Your Creative Team Wants You to Stop Formatting and Just Write the Darn Book

Photo by Kelsey Todd on Unsplash

Today’s guest post is by Sandra Wendel and Paul Nylander.

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Why would a book editor and book designer team up to write a blog about design? Because too many copy editors and authors who think they are book designers feel the need to unnecessarily pretty up their Word documents.

Just stop. Stop playing art director and just write the darn book. The manuscript is not the place for design! Whether that’s your 90,000-word romantasy where you envision flourishy fonts for drop caps in the chapter openings. Or your business/leadership manuscript where you want special dingbats and gray boxes. Or different font sizes and colors you think are ideal for the various levels of headers.

The manuscript is not the place to indicate your aesthetic preferences.

Even if you didn’t play designer, have you spaced down with “enters” to break the page for chapters and adjusted line spacing because you know widows and orphans are bad, but centering various epigraphs and pull quotes is good? You put spaces on each side of em dashes because you thought they looked better in Word, and, finally, you added page numbering and highlighted sidebars?

Guess what? All that fancy design stuff you did in your manuscript? It gets stripped out, anyhow. Poof!

While you might take great satisfaction with the look of your manuscript pages in Word or Vellum or Atticus, you will be mighty disappointed if you send your files off to a professional book designer for cover and interior typesetting. All that extra “bling” you added or extraneous spacing and coding can cause big headaches for your designer. Plus, an overly designed manuscript is likely to cost you more, just for the hassle factor to remove that formatting.

Ask the designer ahead of time: “What can I do to make your work easier or efficient and accurate so you can focus more on the design than the cleanup?”

What to discuss ahead of the design work: process and goals

Once you understand how your Word document goes into your designer’s software, you can avoid creating problems for the designer, and the inevitable errors and extra tasks that follow and thus save everybody time and you money.

Whether you are the author or the editor, there is no need to create all those special embellishments. These visual elements are design decisions you and your designer make in advance when creating a custom layout for the look of your pages. This design is crafted by the book designer typically within InDesign, and when done right, your Word document will flow right into that software framework.

Often, the critical starting place for the designer begins by determining the finished size of the book pages (6×9 or 5½ x 8½ or something else), the type of cover (soft, hard, jacket), and versions (paperback and hardcover and ebook and audiobook).

These choices change the design options, so they are a big deal; they are based in part on comparable books, bookstore and consumer expectations for book sizes, and the length of the book. (If you specify too large a size for a short book in length, then the spine width might be too narrow for text.) Maybe you bulk up a shorter book with wider margins. Designers know these tricks of the trade, but they need to understand the goals of the author and editor too.

When you are ready to provide the designer your edited Word document—the manuscript—follow these guidelines.

Part 1: How best to prepare a Word document for production

Consistency is the most important feature of a clean manuscript: Whatever you do to preformat, do it the same throughout.

Wait, you say. We just said not to format.

Format in this context is not design. Format tells the designer what the structure is. For example, what lines should be a heading, or a subheading, body text, caption, block quote—not what you think it should look like.

That last paragraph is so important, please read it again.

Check with your designer on their particular preferences, but these are a few smart guidelines.

1. Don’t leave tracking and marginal notes in your final Word document. The designer’s job isn’t to answer lingering editorial questions between the author and editor.

2. Show suggested photo placement, file name, captions, and alt text (if EPUB) with a direction in the manuscript like this: [photo 35.jpg: My sister (left) and I hiked the Grand Canyon in 2016.]

And plan to provide the actual high-resolution images, graphics, and illustrations as separate files in a folder, with naming/numbering to match the in-text callout. (Image files for print are usually quite large and best conveyed to the designer via Dropbox, Google Drive, or some other file transfer mechanism.)

3. Similarly, other design notes can be called out with a consistent markup—brackets are a common trick, since they are rarely found in the general text. [Design Note: next paragraph should appear handwritten.] Just remember that any actual text style formatting (color or underlines, for example) is discarded from your Word document when it flows into InDesign.

4. Click on the paragraph symbol in Word>Home>Paragraph to see symbols (these are hidden characters) in the Word document.

Show/Hide hidden characters under the Home toolbar

So instead of long strings of enters that look like this, you can delete them. Use page breaks instead (create a hard page break with Control + Enter on a PC or Cmd + Enter on a Mac).

Before and After: using Word styles and page break to preformat a manuscript

5. View the Styles Pane, and turn on “Show styles guides” and “Show direct formatting guides” with “List: Styles in use” to see the document’s structure.

The Styles Pane button reveals the formatting (structure) controls in Word

Create structure within your document with headings and subheadings by using Word’s Styles where you will see Title, Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3. Highlight the chapter number and chapter title and make them Heading 1. The first level of subheading would be highlighted and set with style Heading 2.

While the actual look and feel of these headings is unimportant in your Word document (the designer will change this on import), these styles can preserve the document structure when moving from Word document to InDesign template and can be used to create a contents page.

Special formatting

1. Let’s say you insert a poem or a sidebar or maybe a long indented block quotation. You can either use a Word style to delineate these sections, or you can indicate where those elements begin and where they end with bracketed direction like your photo captions. Designers don’t want to guess or slow down production by asking or guessing. Examples would be [box] [end box] [open block quote] [end block quote].

2. Likewise, discuss how you should mark pull quotes with your designer ahead of time. Sometimes the designer wants the phrase or sentence bracketed. Then the designer can grab that wording and break it from the flowing pages where it works best during the initial formatting pass—not later when page flow becomes a much more critical headache. Don’t mark the pull quotes in your PDF proofreading step and expect the designer to reflow the pages around a last-minute design element.

3. Same with those summaries that authors of business books often put at the end of each chapter. Discuss how to handle the look of those bulleted summaries—and any other design element in your book when you and the designer create your page template.

4. Does your text use spaced breaks in the chapters? These should be specifically called out (say, a line of ••• or ***)—do not rely on the designer catching an extra blank line, especially if you’ve littered blank lines throughout the manuscript.

5. Did you cut and paste text from an online source? Well, don’t (that could be a copyright violation). But if you did, the formatting embedded in that source text comes right along with it, including hyperlinks. Unlink and insert the text only, even if you have to retype a few lines. Or use the Style Panel to clear formatting on the pasted text (highlight and click Normal).

6. Use the Word feature for a bulleted or numbered list to create yours (under Home/Paragraph).

Don’t manually type bullets; use the built-in formatting tool

7. Are you creating tables in your document? Use Word’s Insert/Table feature and not tabs. InDesign can preserve that structure.

Use Insert Table instead of tabs to create a tabular structure which will transfer to InDesign. The number of rows isn’t critical, and can be increased as you type into the table in Word

8. Do you have hyperlinks? An index? Footnotes and/or endnotes? InDesign has support for importing some of these special elements as well. Talk with your designer in advance.

9. If you love your designer, create a visual style guide as a road map for your collaboration. This is a list of the levels of headings and other structure, and what you have used to code them (such as Heading 1 and Heading 2). Include how you show photo placements and captions, pull quotes and summaries. Mention special design elements such as graphics or flourishes and where you want them.

10. Quirky punctuation:

• Although Chicago Manual of Style style calls for the ellipses to be three periods with nonbreaking fixed-width spacing . . . like this (not … an ellipsis character), make sure you understand what your designer/typesetter needs in the manuscript, and then do it consistently.
• The em dash is solid—with no spacing on either side. Same with the en dash for 1923–2003. Do not insert spaces around it.
• About those quotation marks and apostrophes. There are straight and there are curly (“typographer”) marks. Do you know when each is used? Hint: “69” is the way to remember which way the curls are supposed to go. But distance, time, and angle use straight marks. Alert your designer if you are using both.
• Make sure open contractions start with a closing single quote—not the default for an autocorrect word processor. Catch ’em now in the copy edit.

11. Speaking of spaces, someone will need to remove all double spaces between sentences. No matter what you were taught in high school typing class, place one space only after punctuation—a rule that typesetters have followed since the advent of moveable type. (Only typewriters and text in fixed-width fonts—special formatting—use a double-space after sentence ending punctuation.) Fixing this is a simple find-and-replace process that the editor should be doing in the copy edit.

12. Also, no need to include page numbers, but if you do, please make sure they are in a page header/footer, not the actual text. Keep them in earlier drafts if you like, for reference, but remember they will all change when the manuscript is typeset.

13. Generally for books, it is best to submit your manuscript as one complete file. Not various chapters or bits and pieces to come later. This one-file approach reduces the chance for errors.

• The editor should be compiling all the elements and making sure they are all there, and that they are formatted consistently, including the sample contents page (no page numbers needed here; those are determined when the book is paginated), copyright page with all items such as ISBNs and copyright notice and disclaimers.
• The only missing element should be an index (only if it is necessary, and most books do not require an index). Since the index is compiled with actual page numbers, this is usually done after typesetting, when the book is in PDF format (although it is possible to add index markers in Word in advance). Do let the designer know that an index is coming, and include the index on the Contents (we call it Contents, not Table of Contents) page.

As always, let consistency be your guide for any editorial decisions about design.

Part 2: How to efficiently mark PDFs

Through a little designer magic (and fairy dust and professionalism with InDesign), your Word document comes back to you in actual beautiful pages in a PDF format. Once typesetting is underway, you do not make any more changes to your Word manuscript—go ahead and archive it.

When the author and the editor or proofreader receive the PDF, marking that file for errors, insertions, or deletions is a completely different game from editing a document in Word. Instead of directly making changes, you use PDF markup symbols in the Adobe Acrobat files to indicate (or “mark up”) where the designer/typesetter should make corrections.

You cannot make the changes yourself, and this is a good thing.

This two-step process is necessary, as the designer needs to ensure that any changes do not affect the surrounding text or the following pages. Even something as small as a comma can throw off a typeset page, potentially forcing a reflow of the entire chapter or remainder of the book. Use the Adobe tools and commands to show insertions, deletions, changes. The markings show up in the right margin, in order. It is a simple matter for the designer, using InDesign, to accurately ping right through these changes if they are marked properly.

Using Adobe’s Acrobat Reader to mark up typeset book pages: comment, text replace, and text insert are under one tool, while highlight and strikethrough are under another

Within InDesign, those comments in the PDF can be imported for clean and precise application by the designer—while keeping an eye on unanticipated consequences

Proofers and editors or authors: While you can leave questions for each other in these marginal comments, do resolve all your questions before returning the marked PDF to the designer. It is not the designer’s job to decide an editorial question.

• Let’s say you have this comment from the proofreader in your PDF [I found titles capped on page 87 but not here on page 156. For consistency, which should be capped?] It’s up to the author and editor/proofer to resolve these inconsistencies and mark up the changes before the corrected PDF goes back to the designer. If not, the designer then has to stop, read the repair in context, understand what you are trying to accomplish, and make sure they aren’t creating a Whac-a-Mole situation where they fix one item but create an entirely new problem.
• Make your comments crystal clear, especially if the designers you are working with are non-native English speakers.
• Let’s say the designer can’t figure out what you are trying to do when the proofreader comments: Wikipedia shows this spelling as Smythe, not Smith. Which should we use? Then they have to stop and ask, or make a note to comment back, and you’re guaranteed to have yet another round of edits. Your quote for design work may not have included two or three rounds.
• Know up ront what was included in your design quote and when the meter starts ticking with consulting time to be billed hourly with multiple author changes. PDF is not the stage to start editing and revising. It’s a time for polishing toward final pages for printing.

Targeted markup tools are more precise, so are generally preferred where possible (for text changes, formatting changes, as examples). But general comments can also be used when a more general statement is called for. Drop the comment icon right in the area you are discussing. Don’t make the designer wonder what you are referring to if the icon is sitting in a margin. Oh, there. Why didn’t you say so? Don’t make a designer try to read your mind. They haven’t mastered that talent yet.

How we want you to use this information

I (Sandra Wendel) am a nonfiction book editor who has written and published my own books and have shepherded my authors through production, publication, and marketing. I don’t just shove my authors out of the editing nest after our collaborative edit because I know they don’t know what comes next. I even wrote a book about what first-time authors need to know. I just see too many new editors whom I mentor who don’t know how to prepare manuscripts for publication, and authors who think they are creatives.

Authors (and unaware editors) spend time formatting the Word doc, playing with fonts, and don’t realize all that fancy formatting strips out when a Word doc goes into InDesign to my colleague, Paul, who is writing this blog with me.

I (Paul Nylander) am a multi-genre book designer working with small publishers, freelance editors, and self-publishing authors. So I know the production process of a book can be daunting. But it can also be so very rewarding. I believe in the power of independent publishing to share ideas and underrepresented voices. That is why I also work hard to tamp down the well-meaning misinformation (and the frequent not-so-well-meaning predatory players) to help authors succeed in whatever way they define their own success.

Together, we decided to inform our colleagues on both the editorial side and the design side how to efficiently and effectively guide our clients through the process. The goal: a smoother design process that minimizes unnecessary friction, saves time by eliminating miscommunication (among author, editor, proofreader, and designer), prevents awkward design missteps, and generally avoids stress and frustration all the way around.

• If you are an editor, you can bring this expertise to your editing work.
• If you are a book designer, you might send this post to the editors and authors you work with.
• If you are an author, you should know where to efficiently spend your time (writing the words, planning for marketing, not playing with fonts and colors and spacing).

We talked with other designers who had plenty to say about their own frustrations in working with edited manuscripts. Our bullet points here are a compilation of their advice and ours. Thanks to our design colleagues for sharing their pet peeves: Lisa Pelto, Concierge Marketing and Book Publishing Services, conciergemarketing.com; Marko Markovic, 5mediadesign.com; and Rachel Valliere, PrintedPageStudios.com.