Continuing to Format

I finally feel I'm making some progress on In The Shadows!

The artist and I have been meeting and emailing, and we're getting close to the finished product for the cover image. I think the black and white version is done, so now she'll add color to it and we'll see how that turns out.

Meanwhile, I've started to format the novel in earnest. I typed In The Shadows before I had the template that I used before, so there's a lot of work to be done. I already worked on the headers (which I talked about in a previous post), so now it's on to the rest.

First I worked on the margins. I use custom margins, which are set up in Page Layout in Word. Once I set it for mirror margins, I could set the margins for the top, bottom, inside and outside, using the guidelines from CreateSpace.com.

After that I justified everything except the chapter headings, so the text goes all the way to the edge both inside and outside. It looks a lot cleaner that way. I had to watch out for the last line of each paragraph, though: if I forgot to press Enter at the end of the line, it was all spread out and looked very odd!

Next I set the trim size, which is 5"x8". This is also set in Page Layout and is applied to the whole document.

I had to wait until after I set the trim size to set the Drop Caps. I learned the hard way that these might look great in one size, but then look absolutely wrong in another size, so I don't set them until late in the process. If you don't know what Drop Caps are, that's okay (I didn't at first either). If you look at the first line of each chapter in either of my novels, you'll see that the first letter is much larger than the others and extends down to the next line. I set this to "drop" down two lines rather than three, because I think it looks better that way. I have to manually set this for every chapter.

Now the slow part: I need to scroll through the entire thing, looking out for bad page breaks, bad scene breaks, bad line breaks, etc. This takes quite a bit of time, but I don't mind. It's kind of an excuse to run through the story again, although I'm not rereading the whole thing. It gives me little reminders of scenes that I particularly like.

And that's where we are for now. I need to keep checking the format and the artist needs to apply color to the cover. After that, I'll be ready to try submitting the whole thing to CreateSpace.com. I'll let you know more about that when the time comes.

Onward!

Starting to Format

Formatting is an important component of preparing my novels for publication. As I think I've mentioned before, this is one of my least favorite parts of the process, but it has to be done. I'm rapidly approaching that point in the third novel, so I'd better get started.

One aspect of formatting that's already done for this novel is the headers. When you look at my novels, you'll notice that there's a page number at the top of each page. There's also either my name or the title of the novel. I had to set all of that up.

First I create the headers and select the style that puts them on opposing pages. I had no idea how to do any of these steps a few years ago, but I learned a lot from createspace.com and from Googling various things like "how do I put headers on opposite pages." Whenever I get stuck, those two sources are invaluable.

I needed to select a font for my headers and that took some experimenting. The recommendation I got was to use a sans-serif font, meaning it doesn't have the little flourishes that you find in a font like Times New Roman (which I use for the text). After some testing, I went with Calibri. Then, after some trial and error, I got even pages to have my name and odd pages to have the title.

My next problem was figuring out how to remove page numbers from the front pages and the first page of each chapter. This was surprisingly difficult, possibly because again I didn't know what I was doing when I started. Rather than get into a complicated explanation (and get part of it wrong), I'll just tell you that it involves creating sections and marking the first page of each section as different. On this novel, I had to go through several attempts before I got it right. Thank goodness for the option to close without saving the latest changes! After a few failed attempts and perhaps a little swearing, I finally got it right (although I don't have the front pages included yet, so we'll see how it goes once I add those).

One step down, several more to go!