Self-publishing CreateSpace POD Paperbacks 2: Word Formatting Part 1

1. Why Use Microsoft Word for Self-publishing on CreateSpace: Hello and welcome back to my course on using create space to publish your manuscript in this course before we actually bring upward and start using it to format or a document we're going toe discuss why? To use word. Now. Word has a particular layout. Menus are on particular or commands around particular menus, and I'm going to be using word to demonstrate the formatting of the document. Some people have had problems following along. If they don't use the word editor, they use a different editor and try to follow my instructions. If you can make the translation to your own editor and prefer not to use word, then good for you. Go ahead and do it. Many people have had difficulty. Another thing that I want to warn you about is that creates space, accepts his input. Doc files, which is a word format. Doc X files a word format. RTF files word format and PdF files, which is an open format. While not exactly open, it's owned by Adobe, but it's fairly open. Um, so it's primarily word that create spaces, focus toward accepting input from, and after all, why not? It's probably the most popular word processor in the world. So I recommend you for two reasons. To use word so that you can follow my instructions without getting lost, and so that you don't run into difficulty having to try and figure out how to create a word file for submission to create space. With that said, Let's get formatting. 2. Displaying Formatting Characters: Hello and welcome to the next lecture. In this lecture, I'm going to be discussing how to see the formatting that we're going to be applying to this document. Here we have a fairly well formatted document, and it has secret characters in it that we can't see. You can enable the display of these secret characters to get a better idea of how your documents being formatted. Now, you do this by going to the home menu and selecting off of it. This thing in the middle that looks like a backward p with to a senders. This is the paragraph symbol. If we turn that on suddenly all the special characters in our document below appear we can see a page break here for the head one. That's what this square button up here is. We can see a paragraph or new line at the end of the line. Here's another paragraph. New line. There's one at the end of each paragraph. Beat Ealing. Words are little dots. They're actually raised higher than a periods. You can recognize them there in the middle instead of at the bottom. And in this way, you're gonna be able to see extra spaces, extra carriage returns that may be laying around tab characters, which we don't want in the document before editing enable this feature. Now if you want it to go away. If you want these special symbols to go away, go ahead back to the home menu and click once again on the P the backward P that's now highlighted in orange. The special characters will stop being displayed now. To tell you the truth, I get so use than that I come sometimes. Forget that I've got him on. You might see me in some of the demos here with characters on when Maybe they shouldn't be , because I just don't really see them after a while, I see them when I want to see them. When they're useful, ignore than the rest of the time you might find that you like writing with the mine Anyway , do this before formatting your document. Be able to see your formatting before trying to format 3. Replacing Invalid Characters: Welcome back in this lecture. We're going to replace certain characters in some case, removed them and in another case, replaced them with a more valid character There, too. Problematic characters come about in formatting a document for publication. One is tabs. I don't know the real reason behind this, but none of the formatting for any of these publications. Systems like to have tabs and documents. Maybe it's because a tab doesn't really have a pre defined in debt. It can be completely ignored. It can mean tab in half a page, so you shouldn't use them for four banning your documents. Instead, you should used centered text things like that which always have a fixed meeting. Now what we're going to do to remove the tab character is go tab. Characters in this document is to go to the home menu. And once up, we will click on replace. It's all the way over on the right on the editing sub menu. Now, replace will ask you what character you want to replace. In this case, we want to replace a tab. How do you type a tab into a text box here? Well, actually, what you do is you click on more and up will come this special button at the very bottom. This allows you to enter special characters, including the tab character. Let's click on that. Now You could see that we could have entered the keys Carrot t to represent a tab. It's already done that for us, in case you don't remember. And what we're going to replace it with is nothing. Okay? And we will replace all in the document. Let's go ahead and do that. There was one replacement. There was one tab in the document that has been replaced with nothing or effectively removed. That's good. The other character that we're gonna work on me show you this. As you write inward, you can type two hyphen characters to try and get an AM dash. Let me show you how this works. Here comes the em dash right between these. Now, if you didn't notice it, Microsoft Word replaced the dash dash with an em dash on the fly. Sometimes Microsoft Word does this sometimes it doesn't. And what you end up with is dash Dash is in your document when you would have rather law had like a long dash or an em dash. So what I like to do, especially when working on documents with people that like to use em, dashes a lot, is to once again go to home, go over to replace and replace hyphen hyphen with and down. Here you pick special again from the more menu and up comes em dash and you can see that's a carrot plus sign. We could've type that in. So I'm replacing hyphen hyphen with an EM dash wherever they occur. Let's replace all of them. I got one of them, Okay, It's probably the one I just typed, actually. So those the two problematic characters that we're going to replace before we start formatting you use the replace option off of the home menu. 4. Dropping the Formatting Bomb: Welcome back in this lecture, we're going to discuss the nuclear option. No, not that one. We're talking about the formatting nuclear option of dropping the bomb on our document. Sometimes documents air so poorly formatted that you have to bring them back to a base. You have to completely wipe out there formatting so that you can reform at them again. This particular document is well formatted. And to tell you the truth, I'm about to show you how to format a document. What fun is it to show you of? It's already well formatted. So I'm going to drop the bomb on this document. Now, basically, what that involves is taking everything and making it the base or normal style for the document. How do we do that? Well, first you go to home and we're gonna select the entire document. Once again, we go over to the far right to these editing options. Notice Select here, pull it down and choose. Select all. You've now highlighted everything in the document. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna turn everything to normal formatting. We'll go to home and will come over to the style that we would like, and the style we want is normal. Here's what everything's gonna look like when we get done. It'll all just be indented paragraphs, even our title page. Even our chapter headings now noticed that any styling that you did using italics or bold does not get wiped out by dropping the bomb on your document. It's just the style that we're going to change. Even your hyperlinks remain in the document and are not affected by dropping the bomb. So one of the first things you might want to do when working with a poorly formatted document is to remove all of its formatting by changing everything to normal style in the next section, we're actually gonna begin formatting the documents. 5. Inserting Title and Copyright Pages: welcome back in this lecture. We're going to format the title, and the copyright page is for our printed book. Now. It just so happens that the title page here that I already have filled out was set up for smash words. So I'm going to show you how to convert this e book title and copyright page over to a printed book version. And we're going to do quite a bit of formatting here, and I think it's gonna look quite nice when we're done now. First, there's a natural separation here between what should be on the title page, which is the title in the author, and then stuff that ought to be on the copyright page. So we're gonna insert a page break by going to insert on the menu. Coming down to page Break after having positioned are cursor in front of version will explain version once we get to that page. Now, now we have two pages. Here's our title page. Now what we need to do with this is make the fonts substantially larger. Let's take the title, which is bad medicine and will come up here to the home menu where we will make the font something larger like, Oh, that's getting too large. Maybe 24. That's a nice size. And then maybe we'll leave by as small as it is and will take Melanie Jackson. This is one of my wife's books, and I will do home, and we'll bring the size on that up to maybe 18 is looking pretty good. Now, what would really snazzy this up is a little bit more space in between these things and maybe to have them right justified. So let's go ahead and do that. I'm gonna select everything here that we have on our title page, and I'm going to right click to bring up the formatting menu where I will pick paragraph here rather than being left justified. We're going to make things right, justified and click OK, now our title and our author are right justified. What about to get a little extra space in between? Well, that's pretty easy. In most cases is press and er here by comes down. So does Melanie Jackson. It capitalized by for me, which I don't want, Oh, lower case that and we're beginning to get a decent looking title page. Now what will move on to it is the copyright page. What I like to do is have this completely left format, uh, left aligned so it wouldn't have this paragraph in debt that we have going on here. And we need to change the smash words. Ah, copyright information here to, um, or generic print copyright information. But I think everything else looks pretty good. This version here is something that I used to indicate whether this what version of the document this is, that's out. And when it was basically published, So right now we're at version 1.0. That would mean not edited by a copy editor. Or at least not that one that I know of. It was previously edited by other people, but not by an official copy editor. So I used the point number to indicate whether it's been copy edited, and I use the previous number to indicate the version of the revision of the text that I'm putting out one point. Oh, would mean base version. Okay. And here will replace the smash words edition. So when I need on here is this text I like the Discover other titles by Melanie Jackson at I would left justify this by right clicking to bring up the formatting menu and then click on Paragraph and here we will left justify. But the reason we're not fully left justified is because of this indentation, which we've applied to paragraph. So I'll say none. And there I am, fully left justified. Now the thing we need to dio is to replace this copyright information. And the easiest way to do that really is to go to another book, and I will post these pages for use that you can just slip them into your book. Basically, I'm going to give you a template for creating a create space formatted manuscript that you can use to plug in your text if you'd rather go that way. So let's replace this text by going to another document and finding an appropriate text for a print document Here. I just happened tohave another print document, Cuba, that has the appropriate text. This has no references to smash words. It's a general copyright that the names and persons air made up and that you can't copy this without permission from the artist. So we'll go ahead and will say copy this and then we will go back to the other document and we'll go ahead and well paced it in place of this. Now I'm gonna paste it as it came, noticed that the font is different. It's smaller than the fund that we're using right now, and I'd like to replicate that for the rest of my title page. So I'm gonna go ahead. I'm going to click inside of this lower fund copyright description, and I'll see up here in the on the home menu that it's times New Roman 10 point. Okay, let's go ahead and will grab the rest of the text, and it's 12 point will make it 10 point to match the air. I like that. In the meantime, while I was traipsing around I up the size of my fonds a little bit on the title page to make them look better. So now I think that I have a decent title page and a copyright page. Next, what we'll do is we'll movinto setting up styles and formatting the rest of the book now. Actually, before I leave, I noticed that there were several references to wrong dates and smash words up here. My version number is okay, But it's the wrong date. Let's go ahead and we'll update that, too right now, which is August 2014. This is published by Brian Jackson on Create Space, not smash words. And the copyright date is 2014. Ah, the web page to look to for Melanie's books is the same. So now we have everything on the copyright page pretty much laid out correctly, except for one thing that we're going to add. We're gonna have to wait until while we're publishing to add it, which is what do you think it is? It's the I s bien. We're gonna add an I s bien later. Once we get one as a result of the publication process, this is a bit of a chicken and egg thing. Right now, we're just gonna put a placeholder for it. And don't worry, we'll be filling this in in no time.