Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book, Part 5

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Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book, Part 5

Another ‘style’ we need to concern ourselves with is our grammar, spelling and usage style. For example, is ‘drop-down’ or ‘drop down’ correct? (Depends… if used as a noun or adjective, like ‘drop-down menu’ then the hyphen is correct. If used as a verb, as in “drop down and give me ten”, then no hyphen.) A style guide is a set of standards for the writing of documents that ensures consistency throughout a document, and encourages proper usage of the language.

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Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book, Part 4

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Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book, Part 4

We’re making some progress now, and the hardest part – figuring out the style templates - is over. I’m now ready to take Marcie’s manuscript and reformat it into a presentable book format. First, however, I want to remove any previous formatting that might be embedded in the text. Then we’ll work on the images.

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Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book – Pt. 2

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Blue View – Publishing Your Own Book – Pt. 2

When I open a new document in my word processor program – whether I’m using MS Word, LibreOffice, or OpenOffice – the paragraph and page styles are usually set to the default styles, and 99% of the time, this is just fine for what I’m doing. I just start typing my document and use the default settings for font, font size, indenting, etc.

This isn’t a good way to format an eBook, however. For an eBook, it’s important to set up page and paragraph styles and save these as a template.

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