Writers’ Mill Minutes, Nov 18 2018
Only ten people were present for November’s meeting, but those ten got to watch a book grow from folders of random files to print-ready, kindle-ready documents, to a saleable, slender volume with a cover, designed at the meeting, soon to be available on Amazon! How’s that for an action-packed afternoon!
Go to https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07KNYKHDJ/ to see the kindle version ALREADY ON SALE!
In quiet moments, Matthew handed out singularly appropriate contest awards to
- Sheila for “…and having writ…”
- Judy for “Refugee” and
- Richard for “A short history of reunification.”
Other entries will be listed in a separate email. And further information about December’s contest can be found on the website at: http://portlandwritersmill.org/contests/upcoming-contests. Judy gave us plenty of encouragement (and even a handout) to help us think about the season’s tangled webs of relationships (the topic is Tangled Webs). But, as she pointed out, if tangled webs means spiders to you, then write about spiders!
Please note:
- Contest deadlines are always the first Sunday of the month.
- Meetings are always the third Sunday of the month (except at Easter).
- Website is http://portlandwritersmill.org/ and the top menu bar gives access to everything else.
- New passwords are created each month, to maintain privacy and unpublished status of contest entries.
- The current password is UniteNov18
Snacks were provided by various generous members who raided their cupboards on the way over, and Robin has kindly volunteered to be our new “snack coordinator,” thus freeing Sheila to panic about other things.
Sheila’s presentation overran by 10 minutes, but the brave souls who stayed to the end saw how the printed version of Fine Lines will look, as well as the e-version, and were suitably impressed. I think we did a good job creating this, and I shall look forward to delivering orders at December’s meeting. All we have to wait for now is Amazon’s final stamp of approval (and Sheila will fix anything if we fail their test).
Notes from Sheila’s talk follow: I’m sorry they’re a bit long – I made them directly from the powerpoint.
Let’s Make An Anthology!
Or a novel, memoir, poetry book…
How to create your book
• Write something good
• And in a format that you can read and edit!
• Edit it (or hire someone to edit it)
• Content edit
• Copy edit
• Proofread
• Format and print/upload (or find a publisher)
So here’s what we wrote…
• One directory filled with my mum’s contest entries, mostly taken directly from email.
• One directory filled with Growing Older contest entries, mostly taken from the web page.
• One directory filled with additional submissions, mostly Word docs.
…in multiple formats!
First task – create a single file
• Each entry will need a title and author name, even if they weren’t in the original file.
• Entries should be “moveable” – so we can content edit. (If you’re writing a novel, this is where you decide to move chapter 3 if it should go before chapter 2.)
• Entries should be easily readable, so we’ll want to add them with consistent formatting.
And here are the biggest problems
• We all use different fonts and styles.
• Mum’s emails often include “hard returns” for the ends of lines. And everyone’s emails have straight quotes instead of curly ones.
• We all use different conventions for m- and n-dashes, ellipses… etc.
• We use different ways to indicate new paragraphs – spaces, tabs, or auto-indent…
• POETRY !!!
Well… and pictures…
Not so many this time. But… Pictures are a pain in Word. So are text boxes. DON’T USE THEM!
• If one of the entries includes text boxes, copy the text from the box, but don’t copy the box.
• If one of the entries includes pictures, save the pictures in a place where you can find them, but don’t insert them!
• Then…
Copy entries into one file in Word
• Use the NAVIGATION PANE. (Whatever your word processor, look for “view>navigation,” or ask GOOGLE how to do it!)
• Use STYLES
– Select HEADER 3 for title and author name, and type or copy them from the file. (Header 3 leaves space for Header 2 or 1 to delineate sections.)
– Select NORMAL for the content, and copy it from the file.
– Then repeat cutting and pasting all the entries.
What goes wrong?
• Hard returns make line lengths strange.
– Use ADVANCED FIND>MORE>SPECIAL>MANUAL LINE BREAK to remove them, BUT
– Where the line break is a genuine paragraph break (or stanza break in poetry) replace it with RETURN.
• Remove tabs the same way.
• Be careful – repeatedly formatting the same text as NORMAL will remove bolds and italics too.
• And then there’s POETRY!
Make a new style
Poetry will look strange with paragraph breaks at the end of each line. Use STYLES>NEW STYLE to make a new style based on NORMAL.
– For centered poetry, center the text then use FORMAT>PARAGRAPH and set no indent, no space after lines, and NAME THE STYLE – otherwise you’ll never find it!
– For left-aligned poetry, FORMAT>PARAGRAPH, no indent, no space after lines, but don’t center text.
Why use styles?
• You can make decisions about paragraph indents, spaces after paragraphs, and more, when you’re ready, and have them affect the whole document.
• Since your poetry styles are based on NORMAL, you can change the font, font size, line spacing etc for the whole book, just by changing NORMAL.
So, where are we?
• We’ve written something good
• And turned it into a readable, editable file.
• Now we edit it (or hire someone to edit it)
• Content edit
• Copy edit
• Proofread
• Format and print/upload (or find a publisher)
It’s time to CONTENT EDIT
• Open the file (and navigation pane) and start reading.
• Is this chapter/entry in the right place?
• Should I label my sections (use HEADER 2)?
• Should I start a new section?
• Should I move this entry to the previous section? (Just click and drag in the NAVIGATION PANE.)
Just content editing?
• You’re reading for “content” and working out where things should go, but you might as well fix terrible typos as you go…
• and obvious grammar issues
• and wrong-facing quote marks, wrongly-positioned quote marks, etc
• and anything that jumps out at you, just to keep things simple.
And then?
• We’ve written something good
• It’s in a format where we can read and edit it!
• We’re editing it
• The pieces are pretty much in the right order
• But we need to Copy edit – NEXT
• And Proofread
• Format and print/upload (or find a publisher)
Just copy editing? – Or maybe Format too!
Did you know it’s easy to miss typos at the beginnings and ends of lines? If you format your book for print at this stage, you make the lines shorter, beginnings and endings change, and you’ll find lots of typos that you missed the first time through. So let’s digress…
How to format a 6”x9” book
• Download a template from kdp. (Just ask Google where to find it.)
• Or re-use a template you’ve used before (cut and paste the text into an earlier anthology).
• Or use your own settings:
– PAGE LAYOUT>MARGINS>CUSTOM
– PAPER – set size to 6” width, 9” height, whole doc
– MARGINS
• 0.5” top, bottom, left and right, 0.25” gutter
•Portrait, Mirror Margins
What are gutters and mirrors?
• The gutter is the extra space in the center of the book, that allows you to read even though the pages are glued together.
• Mirror margins makes sure your gutter is in the center when you print on both sides of the paper.
• (And widows and orpans are one-word lines that look weird – we’ll deal with them later.)
Headings, Paragraphs and Fonts
Now you need to decide on the fonts, paragraph styles etc. Put the cursor in the middle of something (normal) then…
• STYLES, EDIT STYLE
– Times New Roman 12 pt is pretty normal and readable
– Indent paragraph by 0.25”
– No space before or after paragraphs looks good. But
– You get to choose.
• Do the same for your Headings (titles)
• maybe start each entry/chapter on a new page,
(edit style>modify>format>paragraph>page and line breaks)
Then get rid of the niggly things
• Get rid of manual paragraph indents:
– FIND space space and replace with nothing.
– FIND tab and replace with nothing (except where the text needs a tab for formatting).
• And other stuff…
– FIND period space period space period and replace with ellipsis.
– FIND n-dash and replace with m-dash.
– FIND space m-dash and replace with just m-dash.
– FIND ”. and replace with .” etc… MAKE A LIST !
Ah, but what if you want to type and ellipsis, m-dash, n-dash…
Yes, it’s another digression:
To type an ellipses, type three periods in a row, then space or return.
To type an n-dash, type space hyphen space
To type an m-dash, type letter, hyphen, hyphen, letter
To use m-dashes to indicate missing letters in a document, first type an m-dash (above), then select, Ctrl C, Ctrl V, Ctrl V to paste as many copies as you want.
Add pictures?
• Word does not do well with pictures. For simplicity, just add them in-line (use Word’s default) and maybe resize to fit, with text above and below.
• You can prettify it later, when EVERYTHING else is done!
Add title page, section breaks, contents list
• This is a good time to add a title page too. Just make it look nice.
• And a copyright page (next page in doc).
• Maybe make all your sections start on left-facing pages (PAGE LAYOUT, BREAKS, ODD PAGE). (Use “show formatting” to see what you’ve done.)
• And add a contents list.
– In WORD, go to the REFERENCES tab and choose
– TABLE OF CONTENTS (default is often good)
Headers and Footers too?
Headers and footers are great, but first be sure you’ve got everything in the order you want it. Then
• Make your book look professional. Before each “section” (Heading 2) add a section break:
– In WORD, PAGE LAYOUT>Breaks>Odd Page forces your new section to start on a “forward facing” page.
• Then add headers and footers that are different for each section
– And remember to start the page numbers with the first section, not the title page!
And do some final content edits
• Should poems be allowed to cross pages? Maybe you can shrink the text, just a little, to make it fit (or shrink the spaces). (Do this after doing headers and footers – they can change the page sizes, and only do it if you’re really going to print.)
• Do you want two-page poems to be on facing pages. You might need to move something around to make that work BUT, beware of Word dragging those section breaks with you. Use the backward P, “show formatting,” to see what happened if something goes wrong.
Then Copy Edit
Copy editing for yourself or a friend (or employer) is where you look for things that “don’t work.”
• Repeated words
• Paragraphs that start with the same word
• Dialog that’s confusing
• Wrong word choice, etc.
Copy-editing an anthology means you make minimal changes and ask the authors’ permission.
So where are we now?
• We’ve written something good
• Formatted so you can read, edit AND print!
• We’ve edited it
• Re-ordered entries/chapters: Content edit
• Re-read and edited to remove errors: Copy edit
• Now we need to Proofread
• Format and print/upload (or find a publisher)
Proofreading
Ah, if only you could change the format again to make more errors stand out. But you can!
Kindle Create
Download Kindle Create to your computer (ask Google where to find it), then format your book for kindle and proofread it there.
How to use Kindle Create
• Open Kindle Create
• New Project from File
– Novels, Essays, Poetry, Narrative, Non-fiction
– KC will add a table of contents, quickly do all the basic formatting for you, and select a theme that gives a “professional” style.
– Choose file (.doc or .docx), and select your file
• Then wait…
Then CONTINUE
While you’re waiting, KC gives you some idea of what it’s going to offer you. Then you hit CONTINUE.
• KC offers to help find chapters, format headers, and add things to the contents list. Accept all offers!
• GET STARTED brings up a list of everything KC thinks might be in the contents list. Remove the checkmark from things you don’t want there.
Tidy up
• Remove the old contents list from your kindle create version; it just confuses things.
• Make sure you don’t have any ISBN info.
• Check any images look right. If you click on an image, you can make it bigger.
• If KC missed anything from the contents, you can add it – just click on the page in the navigation (left) pane, then click on Table of Contents entry on the right, and checkmark Include in Table of Contents.
Proofread on Kindle Create
The format has changed again. Now you can re-read with fresher eyes and find more errors.
DON’T FORGET to make changes in your WORD doc as well as your KINDLE doc. They won’t happen automatically.
Getting a friend to proofread too is a HUGE HELP!
But did the changes work?
• Save as pdf lets you read your book like a book
– Open pdf
– View>page display>two page view (show cover in two-page view…)
• But how do you know you didn’t mess up one of your edits?
– If you saved your versions to separate file names:
•Open Word
•Review>compare>original doc, new doc, and choose settings
So where are we now?
• We’ve written something good
• It’s in a format where we can read and edit it!
• We’re editing it
• The pieces are pretty much in the right order
• We’ve copy-edited
• We’ve even proofread with the aid of kindle
• And we’ve (mostly) formatted. Next is print/upload (or find a publisher)
For our PRINT anthology…
All that remains is to
• prettify the pictures. You can flow text around pictures, and move them around on the page, BUT they might not stay where you put them, and you don’t want to mess up the forward-backward facing pages, so be careful.
• Prettify the text. WORD does some widow-orphan control, but you might want to use those “manual line breaks” (Shift Enter) to stop one-word paragraph ends, one-word page-starters, etc.
• Save as pdf (if you can).
For your novel/memoir/poetry book
You’ll send an unformatted version to the publisher. Just reset the page size, margins, fonts, spacing etc according to the publisher guidelines (8.5X11” page size, one inch margins, double-spaced text is common). Remember, make changes globally:
Use Styles and Page Layout: your publisher will thank you (and might even like you too).
How to save as pdf
• This “should” be easy.
– Open you Word doc (or docx)
– File>save as
– Click the arrow for “save as type” and choose “pdf”
– Select “standard publishing” and “open file after publishing”
– CHECK the file. Sometimes fonts don’t translate properly and pages change. If there’s a problem, try saving as 97-2003 and fixing the problem there, then save as pdf again. It can take several attempts.
How to Upload to Kindle and Print
• Save your WORD doc as PDF. This is the file you’ll upload for print. But check that it looks okay (sometimes format changes and you have to fix it.) If you can’t save as PDF, upload the doc.
• Save and Publish your KC document. This produces the file you’ll upload for kindle.
• Go to kdp.amazon.com (ask Google if you forget where it is)
• Sign in with your Amazon account (or create an account)
Kindle Dashboard
• On your kindle dashboard, click “+ kindle ebook”
• Type in the title, author names (just add them one by one till it runs out of space), description (proofread it!)
• Confirm you have copyright permissions and continue.
• Upload your kpf file – it will take a while to process it. Meanwhile
• Make a cover (just follow instructions – you can upload your own picture if you want – we did)
• After uploading, make coffee, sandwiches, etc ( or deliver contest awards) while you wait, then proofread online
• Then accept or change and re-upload… save and continue
Kindle price
• Next they’ll ask you where you want to sell (everywhere?) and what royalty you want.
• Simple books, minimum price is 99cents
• Books with lots of pictures, min price is $1.99
• 35% royalty means you get 35% of the list price.
• 70% royalty means you get 70% after delivery costs. We usually got for 35% and $0.99 (except for anthologies with pictures, which have to cost more)
Kindle print
• Agree to add a print version straight away, or add a paperback version later from the dashboard. (You can do the paperback first if you’d rather, using “+ paperback” at the top of the dashboard.)
• Get the ISBN and add to your word doc.
• Resave as pdf and Upload your pdf
– If you couldn’t save as pdf, upload your doc and PROOFREAD!!!!! And fix and reupload and fix and reup…
• Use the (print) cover creator.
• Remember to proofread back cover text!!!
• Make coffee while waiting for the final version again, and proofread carefully.
Kindle Print Price
• Kindle will tell you the print cost. You can buy personal copies for this plus postage (it works out at approximately $1 per book)
• Amazon will want a cut of your sales. They will give you a minimum sale price which is higher than the print cost.
• If you want to “distribute” to stores outside of Amazon, the minimum sale price will be higher again.
• You can set international prices, or let Amazon convert the US price for you.
Personal Copies
Proof copies have “PROOF” written on them. Personal copies are just the same as any other copy.
• You can’t buy personal copies of ebooks, but you can view that kpf file with “Kindle Previewer” – another free download.
• You can buy personal print copies. Click on the three lines next to “promote and advertise” (or ask Google if the dashboard changes), and select “Request Author Copies.”
• You will have to pay shipping, even if you have Amazon Prime. Sheila is ordering copies for the group.
And now we’ve made our anthology
• We’ve written something good
• In a format where we can read and edit it!
• We’ve edited it.
• Content edited – Got the chapters, sections, stories, poems… into the right order
• Formatted for print, then copy-edited
• Formatted for kindle, then proofread
• And we’ve uploaded to kdp – it will be on sale by this time tomorrow (probably)!