As a self-publishing author, you will likely be writing your books in Microsoft Word. It is a commonly used and well-known piece of software with lots of handy features to make your job easier. In this blog post, we will be considering some of these things as well as a few extra tips to make the most of Word. You can even do a lot of your formatting in Word, although using a pdf file for this tends to be better as you have more control over the end result, and it is less likely to be lost in the conversion.
Of course, Word is not without its faults. Parts of it are not always intuitive and there can often be technical issues and glitches. However, there is a lot of support available for this online, especially in writing communities, so you may well be able to find a solution. There are other options you can use instead of Word, such as Pages on Apple devices and Scrivener, a dedicated piece of software for writers. You can consider these options, possibly get a free trial, then decide which works best for you.
Basics of Word Files
When you are creating your Word file, there are a few things to bear in mind. Firstly, you need to decide whether you will just work in one file, which includes all the chapters or sections of your book, or whether you will have a separate file for each of these. There are pros and cons of both options.
If you have the entire document in one file, you may find it difficult to navigate between the chapters, although you could use Word’s Find option for this (Ctrl+F). In addition, you can set up a table of contents to jump to the right point, which will also make it easier when you need to format it for publication.
Don’t worry about the file being too long – there is no word count limit on Word files. If you do find that it runs slowly or your computer has difficulty loading it, this is more likely to be due to out-of-date software. Try checking for and installing Word updates to see if this makes any difference.
Alternatively, you may find it easier to split your document into chapters and save each of these as a separate Word file. This means that you can easily navigate your book without having to go through a large document every time. The disadvantage of this is that you will need to have multiple documents open at the same time, rather than just having the one.
The other downside of having separate chapters is that you have to combine them all at the end by importing the chapters into one main document. This can be a bit fiddly, especially if your book has a lot of chapters. You may decide to compromise and make documents of around five chapters at a time.
Formatting in Word
If you are having multiple chapters in the same document, it makes sense to use Word’s chapter function. The easiest way to do this is to assign a particular type of Word Heading to chapter titles so that you can later use them to build a Table of Contents. You can also have a variety of headings and sub-headings formatted in a particular way, which will mean you can build a tiered table of contents.
In addition, make sure you always insert a new page to start a new chapter on, rather than inserting blank lines until you are at the top of a new page. This saves you from having to alter this every time you change anything in an earlier paragraph and will make it easier to format later.
However, while you are still writing your manuscript, try to keep formatting at a minimum. This makes it easier for you to see what you are doing and will prevent you from having to make too many alterations. When you first apply the formatting, it will highlight any existing mistakes such as double spaces or multiple lines between paragraphs. It is simpler for you to change all of this at the same time, rather than have to deal with it every time you introduce new formatting, which may well create errors anyway.
Editing in Word
Word also provides some handy tools to help with editing. For example, while the Spelling and Grammar Checker is by no means perfect, is it nevertheless a great place to start when you are looking for errors. It even offers you a brief explanation of the rule being used for grammar corrections. However, do bear in mind that Word rarely takes account of the context you are writing in. Therefore, it will consider both “form” and “from” as correctly spelt, despite the fact that one might be supposed to read as the other.
You can use the Find tool to help with this. Pressing Ctrl+F opens the Find window, where you type in the text that you want to search for. If you think that there is a possibility that you might have used the wrong word, you can search for this here. It can also help you keep track of any names or place names you are using, as you can jump to each mention of them.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, Word is a very useful system for a self-publishing author. There are lots of other tips and tricks out there – see what you can find! In my next blog post, we will be looking at whether to have an audiobook version of your book.
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