— Mark Paxson
I finally finished a novella I started writing over ten years ago. I’m trying to get it published by the end of September. So, why am I screaming?
I’m cursing the formatting Gods. The Microsoft Word Gods. I … just … can’t take it anymore.
One of the challenges I’ve always had with publishing paperbacks is getting the headers and footers right. I gave up years ago on having headers that say my name on one side of the page and the name of the book on the other. Page numbers are a different story.
As I’ve always understood things, the front matter in a book should be numbered with Roman numerals, but the title page shouldn’t have a number. The Roman numerals start with the next page. And the pages of the story itself should be regular numbers (what are those numbers called), but you don’t start the numbering until the second page of the story and then you start with 2, with numbering going on from there.
I’ve learned over the years that the key do getting headers and footers and page numbering right is to use section breaks. With previous books, I’ve been able to figure this out, although never 100% perfect. A recent book has the Roman numeral “i” on the title page and the number “1” on the first page of the story. But at least I could get Roman numerals on the front matter and new numbering for the story.
This time around … Microsoft Word is scoffing at me. I decided going into the formatting of this book, I wouldn’t bother with the Roman numerals, just start with the “2” on the second page of the story. I’m a silly, silly man.
Whatever I did before that worked is no longer working. No matter what I do with the section breaks, I can’t get it right.
I asked a couple of writer friends if they knew how to do this. One said something that made no sense. The other said she uses Atticus for this, but she also offered to run my manuscript through Atticus for me. I didn’t want to do that because then I’d have to do that every time I publish, and I’ve got more stuff coming.
Based on her recommendation, I went and purchased Atticus. $147 later, I had it on my Chromebook and MacBook and started fiddling with it. After a couple of hours last night and the entire morning today, after more than a dozen uploads of the manuscript followed by deleting it and making tweaks to the manuscript to address issues, I think I finally got it.
The final product isn’t perfect, but it does have headers and footers now. The biggest problem is that the second page of the story is actually numbered “4”. I have no idea how it came up with that, since that first page is actually the fifth page of the document. I’m going to let that slide.
The good thing about Atticus is that it formats the manuscript much better than I ever did. It gets the margins right. It gets the headers and footers right. Maybe this was a good investment.
But why, oh why does Microsoft Word have to be such a hellscape for stuff like this?
Meanwhile, the next issue is this. I’m going to use Draft2Digital’s ISBN, but as near as I can tell, they don’t tell me the number before I have to upload the manuscript in PDF (which means it is unalterable). But I have to include the ISBN on the copyright page. So … how do I do that without going through the entire process and then starting over, once I get the ISBN and then upload the corrected version of the manuscript?
I’ve send D2D a question about this.
What are your publishing horror stories? Please tell me you have some.
Writers Supporting Writers 
I feel your formatting pain. Don’t get me started on fixed EPUBs.
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Why does all of this have to be so difficult? I can’t understand how Microsoft, after decades of updating and “improving” Word hasn’t come up with a better, easier, more intuitive way to do some very basic things.
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It probably has something to do with money. 😦
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Probably.
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I have managed to manipulate the page numbering and (I think in the case of Perseus) different left/right page headers. But it’s like a house of cards where one minor alteration can cause everything to fail.
As with most major software, Word and it’s ilk try to do everything for everyone. I’ve always wished they had a preset, tweakable app style. So, you could say for instance, I’m an author writing a novel, give me the basic tools for that. And it would be the specific things needed to get a book into publication ready format using standards that have been around for longer than the PC.
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The good thing about Atticus is that it is entirely geared towards book formatting. Still have learn all of its ins and outs and secret compartments, but …
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Word wasn’t intended for creating books, so that’s part of the problem. I was dreading having to do the header and footer thing for my latest novel. I’ve gone through it many times, but each occasion has been a couple of years after the previous one, so the process has never soaked in and was always a challenge.
BUT: this time I thought I would use D2D, who claim that their templates make the process easy. When I published the ebook last month, it really was easy and the ebook looks good. (I did have an issue with the BISAC codes, but that’s a separate thing.)
For the print book, I opted to use the same document as I did for the ebook. That means I did NO additional formatting. I selected the same style (called Minimal, I believe) as I did for the ebook. I was delighted to note a check box for starting each chapter on the right hand page. That added a few pages, but it’s one of the things that makes a book look “professional.” The program added a running title on the right hand pages and the author name on the left hand ones. It got the page numbering right too.
BTW, you don’t need Roman numerals for the title page, the copyright page, dedication page, or epigraph page (if you have those). Those pages shouldn’t be numbered at all. You need Roman numerals only if you have extensive preliminary stuff, such as a list of characters or a long foreword. The first numbered page should be at the start of the story. It could be 1 or whatever it actually is (i.e., if you have 6 unnumbered preliminary pages, your first numbered page could be 7). I’ve done that with my previous books, but the D2D template made my first page of text page 1, and that’s fine with me.
I think Amazon KDP also has a template, but for some reason I never used it for my first 7 paperbacks, thinking I could do a better job doing my own formatting. And while I think that’s true, I decided to try D2D’s template because I couldn’t make myself go through formatting the Word doc again, unless there was no other option. The result isn’t perfect. The title page is bare bones and the running title includes the subtitle, which I wouldn’t have done. But it’s better than acceptable and was a lot easier.
I haven’t ordered any author copies yet, but I hope when they arrive, I’m still happy with it.
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What bothers me the most is what worked the last time (and the time before that) didn’t work this time. Which makes no sense. (And it was not user error!!!)
I thought of using the D2D template but for some reason I just don’t trust the templates these platforms develop. They seem a bit clunky. You mention the title page on the D2D template — it’s the same with Atticus. I don’t like the look of the title page, but that’s small potatoes if the rest is okay. Improving the title page will be on my list of things to figure out with the next book.
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I think Word changes in subtle ways and I forget crucial details between books. For me a nice title page wasn’t worth the pain of doing all the formatting myself. This time, anyway.
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I share your issues with Word – not just the headers and footers but setting the right margins too. For what it’s worth I think the KDP templates have corrupted somewhere down the line. Given what I suffered with my first book, it’s a wonder I ever published anything else. I persevered, however, and now I keep a copy of that first paperback file, with correct headers and footers, which I’ve used for every book since. I change the book title in the header, change the chapter titles, then cut and paste in the new chapter text, copying the style of the existing text before deleting that. It takes a bit of time, but not as long as doing it from scratch would. We suffer, but we overcome. 😊
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The good news about Atticus is that in the process of formatting this book on it yesterday, I created a template that I believe will work for all future books. Now I just need to remember that I did that!!
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That’s the hard part, lol. 🙂 Best of luck with it.
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Been there, done that.
I use the free LibreOffice software for both the ms, and paper editions. I assume it is much like Word without some of those “helpful” bells and whistle. For the paperback, I set the custom page size, select “mirror image” to bet both the right and left pages, and then set the margins manually. I don’t use a header, since I figure that if you don’t know what book you’re reading, a header ain’t going to help you any, so it just wastes space. I have the page number as a footer, and center it for simplicity.
The program allows me to set the number of front matter pages, and I can choose to start numbering pages after the number of those pages. Alas, it will often then number those front matter pages which, of course, you don’t want. My solution is that I created a small, white square in Gimp, and insert this “image” onto the page and position it so that it covers up any number I find on the front matter pages. Problem solved.
I go through the complete book page by page, adding the spaces needed at the end of every chapter to get the next chapter to start on the next available right hand page. I have tried using page breaks, but for some reason, if you move things around after they are set, the pages tend to get screwy in unpredictable ways, so I do it all by hand. Once it’s a PDF it won’t matter how I got there.
Like everyone else, it’s always something of an adventure, but after doing it twenty-some time, I’ve seen it all, and can generally work it out in some ad hoc way.
I use D2D’s formatting options for all but my Kindle ebooks as it will usually generate the proper table of contents which I need for audiobooks. I downloading the ePub version prior to publication and use it for Google as well. It works just fine. For my Kindle version ebooks I use their Create app, just to get the table of contents needed for their audiobooks as well. I figure using their app means that they won’t find anything wrong with the way its formatted. Though, like with D2D, the front matter tends to get messed up. But since most ebooks open to Chapter One, I don’t get upset if a variety of things all end up on one page, save, of course, the title page.
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One of the issues I had with Atticus on this book was that page breaks I inserted to keep certain things on the right hand page (like the dedication) weren’t recognized by Atticus. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get that right, so I eventually gave up.
I don’t know what it is, but when I let D2D do some of this, things just look wonky to me.
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You would think page breaks would work, but as I said, I never got them to either. I just “enter, enter, enter” until I get the chapter headings where they need to be, and then save it as a PDF. And then go through every page again when I upload it to Amazon to be sure. And I have caught errors there as well.
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I don’t recall having so much difficulty . I’m probably 15 years or so along on this journey. I even remember the really bad old days. Print off three chapters. Write a synopsis. I was particularly bad at those. Send it off to some so called publishing house. Get rejected. Almost give it all up as a bad job. Then, the indie way came along and a tidal wave of creativity was unleashed. Smash had a lot to do with it, of course. The dawning of the ebook, so radical back then. Amazon doing at least one thing right, by saying ‘we don’t care what you write, good bad or indifferent, as long as it’s formatted ok’. So I did, and well, you count my ebooks. I can’t be bothered. I found paperbacks a little more troubling, but got there in the end. Now the mighty Zon have some kind of free audio version of our ebooks we can sign up for if we want to, albeit a robot voice. Yeah, I’ll check it out and probably do it. I’m not that tec savvy, but I wangle my way through all this. I’ve been giving up on this writing thing for a few years but somehow another book slips out. I will really pack it in after this new one. Honest. I mean it this time. Just don’t overthink this stuff. It’ll sort its self out in the end. It always does.
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There are definitely people out there that don’t have the same issues as me. I wish I was one of them!!
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Having looked at Amazon ,free, audio versions of our ebooks, plodding through their systems to do this, guess what? We have to have those titles in their KDP select, meaning exclusively with them. I’m not doing that, so no audios for me.
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Amazon is like that. It’s one of the reasons I left Amazon and went to D2D. Their use of their market power to try to squeeze everybody else out is not one of my favorite things.
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Here in the US, at least, you don’t need to be in the Kindle Unlimited program to take advantage of their free conversion to audiobooks. All my books have Amazon audiobook versions even though all are wide, with D2D/Apple and Google audiobook versions as well. Not that I sell many on Amazon, just a few odd copies. But then, Amazon is only a small outlet for me.
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