’m really sorry to say, it was pretty much a mess. It’s a text book written by someone who doesn’t normally write – anything. He wrote each chapter individually, so each chapter was formatted in whatever way he felt like doing it that day. And, even more unfortunately, he wasn’t even consistent within each chapter – or even each section or paragraph. Which meant that I had to go through and fix the entire manuscript before it could be anywhere close to being ready for me to convert into HTML. I found it to be a great lesson!
I wish I could say it was the first thing I did, but by the time I was about halfway through the book, I realized that I needed rules. A standard set of rules for formatting the entire book — how sections should be handled, sub-sections, vocabulary words, examples and so forth. This did mean that I had to go back through the first half of the book making sure I followed my own rules throughout the entire book. But having these rules set out clearly made the formatting and cleaning up of the manuscript go so much easier and go faster!
Now, formatting a novel is so very much easier, there isn’t a lot of room for manipulation or the need for hard and fast rules. You need to make sure your styles are formatted in a standard way, and that all of your text is in the correct style (chapter titles in one style, body in another). You need to decide whether you’re going to indent the first paragraph of every chapter or not, and if you want anything fancy there, like a drop cap or the first couple of words in bold.
Non-fiction gives you a lot more leeway for fooling around. You’ve got chapter titles, sections within each chapter for the major topics covered, and usually sub-sections as well. You can have bullet points and numbered lists (there are a gazillion of those in this book I’m formatting now). So, to make sure everything looks professional, and consistent throughout the book, you need those rules. But my lesson, my takeaway from this enormous formatting job is to make those rules first, and then stick to them like superglue.
I can tell you I’ve got a very deep respect for copyeditors right now. So, what about you? Do you have any hang-ups, anything that your struggle with when you’re formatting a book for publication? Or do you just focus in on those details and hope that the forest will take care of itself?
