LETHAL JOURNEY
Historical Fiction

Noir 1892 Thriller

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

1. Intro: Add Power to Your Book with a Live-Linked TOC.
2. Word's Powerful Auto-TOC—Use in Writing, Not in Publishing.
3. DIY: Creating a Live TOC in Your Book
4. And Now, Here's How! (the actual process)
5. Next Week…

   1. Intro: Add Power to Your Book with a Live-Linked Table of Contents (TOC). Recently, we discussed how to format a SmashWords interior text file (the body of your story). At the time, I promised an article on how to create a TOC that actually works. Don't be deceived into thinking that your automated Word TOC-creating functionality does the trick. It does not. All you'll get, at best, if you use it, is a nice-looking page of blue lines of text, which look just like hyperlinks—but for all that one clicks on them, they lead nowhere. They aren't links, but decorations that do more harm than good, because they frustrate readers because they are non-intuitive, and cause the reader to struggle with misleading visual cues.

   In this article, I will show you how to create a real TOC that works first time, every time, once you have everything else working in your interior file. Use your template as told in the recent article. Add no tweaks, not even a single italicized space. Formatting a TOC will not require any added Styles. Remember—if you cause Word to add more styles in the background, you'll have to discard your work and start over to end up with a clean, fresh, simple, pure SmashWords file. Only then can their converter take your .doc (Word) upload file, and grind out multiple, differing output files from it. The reason we have to use an older, brute-force technology is because Smashwords' converter or Grinder, while it is powerful, does not have the chops to dig deeply into your Word document and engage with its more esoteric features. Keep It Simple, Sassafras, is the slogan here (KISS).

   Speaking of KISS: Try to keep things simple. By 20th Century publishing convention, you do not need a TOC for most fiction works. With the new digital freedoms, by all means use numbered and titled chapters if you design these as an important element of the story itself. At a minimum, you should number chapters, to help the reader navigate, because a digital file has no fixed page numbers. Your printed book of 300 manuscript pages may wind up as 1,200 or 3,000 screens on various e-reader devices. Many of my novels do not have chapter titles. All have, at minimum, numbers. A few of my novels (e.g., Lethal Journey, Mars the Divine) have chapters with numbers plus named titles, each appropriate on its own merits. Such titling was the time-honored tradition for centuries, and it remains a beautiful tool for the more artsy author-publisher in carefully selected instances. In the latter fiction type, and with most nonfiction books, especially scholarly works (e.g., Dead Move: Kate Morgan and the Haunting Mystery of Coronado) you should have named and numbered chapter titles. This affords you the opportunity (actually, the necessity) for a working, hot-linked, live TOC—as we'll learn to build in this article.

   One more note before we start: There are as many ways of trying to do something as there are people trying to do it. Formatting Smashwords text is no exception. However, the number of successful ways of accomplishing 'it' quickly dwindles to a very few. Smashwords CEO Mark Coker, in his free formatting guide, gives at least two ways for creating a live TOC. I have chosen the seemingly simpler and safer approach. You may find some other approach that works better for you—but here's a way that works, in the meantime. (As with every new trick, you learn more about Word in particular, and word processing in general.)

   2. Word's Powerful Auto-TOC—Use in Writing, Not in Publishing. You will benefit from understanding this feature as a writer, and it will help you structure (but not format) your SmashWords interior TOC. One constantly finds link-dead TOCs in books from publishers who ignored the rules.

   So what? So you use the Word auto-generating TOC feature to create a nice-looking (even in blue, like faux links) TOC that tells the chapter names…is this useful to your reader? Not much so. Frustrating, if anything, since they'll see the blue text, think it's a hot link, and click on it to be carried away to Chapter 9 or whatever. Click, and nothing happens. But with a little more learning curve, you can create a living, working TOC that makes your Smashwords files all that more powerful.

   Remember that a digital file can be flowed on all sorts of readers, meaning there are effectively no really fixed page numbers (you can't plan on them, let's put it that way, though one manufacturer at this time guarantees bookmarking from platform to platform for a file as you read it on your PC at home, your phone on the metro, your laptop at the café, or your e-reader in the park. You cannot insert a dead, fixed TOC that tells readers Chapter 9 is on page 238 in your manuscript at home, because that will never work. It might be screen #1001 or screen #856 on someone's phone, laptop, or Nook. In short, there is no way you can predict where Chapter 9 will begin on the user end. Also, there is no one answer. Chapter 9 may begin in lots of places. In general, there may be thousands of screens ('pages') in a typical novel, and it does more harm than good to simply say that Chapter 9 is titled The Grinding Ordeal or whatever. The reader expects a hot or live link.

   Last Words about Word. Just as a note, I have found that it's wonderful to use the auto-TOC feature while planning, researching, and writing a book (fiction or nonfiction). Like no other tool, it helps you organize your thoughts, and see your book at a glance. However, when I move on to text formatting, I find that I must go in two different directions. For my POD file, I must hard-code the final list of Heading1 styles that signal chapters. When I'm all done, and my book is finished, I then know for sure what the chapter numbers and names will be. The auto feature is a linkage, in Word, between the Heading1 (or whatever; SmashWords most easily understands just one heading level) and its automated representation in the auto TOC. When you format your POD book for the PDF format (used by LightningSource International or LSI), PDF may not understand what went on inside Word. Accordingly, the converter to PDF drops whatever it doesn't understand, or may even blow up and render gibberish. For a POD file, since the end product is a fixed sequence of hard-numbered pages, you'll change your links to hard numbers as I will show you in a future article.

   For Smashwords, use the process I will show you next. Is it hard? In terms of learning curve, there is a little nuisance value until you get used to doing things in a much older, labor-intensive manner dating to long before the advent of automation of tables and indexes. But consider this. Many authors I work with typically have a smallish number of chapters—e.g., Chapter 1 through Chapter 25. It does not take a really long time to manually and repetitively crank through these 25 iterations of the same thing. It is, frankly, a little chore that yields powerful results and is worth every moment. It is also worth taking a few moments to study Word's powerful auto-TOC feature.

   Even though you cannot use an automatically generated Word TOC in your digital book, it's worth briefly discussing this powerful feature. I use Word for writing as well as typesetting digital and POD books. Those are two different modes—authoring and publishing. This paragraph talks about authoring only. As an author, I have developed a great working relationship with Word's automated TOC.

Sator Enigma: Ancient Roman Mystery Solved

The so-called Sator Square (also Sator Rebus, Puzzle) refers to a mysterious ancient text found on walls throughout ruins of the Roman Empire. Archeologists have found exemplars in such diverse ancient Roman locations as a government hall (aula) in Cirencester, Britannia; twice in Pompeii, pre-dating the city's volcanic destruction by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE; and in the distant frontier fortress of Dura Europos on Rome's Mesopotamian border with Parthia. Something about this strange, cryptic writing must have been so important that the Romans would post it in their government halls, public squares, and top military headquarters.

   It is one of the most perfect palindromes ever created. A simple palindrome is a text that reads the same, backwards or forwards; e.g., "Madam I'm Adam" and ".madA m'I madaM". The Sator Square is a perfect four-way palindrome that reads the same left-right, right-left, up-down, and down-up. Nobody had a clue how to translate it, despite thousands of hours of research, hundreds of learned books and articles, and at least one Ph.D. thesis in Classics at Yale University.

   John T. Cullen solved the puzzle in the summer of 2007, almost coincidentally, while continuing eight years of scholarly research for his nonfiction/Ancient History virtual tour guide A Walk in Ancient Rome, Revised 2nd Edition (Clocktower Books, Summer 2011). He had been aware of this baffling cryptogram from long ago, which has since become an object of superstitious reverence in certain Christian and Neo-Pagan settings. Suddenly, while taking a break from his Rome research, he looked at the Sator Square in a new way—and was able, within a few weeks, to both translate it and plausibly explain it.

   Ironically, at the annual convention of International Thriller Writers, of which he is an Active Member, in New York City in July 2009, he was the only author present who had actually deciphered and explained a cryptic, ancient epigram of world importance—and lived to tell about it.

   You only need to understand the basics about Styles to make this one of your best writing tools—because it helps you organize your thoughts and your plot. If I'm doing research, I create one or more separate research files (in Word), where I write my own notes and also sprinkle in many live online links that allow me to click back directly into a web browser (e.g., Internet Explorer).

   Now here's the thing. I write the entire text in Normal style. At the same time, I create section or chapter headings in Heading1 style. As I add chapters in my work, I have set Word to auto-number these Heading1 styles sequentially 1, 2, 3...N. Then, at the beginning of the file, usually on its own page (Insert a Page Break before the TOC), I tell Word to generate a TOC. In Word 2003 (the functionality is the same in all versions) I use Menu > Insert > Reference > Index and Tables. The Index and Tables dialog opens. I click on the Table of Contents tab. I typically then insert a simple TOC, showing page numbers and right-aligning them. I use the Formal formatting for the TOC, which renders a simple, elegant, easy-to-visualize TOC. In formatting for SmashWords, I only use TOC level 1 (which is a separate style, defined by the Heading1 Styles in my working file. Press OK.

   Now Word races through your file, finds all the Heading1 styles, and auto-generates a TOC. Now here's a great trick: use the F9 function key to regenerate this table as often as possible. It is a working key or doorway to your file. Just as I urge Word (or in general, word processing) users to save constantly as an unthinking reflex, I urge users of the Word auto-TOC feature to regenerate this au-courant working tool as often as needed. Every time you write new text, or re-section your book into new logical blocks or chapters, go to the TOC, click anywhere on it so it's highlighted, and press F9. Instantly, your comprehensive understanding of your file updates itself and creates a new TOC, overwriting the old. Now ain't that great? Yes it is, because this tool gives me—and perhaps you, if you like it—one of the most powerful assists to organized thinking possible in word processing.

   Word's automatic TOC-generating great and useful when you wear your writer hat, but becomes counter-productive when you don your publisher hat. With either end path (digital or POD), you must typeset (format, flow) your interior text file. I'll cover POD print interior formatting in another article soon. For formatting a Smashwords digital file, using your auto-generated Word TOC is a no-no, as detailed by Smashwords CEO Mark Coker in his comprehensive style guide (available at http://www.smashwords.com for free).

   3. DIY: Create a Live TOC in Your Book. You will use an antiquated feature of Word, called Booksmarks. This is buried under layers of more modern (or, less antiquated) technology in Word. To begin with, we'll assume you have written your book in Word. Similar considerations apply in Word Perfect and other applications, but your file must be formatted as Word (.doc) file for upload to Smashwords. I have not tested it out, but if you are a non-Word user (I lack the knowledge to discuss in depth Mac, which has had its own quirks in handling Microsoft Word) you might also use one of the open-source Word-compatibles available for free download on the Internet. My detailed knowledge specifically only extends to Word. Remember to back up all files before changing them in any way.

   If you have been working with an automatically generated TOC in Word (frequently using F9 to regenerate so you stay current), now you must step back to an earlier, far more awkward technology.

   First of all, remember that SmashWords requires that you use Heading1 for your chapter headings—be they numbers only (prferably Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, etc., and use a numeral instead of the words Chapter One etc. for easier Searching). Therefore, leave the Heading1 chapter headings as they are.

   If you know how, auto-generate a TOC using Word's more advanced method (Menu > Insert > Reference > Index and Tables + Table of Contents tab). The automated, hot-linked TOC should be at the front of your interior story or text block. It may look something like this one (from Lethal Journey):

   In this screen capture, note that I have Show/Hide turned 'on'—the paragaph icon, not that shown in the file, but a similar one in the toolbar as shown in the second screen capture below. We can thus see the hidden formatting, including the black formatting paragraph marks at the end of every paragraph, and the dot between any two words.

I captured the ruler as well, showing the paragraph indent. If you look down from the tabs at left in the ruler, you can see that all the paragraphs are Normal style, from the fact that they all have the standard .25" (quarter inch) indent, and there is zero leading (blank space) following each paragraph.

There are two Styles evident in this screen capture of my TOC page. Almost everything is in the Normal style (as modified from default to a Smashwords Normal with a first-line indent and no leading or following white space). Three lines are in the Normal Center style defined by me, which is a separate style I created using Normal (but not 'based on Normal' if you follow this in the software, where you can create a dependency, to which you should say no, between the two styles. The lines 'Table of Contents' and 'Tom & Kate 1888' are both Normal Center style. The icon at top is also Normal Center.

Here are some added nuances: While working with this file in Word, I would have made the book title, perhaps a dedication, and the TOC heading Heading1, along with all of the chapter number/title lines in the body of the text. That means they all show up in an auto-generated TOC based on one level (Heading1, ignoring Heading2, Heading3, etc.). When I manually create the final Smashwords TOC based on this auto-generated TOC, I remove (CTRL+X) the entire TOC including its title ('Table of Contents') to the clipboard. I pasted it into a Notepad file, where it loses all formatting. I then copy and paste it back from Notepad into the same spot in my Word document, and presto—it assumes the Normal style with no other formatting. The point of all this is: once you have a text-only or Normal TOC, you can delete such extraneous items that were auto-generated, as the book title, dedication, and anything else the auto-TOC picked up. By all means, make your book title Normal Center and don't worry about formatting—Meatgrinder will render a workable result in the various output formats.

Some nice effects are possible within the austere Shaker simplicity of a well-formed Smashwords upload file. I often use a relevant decoration at my breaks, rather than just asterisks (BTW: never, ever use a blank line forced by a manual return!) to add a little life to my text interior, as seen in the screenshot above. In this book (Lethal Journey), it happens to be a small, round icon showing the Hotel del Coronado, where the 1892 crime and ghost story originated). That's an issue we'll take up soon in one of my upcoming article about interior and exterior or cover graphics. Notice also that the title Table of Contents is in the Normal Center style, not Heading1, since I don't want it to show up in my auto-generated TOC. Also, notice the underlines. These are a standard, default way of showing hot or live links in many browsers and applications, but they would not appear underlined in Word's auto-TOC. They are a feature resulting from the manual process of creating a TOC as we'll demonstrate next.

After all this preliminary discussion, let's get down to the actual process.

   4. And Now, Here's How! (actual process). You're going to do two things. (Refer to Step 20b in Mark Coker's free formatting guide.) First, you're going to *bookmark* your Heading1 style chapter headings. This does not create a new style, but merely modifies the existing Heading1 style. Second, you'll manually, one by one, turn each line in your TOC into a *hyperlink* that will survive formatting in Smashwords' Meatgrinder conversion tool, and emerge as a functioning TOC within your Kindle, Sony, Nook, and other e-readers or pads.

   More specifically:

(1) You're going to Bookmark each Heading1 chapter title. This does not directly affect or 'touch' the underlying Heading1 Style. If Word generates more Styles, as seen in Menu > Format > Styles and Formatting, it means you touched something (added formatting) and must undo or dump your work and start over. Starting over at this point means you kept a dozen backup copies of your final Word text, and you'll work from one of those copies as your baseline copy, while leaving the rest untouched. If you always work in such a methodical, layered manner, you will never have far to back-track to a safe, trustworthy baseline iteration.

(2) You're going to Hyperlink each line (chapter) in your TOC section, so it points to its appropriate match (a corresponding Heading1 chaper title) in the main body of your text. When the owner of a reading device (Kindle, Nook, or whatever) clicks on a hyperlink in your TOC, they will be taken to the target chapter just clicked.

Let's look at the process in more granular detail now. You've written a novel or book. You've used Word's powerful auto-TOC feature, with constant refreshes (select TOC, press F9) to keep the TOC up to date. Each line in the TOC is a Hyperlink, which the reader can click to bring up the matching chapter. We're going to manually recreate this functionality, using an older method predating the auto-TOC. Now your book is finished, and you want to format it for upload to Smashwords. The easiest way is to use the Heading1 (top level) chapter headings in the automatically generated TOC to reverse-engineer your manual TOC. You will convert the auto-TOC into a manual TOC, eliminating that fancy auto-formatting—Smashword's Meatgrinder conversion software will not produce a live, working TOC for the various target reader files. To reverse-engineer your TOC, you could go through the TOC, one by one, right-click on each line, and Remove Hyperlink. Instead, there's a quicker way.

   Remove Auto TOC formatting. The easiest way to remove all page numbers and other formatting all at once is this. (1) Separately in Windows, open Notepad, a rudimentary ASCII-only text editor designed for purposes like this, and useful in many Word or web design operations. (2) Select the entire auto-generated TOC in your final Word file by highlighting it with your cursor. (3) Remove the entire selection, not with a *Delete* operation, which eliminates it totally, but with a CTRL + X operation, which removes it from the text but also places a copy on Word's memory clipboard. (4) Click in the Notepad (currently blank) file. Using CTRL + V, paste the TOC into your Notepad file. All formatting vanishes as you do so, leaving only flat (txt or ASCII) in Notepad. (5) Now go reverse. Select and copy (CTRL + C) the TOC, which you just pasted into Notepad, from the Notepad file back into your Word file, where the formatted TOC was. (6) The result is that you now have your TOC back in your final Word document, but without any formatting other than the default Normal style. You have removed, from your TOC, the field codes used in the automated Word TOC generator. Don't try to fancy it up. Just leave it flush left. You'll note that it will have the .25" paragraph indent of the Smashwords Normal style, as found in the free template I uploaded for your use in a recent article on formatting your interior Smashwords text.

   You are ready now to create a manual Word TOC by an old-fashioned procedure. Remember, Word is very old, and has gone through many iterations, several migrations across operating systems, and several changes in hands, in about thirty years. As a result, there are usually multiple ways of doing almost anything. It depends on how the user is comfortable working. Some people prefer to use the Menu, while others set up icons to click, and yet others prefer the really old-fashioned method of using keyboard or key-click combinations (e.g., CTRL + X to remove text to the clipboard; CTRL + C to copy to the clipboard; and CTRL + V to paste from the clipboard to a selected location in any file). Note: your TOC should be text-only, and only in Normal style, and have no added paragraph returns. The Normal style provided with my free template includes zero leading (space) after each line. Your TOC is best left flush left, as in the template style for Normal. As with Heading1 chapter heads, it's best that each correspondng TOC line be on a single line, and not wrap into two. Use no page numbering. If you put a return after each line in the TOC, Word will treat each line as a paragraph, which means it will have the same slight indentation as the Template's Normal style. Never indent more than one inch, or Meatgrinder, the conversion tool, may blow up and render bad output files into all your end user files. At best, adding unwanted returns and blank space will result in a target file that the reader will become frustrated with, and may return your book for a refund.

   Create Bookmarks in the Body. Leaving the Heading1's as-is in your file, go from one chapter heading to the next, one by one. At each Heading1 (you can use Search to quickly find them in Word (use Menu > Edit > Find > More > Format > Style > Heading1) and search one by one. When you find each Heading1, click once in the white text field outside the Find dialog, and the text file rather than the dialog box will become active. [Note: the limit on this operation is that you can select text in the file, but cannot move it (drag and drop) while the dialog is open. Select the Heading1 chapter heading.] Having selected a Heading1 chapter heading, go to your Word menu and do Menu > Insert > Bookmark. The Bookmark dialog box opens. In the Name field, insert the name you'll give your bookmark. I recommend something like bookmark1 or bookmark01, which helps Word sequentially number your chapter headings internally. As you do each such bookmark, you are creating a target for the corresponding hyperlink in your TOC.

   Create Corresponding Hyperlinks or Pointers in Your TOC. As you add each bookmark, go back to the TOC and add the corresponding hyperlink. Here is a partial snapshot of my own, personalized Word 2003 interface, showing the main menu (to which I keep referring as Menu > in these instructions), and the Ruler (showing tab settings). Between these two is a personalized toolbar ('johntcullen') that I created to have all my most frequently used icons in one place. [You can create as many personalized toolbars as you want, using Menu > View Toolbars > Customize.] At the end of this process, you will have a live, functioning TOC that can safely navigate through Smashwords' Meatgrinder format conversion tool. Notice that, in the Menu > Insert functionality, the Bookmark menu item is right near the Hyperlink menu item. As you insert hyperlinks (see screen capture, next)…

   …notice that the Show/Hide icon is toggled (the black paragraph mark icon in the toolbar, between the yellow highlighter icon at its left and the format painter brush at its right). This means you see all the top layer of formatting in Word's underlying markup language in your file. That's the only practical way to master Word, by seeing more than your reader will see. I always work with these cues toggled to Show. Even if you hide them in your working file, as you write your book, you need to see the underlying Word cues when you put your publisher hat on and start formatting. You must see the formatting marks in order to be able to format. The actual markup language formatting lies yet another layer below and remains invisible. The settings in this screen shot correspond to the excerpted Word file shown in the image above for Lethal Journey. Notice that the tab setting for the indent is .25" or a quarter inch. That is a good, standard, allowable length for your indent; anything much more becomes painful on your reader's eyes after just a page or two, and may cause Meatgrinder to burp up a bunch of bone fragments and then die while trying to convert your file.

   A good way to move back and forth is to use the Word toggle icon for this purpose. In the toolbar, notice the left and right arrows near the left end. Let's discuss how this works. When you open your Word file, the TOC is offline. The TOC only activates if you click inside it. Try it in yours—either a manually created TOC as discussed in this article, or an auto-generated Word TOC. Either way, the same thing happens. Once you click in the TOC, you've told Word you want to wake up the TOC. Click on any hyperlink. Word takes you to that section. Look at upper left, and you'll see the arrow toggle for Back has been activated (looks green, for Go). Click on the Back arrow, and you return to the TOC. When you're back on the TOC, the right arrow-toggle is green. You can forever toggle back and forth between these start and end points. It works for anywhere else in your text as well.

   To create each hyperlink, choose or select the desired line in the TOC. Press Menu > Insert > Hyperlink, which opens the Insert Hyperlink dialog box. First, in the Link To: column at left, choose one item, which should be Place in this Document. In the middle white space (Select A Place in This Document), select the line items that is your Heading1 chapter heading. Press OK. If your hyperlink is successful, you should be able to press it in the TOC, and be taken to the appropriate Heading1. Use the green go back toggle to return to the TOC. Repeat this process until each bookmarked, Heading1 chapter heading has been matched with its corresponding hyperlink in the TOC. That's all there is to it!

   Coming Soon. In an article soon, we'll resume discussing graphics and their place on the cover of your book, as well as images in the stream of your interior text.

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