LETHAL JOURNEY
Historical Fiction

Noir 1892 Thriller

Article: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

1. Recap: Formatting Digital Files.
NOTICE: STILL IN WORK. THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE. TO BE COMPLETED SOON.

   Intro to Part 1. Today, we'll get down to the nuts and bolts of how to format your print on demand (POD) interior text. In a later issue, we'll discuss graphics (images), both for covers (marketing images) and interior (especially maps, pictures, in nonfiction).

There are many ways to do this, but I am going to focus on a simple way to accomplish the task. The best thing is that, once you master this process, you can use it over and over again. The process almost demands avoiding embellishment. Think of the classic Frank Lloyd Wright modus for modern architecture: Less is More.

Actually, in this first iteration, we're going to use our template to create the absolutely most simple interior POD text file possible, without losing the order and visual appeal of a well-formatted print book. In upcoming articles, we'll focus on refinements involving sections, headers, footers, and more. We'll take it a step at a time.

We'll assume you have a Word file of your finished, edited work. The changes of which we speak in the rest of this article are strictly formatting. Your 00 baseline (to be discussed) will contain your finished, final-edited file. You must guard this baseline, for fear of losing version control, and having to re-read and re-edit your entire project to make sure you nail down a final, edited baseline copy. If you work systematically and methodically, as I emphasize, you'll have *Version Control* at all times.

We are working in Word because that is currently the upload format required by both SmashWords for all digital formats, and a good portal to the PDF format currently required for LightningSource International (LSI, wholly owned subsidiary of Ingram wholesalers) or Amazon CreateSpace. Most other currently popular middlesites do not empower you as these two do. Most others pretend to be your publisher, so you can pretend to 'get published,' at great and unnecessary expense. Publishing Industry News (PIN) is about empowering you to be the best author you can be, and to be a self-reliant entrepreneur who understands this simple industry. When all the hype, smoke, and mirrors are lifted, publishing is just about selling a product. Think of your childhood lemonade stand. You make it, you display it, and people buy it.

So let's begin with the simplest type of book. This will be that hypothetical novel already mentioned, My Fair Novel, 200 pp of interior text in addition to front matter and end matter.

Let's say you have a title page, a copyright page, and a dedication page. Then your main story begins. Now a fundamental principle observed by most formatters is to begin your first page on an odd page. That means, if you fce an open book, the even numbers are always on the left, and the odd numbers are always on the right. This, your first page must begin on the right side. But you only have a title page, a copyright page, and a dedication page so far. You will have to force a blank page. Don't use the insert break functionality to specify Odd Page, because it will cause some mayhem when you do a Print Preview, a wonderful tool you can use to visualize the flow of your book at a high level, where the words themselves don't matter, but the flow of the document does. More on this shortly.

The title page always is on the right, by definition. Your copyright page is always on the left, head-to-head with the title page. The terms head-to-head and head-to-foot are printing terms referring to how a broadsheet will be printed. Head-to-head is now all books are formatted, with the top of the pages all oriented toward the top of each leaf (sheet). Head-to-foot describes a kind of tumbling process of head, foot, head, foot…we need not discuss here. It is, in general, clean looking to have some white space at the front of your book. It's not good economy to make your book look jammed up by not wasting a page. This is the one and only place in your book where it's really mandatory to have some breathing space, some luxury, to let the reader's eye settle in with comfort and luxury. So, you can add a dedication page (e.g., To My Cat, Gloriosa). Remember, for reasons I am about to reveal, you insert a Break > Next Page (which automatically makes it a section break, rather than a simple page break in Word). You'll have your Show/Hide toggled to Show, so you'll plainly see the hidden markup language on your screen page. It will not show up on a printed page.

So you have title page + break next page + copyright page + break next page + dedication page + blank page + break next page + first page of your novel.

So far, in the simplest version of formatting a novel, we're going to insert page numbers at the bottom, and book title/author name at top. You can vary it, but that's the baseline tradition among typesetters for centuries. It looks really good, and it's a good place for you to start. It doesn't get much more complex than that, except for the two ways of handling chapter headings. We'll get to that shortly.

We're getting to the secret to mastering headings and footings. Have your Show/Hide option toggled to Show, and reveal your headers and footers (Main Menu > View > Header and Footer). Now be mindful: it all looks simple and easy at first, but that's deceptive. This stuff can and will drive you insane, like a mad dog chasing its tail and getting angrier and angrier. However, like many things in Word, there is a somewhat awkward, stiff, but reliable rule of thumb for how to make this stuff behave. This is where most people eventually bail out and try to use PageMaker or some other DTP. You can create a PDF file from PageMaker, FrameMaker, Ventura, or QuarkExpress, but it's all unnecessary. The level of page layout needed for publishing (either POD or digital) is so minimal (even with interior graphics, a future topic) that you can easily use Word. Again, I have the stable version of Word 2003, which has served me well for years. Later versions have embellishments that seem to add complexity at unknown gain, but I'm sure you can work with those as well. The underlying functionality is almost always the same; Microsoft's well-financed developers tend to endlessly rework the user interface to increase its UI Fog Index to 'try to find lighthouse, phone ahead for fog horn, at last resort abandon ship and pray.'

By default, if you have multiple sections, Word always makes a section work the same way as the section before it, creating an involuntary daisy chain. This is the most crucial stumbling block in mastering how to format your POD book in Word. Sections and headers/footers—remember that. If you have 25 chapters without separate chapter headers, you may well have about five sections; if you have separate chapter headings, you'll have about 29 or 30 sections depending on your end matter. Once this all falls into place for you, the entire process will be simple. After you get past Styles, about 80% of your struggle will involve sections plus headers/footers.

Let's take the simple novel. You have separate sections for the title page (Section 1), copyright page (Section 2), dedication page (Section 3), and a forced page (Section 4) on which you might put a few acknowledgements. In the simple novel, the entire body is one section (Section 5), and let's say your end matter will be a last section (Section 6). Typically, in your body, you'll use the footer to carry a page number. Word lets you insert an automatic page number and center it, by using Main Menu > View > Header and Footer. The fact that you View it rather than Insert it tells you that this functionality is always there, whether you use it or not. Headers and footers will appear. This is a different view mode than Print View, which is the mode I urge you to work in because, along with Show/Hide toggled on, it brings you closer to the nuts and bolts of your typesetting. When you switch to Header/Footer mode, the Print View becomes inactive. You can toggle between the two modes, even hide the print mode while in header/footer mode, but you cannot work in both simultaneously.

In your Footer, do not hard-type page numbers. Let's use Word's splendid automation. Let's remember also that you may not have headers, footers, page numbers, or any other automation in your Smashwords digital file. That was last week's topic, however. Today, we are print formatters. When you print to file for PDF to be uploaded to LSI or Amazon CreateSpace, the printer/spooler/converter will recognize Word's automated numbering and render it in the PDF file.

Leave the latter two pages mostly blank for aesthetic effect. Begin the body of your novel about half way down the first page. For all of this, look at old library books (hardcovers) to get a feel for how the typesetters of old did this stuff. Remember that all your regular paragraphs will be in the Normal style. You could set your first chapter heading to have about a 120 point leading before it (don't add styles by using Main Menu > Format > Paragraph, but use Main Menu > Format > Styles and Formatting, and directly modify the Normal style by opening the pull-down menu in the Pick Formatting To Apply window, making the change in the Modify Style > Paragraph within that. Follow the prompts, clicking OK at end. [Save, save, save at every little accomplished step, so you don't lose work if the lights flicker for an instant and a fraction of a second brown-down occurred, temporarily shutting down computers.]

In Header/Footer mode, note that a separate Header and Footer toolbar opens. This has a number of icons on it, several of which you'll want to learn. For now, click on the page number symbol (#) to insert not a number, but a field. This is the field code for automated pagination. As you add and subtract pages while writing your book, this feature of Word, in both Print Mode or in Header and Footer mode, will instantly and automatically adjust the pagination.

You have already added multiple Sections, about five for the simple novel, about 30 for the slightly less simple form. Look at your pagination. In each subsequent section, you'll see the default (and this is what drives humans mad when tackling this!!!) 'Same as Previous.' Unless you toggle the tool bar in Header/Footer mode out of this default, you will soon be locked up in a straight jacket. Any innocent little change you make in the headers and footers, thinking you are permanently fixing something or doing something, will madly and insanely ripple through your document's headers and/or footers. If each section has a separate chapter name (e.g., The Blonde Lady, The Blue Man, The Green Guitar, The Purple Dog, The Red Cat, etc.) Let's say you insert a new chapter titled The Golden Horse, and place that name in the Header for that chapter, you'll notice that every chapter in the headings will now change to The Golden Horse. Gone are the other colored animals, people, and recipes for madness? What's going on? The simple fix, which eliminates the need for years of therapy, is when you make any change whatsoever to a header or footer, no matter how slight#&151;always first (*ALWAYS*) first toggle off the Link to Previous default option. I do not know of any way to make Off the default for this monstrous evil. You must always remember this. Be conscious of your Undo option (CTRL + Z) as the first resort in case of problems. Save, save, save, constantly, so you do not have too far back to regress to a properly working file if you forget, screw up as we all do, and wind up with a book full of Golden Pony chapters instead of separately named chapters.

So in a nutshell: if you change the heading, lets's say, in Chapter 15, save, and move on without first having toggled Same as Previous to be Off, you will most likely find that the Same as Previous default has overridden whatever you just typed in. Let's make it simple and say that your hypothetical chapter names go like Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, etc (and we'll say it's not automated, but hard-coded, or typed in as is. You typed in Chapter Fifteen, thinking you were getting a lot done. You were even a good person and saved. Strangely enough, you would close your manuscript, go to lunch, and return to find that all your headings say Chapter One. Why is this? If they all say Same as Previous (not manually toggled off, one by one, by a diligent you), then Chapter Two will be Same as Previous (Chapter One), nevermind that you diligently created a different section or container for each chapter. Every time you touch (make the slightest change to) a heading within a section, *FIRST* toggle Same as Previous to Off.

That gives us a smattering of all that we'll need to know. I will continue the detail in next week's article. For now, I have created a new POD template for your free use, and I will conclude this article with a discussion of it.

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More to follow—stand by please. Coming Monday or Tuesday.

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Planned ending:

Final questions about POD. In a growing, totally digital age, is the print or POD book still worth the investment? Each of us must decide that question for him or herself. Digital books are cheaper to make, quicker to buy, and easier to store. At the moment, the majority of readers still read paper, but that is changing fast. I have kept my older books in print as well as digital format. There is only one upcoming book that will lead with a print edition: A Walk In Ancient Rome, my atlas and virtual tour of the imperial capital in 150 CE under Emperor Antoninus Pius. This is because, at the moment, only a print book can accommodate the large pictures and maps in my atlas. I believe this will change soon, as larger and more flexible types of digital platforms come into being. As to the rest of my books, the digital editions by far outsell their print equivalents, and maybe in a few years I'll let them go, to drift away into history like the horse and the sword.

The typical book you will publish, and have CreateSpace or LSI manufacture, will be of the type that originated about thirty years ago, called a quality or trade paperback. This print format generally has a bit larger trim size than your mass market or racksize paperback, although in practice, almost anything other than a standard mass market paperback may be called a quality paperback. The trade paperback, which most POD publishers tend to release economically in the 6"x9" size, is essentially a hardcover without the hard covers. Up until the Great Depression and World War II, there actually was a true case-bound book, which typically involved hand-stitching signatures in a wooden case, and then binding them by hand, with string and a curved needle, into what were called boards. These were then overlaid with leather or a similar durable material, and would laste centuries like new. With cheap mass production in the 20th Century, and the morphing of the dime novels and pulps into the World War II military Liberty Books (paperbacks), the hardcover became essentially a paperback with cardboard covers glued on, rather then stitched by craftsmen. In the early 21st Century, the book trade as we have known it is migrating from print into digital. I believe the print decision will not be ours to make for much longer. And that is moving things in the right direction. The digital revolution is creating new freedoms and opportunities neither writers nor readers could have dreamed of even twenty years ago. Print books will remain as rarities, beautiful oddities of a bygone age, and those who create reading platforms will long look back for the innovations and thoughts of serious typesetters and designers. For the most part, we should not look back too much, but move forward with our writing and reading projects.