Chapter 4

Formatting Your E-Book Manuscript in Word

In This Chapter

Fixing poor formatting in your manuscript

Working with styles in Microsoft Word

Including headers and footers

Adding section and page breaks

Reformatting your document

To produce an e-book that can be easily read (but not edited) on a computer or an e-reader device, you need to convert your manuscript into a file in EPUB, MOBI, or PDF format (or all three). Don’t worry if these terms don’t mean much to you: I walk you through the conversion process later in this book. For now, simply ensure that your manuscript is formatted so that it’s easy to convert.

In this chapter, I focus on Microsoft Word 2010, because this is the most recent version of the most popular word processing program. Word 2010 has all the features that you’ll need (you’ll find that Word 2007 is very similar, too). If you don’t have Microsoft Word on your computer at home, you will probably be able to use it at work or in a library. The same principles apply to other word processing software, such as Open Office.

In this chapter, I describe the crucial tasks you must complete to ensure that your Microsoft Word manuscript is beautifully formatted. I tell you how to fix formatting problems and inconsistencies, and explain good practice to make your life easier. I show you how to use helpful features such as styles and page numbering in Word, and give you quick tips on setting up your manuscript correctly from the start, in case you have yet to begin writing your e-book.

The features that I describe in this chapter benefit you in two primary ways:

You can quickly and easily adjust the style of your manuscript in Word, which is how it appears in PDF format. For example, if you choose uppercase letters for chapter headings, you can adjust a single style rather than retype every heading.

You can easily convert documents to the MOBI and EPUB formats. Because these file types use a form of HTML, poor formatting practices result in your having to make corrections. Good formatting means a good conversion result — for example, if you’ve set up headings to use styles, all your chapter headings are automatically set up as HTML headers when you convert the Word document into an HTML document (as described in Chapter 8).

These methods are fairly easy to grasp and can make your e-book writing life much easier in the long run. After you’ve used them a few times, they’ll become second nature, so persevere in using these techniques even if you find them different from the ones you’re used to.