Present Your Message with Attractive Formatting if You Want it to Be Received

Formatting plays a role in delivering an important message, and this role is often overlooked by people who focus exclusively on the intellectual content of their words. Good content is not enough to ensure maximum transmission to your audience. It has to be dressed up and presented well. You have to make it easy for the mind to move orderly between sections, reducing fatigue and frustration over extended reading sessions. Formatting exists to make it easier for people to digest your written message, and it gets more important as the depth of your message increases.
Good formatting creates structural order and aesthetic appeal on a page. Think of how organization applies to every other functional part of your life. If you open your wardrobe right now and see your clothing neatly organized on its shelves, you will instantly have a clear idea of what you own and what might suit you for the moment’s occasion. However, if instead, you have only a closet stuffed with piles of disordered garments, nothing to categorize them by color, fabric, or function, it makes it almost impossible to understand what your options are and the appropriate way to use them.
Working in messy conditions lowers your enjoyment of the process and the effectiveness of the outcome. Poor formatting makes it less likely that a reader will find the part of the book they need at the time they need it, or even finish reading it to the end. To avoid this kind of frustration and transmission failure, you want your book to be well structured. Make your book easy to navigate, and even casual readers who only browse through it will want to come back and read from the beginning.
Good formatting blends into the immersive experience of reading your work. If the formatting is seamless enough, it often goes unnoticed. Bad formatting sticks out like a sore thumb and serves as a constant distraction. Without careful attention to the style of formatting most appropriate for the message you are trying to deliver, you devalue the content of your book and make it unlikely to be read and enjoyed fully. Your goal must be to make your message as clear and coherent as it can be, and that means understanding the basics of good formatting.
The formatting for the electronic and printed versions of your book will have a lot in common, but also their own specificities appropriate for the medium. Your readers will read your eBook on electronic devices that make many traditional formatting elements superfluous. The most obvious difference between eBooks and physical books is there is no fixed pagination with the former. Readers can change the font size as they go, automatically altering the number of total screens, or “pages,” that your book will contain. However, even in eBooks, it’s common practice to start each chapter on a new page, instead of running continuously from the end of one chapter to the next. Having page breaks between chapters like this helps segment and break up the flow of the book in a logical and easy-to-navigate manner.
When formatting your eBook, you don’t need to add page numbers, set specific margins, or deal with headers and footers. Your readers’ devices will automatically adjust all of these factors as needed. Of course, you still can choose the font and size and style that you want, but keep in mind that your readers might already have their own preferences that will overwrite your original settings.
The easiest approach to take with your eBook formatting is simply to choose an easily readable font, such as Georgia or Verdana, and make sure the text shows up clearly on all major eReader devices. Occassionally, unrecognizable symbols can appear in the final product if strange fonts are used or you made an error in the formatting process.
Printed books, on the other hand, are completely static in their presentation. The font style and size, as well as how chapters are broken up into specific pages, are all determined by the publisher before the book is even printed and purchased. Electronic books give control to the reader, while printed books are controlled by the producer. In that sense, as the writer, you will need to put more thought into further aspects of how your message will be received. You are setting the aesthetic conditions under which readers will digest what you have to say.
If you believe your message is truly important, it’s well worth the time and effort required to address the context in which it will be presented. Remember: content may be king, but context is God. Prepare the space around your message and medium through which it will be received, and you will have a much more engaged readership that absorbs the maximum amount possible as they traverse the pages (or screens) of your book.
