I finished proofreading Screwing
Up Babylon.* Now I have a friend giving it a once over to catch anything I
missed.
In the meantime, I’ve begun formatting the manuscript for
Kindle. A lot of authors don’t consider
formatting, especially if they aren’t considering self-publishing. But think
about this. Most likely, any agent
considering your manuscript will probably read it on a Kindle (though a few use
Nooks). And after all the work that you’ve put into the book, don’t you want
them to have a great reading experience?
Now obviously, if you’re not at the point where you’re
publishing to Kindle, you don’t need a linked table of contents, a copyright
page, conversion to html, etc. But if you’re using “returns” instead of “page
breaks” at the end of chapters to force a new page, “tabs” to indent paragraphs
instead of the using the margins function, or randomly hitting too many spaces
in your text, your book may look wonky on a Kindle. And, though I’m sure many
agents are used to formatting wonkiness, putting your best book forward can
only help.
The good news is that it’s all easy to fix. Amazon has a
free e-book called Building Your Book for
Kindle that can take you through the step-by-step tidying. (It’s a great “hand-holder”
if you’re pubbing to Kindle, even for non-techies.)
Ironically, even though the book is great, it’s formatted
very poorly. The font is miniscule, which I had to adjust by several stages because
even with my reading glasses I couldn’t read it, and I have yet to find a table
of contents page, though I may have missed it. I guess this is a case of “do
what I say and not what I do.”
If you’re only tidying your book’s formatting, focus on using page breaks not “returns” at the end of chapters, using
the ruler at the header on top of the Word file to set your indent instead of
tabs or five spaces on the space bar, and make sure you don’t have random “returns”
or “spaces” scattered throughout the novel. To see where they are, all you have
to do is click the paragraph icon in the “paragraph” box and you’ll see all the
hidden formatting. Unclick it when you’re done and the marks will hide
themselves again. (This is in the 2007 version of Word—it’s there in earlier
versions too, just look for it.)
Otherwise, you can Google “formatting for Kindle.” The better
news is that the only formatting changes you need to do don’t force you to do
anything weird with your text. And, of course, you don’t need to put your novel
into html or add headings, etc., since you’re not pubbing, just tidying. So
everything stays in a nice MS word document.
And for those of you who are self-pubbing, formatting your
novel isn’t that hard. If you’ve learned to use a word processor, you can do
this. Just bring your patience and a willingness to learn to the table. And if
you don’t understand how to do something, Google it—more than likely there’s a
YouTube video that you can stream where someone will show you how to format.
