Formatting Your Manuscript

(It’s not that scary)

Elizabeth Harmon
Aug 23, 2017 · 4 min read

With two indie releases planned for 2017, this has been my year to learn the ropes of self-publishing.

For my first indie book, Heating It Up: A Red Hot Russians Novella which came out in February, I did the majority of set-up through Amazon, though I used another distributor to connect with the remaining retailers.

Because I wanted to use one distributor for as many retailers as possible, I decided to publish my October release, Shining Through, with Pronoun.

Setting up my book through the Pronoun dashboard wasn’t difficult. But when it came to creating a pre-order, I discovered that my Word file had formatting issues that would prevent it from being accepted by retailers.

I hadn’t run into this on my previous release — no clue why, other than simple beginner’s luck. I hadn’t expected to do any of my own formatting, thinking it was beyond my capability and much too time consuming. But to get my pre-orders up, I either had to find (and pay) someone to format a draft that was still going through rounds of editing, or attempt the job myself.

With a limited budget, I chose to give it a try.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that designing an e-book through Pronoun was totally doable. The platform’s prompts took me through the process step-by-step, and for someone who doesn’t consider herself particularly tech-skilled, this was a major accomplishment.

But it still required several rounds of uploading and reviewing before I had everything in the e-book completely right. The process showed me that doing some basic clean-ups to your manuscript BEFORE you upload can save time and frustration.

That’s what I’d like to share with you, along with screenshots of where to locate the functions I mention. Since I work on a Windows PC, this will look a little different on a Mac. Pronoun’s Knowledge Base contains Mac specific-instructions for the clean-up steps I describe. Access Knowledge Base by clicking on the ? in the black circle at the bottom of the dashboard.

Please note that this is based on my experience as a slightly-technophobic newbie, and isn’t intended cover every upload/formatting issue you might encounter. But if the idea of uploading your manuscript to Pronoun scares you a little, fear not!

If I can do this, so can you. Ready to give it a try?

Step One: Save your manuscript as a .docx file

In Microsoft Word, select Save As and choose Word Document. Give your new file a distinctive name, to distinguish it from the original manuscript. That way, if run into a glitch you can’t resolve, you can return to the original document and start over. I named my file ShiningThrough_preorder

See Pronoun’s Knowledge Base if you use a different word-processing system such as Google Docs or OpenOffice

Step Two: If your .docx includes a title page, table of contents, copyright page, headers or footers, or page numbers, remove them. Pronoun’s layout options will create these for you. Likewise, your uploaded .docx should not include your book cover.

If you’ve underlined any words for emphasis, or because they’re in a foreign language, swap the underlines for italics. Underlined text will show up in a block of type separate from the rest of the text. You might want this for your dedication or acknowledgements, or if you have small passages that appear as letters, emails or journal entries. In which case, underline those only.

Step Three: Turn on the paragraph symbol to see invisible markings throughout your manuscript. You’ll find it under the Home tab in the Paragraph section. It’s the little symbol that looks like a backward P filled in.

Note the shaded symbol at the top of the screen.

Step Four: With the invisible marks visible; make sure you have page breaks before each chapter title. If they’re missing, go to the Insert tab and select Page Break in the Pages section. Note the little dot to the left of the chapter heading, which shows the Page Break comes before the new chapter begins.

Note the shaded Page Break function at the top of the page

Step Five- Make sure your chapter titles are in Heading 1 style. Simply highlight the Chapter Name and select Heading 1 from the Insert tab/Style section.

Note the highlighted box at the top of the screen.

Step Six: Turn off the Paragraph symbol and save your changes.

Step Seven: Upload your manuscript to Pronoun. This can take a few minutes, and Pronoun will send an email when the process is done, with a link to a review copy. If there are formatting issues, the review copy will include a report at the front, along with suggestions for how to resolve them.

But I hope that by doing these small clean-ups, you’ll have fewer issues than I did.

Good luck!

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