Formatting is critical when putting together a book, but it's also easier than it's ever been before!
—R.L. Stine
—Ernest Hemingway
Wrapping up your book
Take these last moments with your book seriously. It might feel like you’re close to the finish line and you want to push through to be done with it and move on to the next race, but this is when it really counts. You want your final product to be completely finished and ready to let out into the world.
So take your time and do it right.
For me, I usually jump around when I’m writing and fill in scenes as I go, and then I make two or three more passes through the book, rewriting each scene to make sure they work well together. I move details, rearrange the order in which events take place, and do a bunch of other little tasks to make sure the story is really coming together.
You’ll find your own routine for finishing up your book, and it will be almost a ritual for you to complete each time you wrap up the next project. I would recommend getting it as clean and finished as possible before sending it off for either beta reading or editing.
Using Microsoft Word to Format
Word uses styles of formatting, things like ‘Heading 1’ and ‘Normal’ for styling lines. It is really easy to ignore this bar of options and just style things as you go, but this will cost you in the long run. For example, what happens if you want to re-size all of your chapter headings?
You could go down the list page by page and independently fix each item, but if all of your chapters are written with the same title heading, then modifying them is as simple as changing that ‘style’ and letting it reflect throughout your entire document.
Learning things like this can save you a lot of time, and my best advice is to practice with it, play with it, and watch some YouTube videos to find out how it works. It will pay off in the long run by saving you a lot of time when building your table of contents or performing other maintenance tasks on your document.
Starting out right makes the finish line easier
A friend of mine recently asked for help formatting his document to publish on KDP and CreateSpace. I didn’t really think much of it, because I’ve been helping him for a while with setting up his book, and I thought it would be a relatively painless and simple task.
I was wrong.
It took hours to fix things because he had systematically done so many things wrong in initially setting up his document. The problem a lot of people make is they focus on how they want their book to ‘look’ but they don’t understand the importance of setting up the headers and styles.
When I write my books, they are ready to publish the moment I finish putting them together. Building my table of contents takes only a few clicks and I’ve gotten very good at handling the smaller details. If you get used to this from the outset, it will save you a lot of grief down the line.
Get out there and do it!
Getting started is the hard part, but if you set yourself up for success you'll find it's much easier than you thought!
