Easing Back into the Travel Lane
Two weeks since my last post, and I apologize that I didn’t get this written sooner. Hopefully, we’ll be back on track now and moving on down the road.
Here’s a quick update on recovery from The Great Helenic Flood, as I’ve come to call that surly hurricane with her partner Milton. We still are not settled back in our own house, but progress is definitely being made. Right now, we’re waiting for our replacement appliances to be delivered and installed. Once that happens, we’ll be ready to move in. Only the refrigerator survived the storms, but that’s a handy thing to have while you’re working to put things back together. We lost most of our furniture, so that means drawers, shelves, and cabinets where we stored a lot of our possessions are gone. Our little beach house is not big on storage space, so we depended on those other places to put things. When we get back, it will take some time to find spots to put things away that are now piled up on platforms that kept them out of the flood water. Thinking positive, we had to throw out lots of things that we otherwise would need to find a place for. All will be good in the end.
Now, on to the business of writing… and publishing.
I left off a month ago talking about blurbs and taglines. That topic finished up the preparatory work for the actual publishing. I chose a title and decided on a pen name/or not. I identified key search terms and whether or not the book would be part of a series or stand-alone. I had a cover and some story descriptions. It was time to move between the covers, to those decisions that would define what the inside of the book looked like.
Like creating the cover, the inside format was a fun part of designing the book but it was also very serious business. I needed to make sure that, when I opened the book, the pages and my story looked exactly the way I envisioned them. I wanted to be proud of the final product. When the reader opened the cover and flipped to the first page, I wanted her to feel comfortable enough to relax and snuggle down into the story. The physical appearance of the pages should complement the story, and not distract from it.
There were a number of physical traits that could make this happen but I learned that, for two very important features, the manuscript had to be formatted that way before uploading the file to Draft2Digital. Fortunately, I could go back, make those alterations and then try again.
First, it was very important to me that my text had a justified margin on the right side. To me, a ragged right edge looked unfinished and unprofessional. If you selected justified margins in your document, it would appear that way after the file was uploaded. Easy to do and it looked so much better.
Secondly, Draft2Digital will create a Table of Contents from your chapter headings if they are easily recognizable. So, do it! I made the chapter titles stand out by using a larger size font and made the full title bold. Despite editing the titles this way, it didn’t work so well the first time around because my books in the True Ghost Story series had sections – Part I and Part II – as well as chapters, and the section headings rather than the chapter headings were picked up by D2D. They offered a button to click if “Those aren’t my chapters.” I could then go in and manually identify the chapter titles to get the accurate and correct listing.
My book also included a few black and white photographs. These were embedded in the text with captions. I was a bit anxious to see how they would appear once the file was uploaded, and whether or not I would have to make any changes to the format or text to accommodate the photos. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they uploaded perfectly within the document and didn’t need to be changed or resized at all.
The rule for your manuscript document should be “what you see is what you get.” Format them in your document the way you want them to appear in the book. This can include (and there may be other issues too):
1) font – both size and type. The standard Times New Roman 12 point or something else? Double or single space? Is there text that need italics, bold, underlined? How do I want my paragraphs to look?
2) Are there any sections that might need special formatting like a newspaper clipping? Special indents or a different line spacing?
3) Photographs or tables?
Once these formatting issues were complete, it was time to upload the file. That’s always a bit scary for me. But I clicked the button and it was done. I was well on the way to publishing the book.
What’s next? More formatting choices. This is going to look great!
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