How to Lay Out a Book just using Word

Word is a word processor, not a layout program, and real layout programs like InDesign will do a better job. But… you probably haven’t got InDesign on your computer, and you probably do have Word. So…

Template

I recommend you download a template for the interior of your book. Try https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201834230 and

1. Download a template – if this is your first time
   doing this, download one with sample content. It gives you a sense for how
   things will look, and you’ll just have to cut and paste to replace text.
2. You’ll be downloading a zip folder. Unzip it and
   choose the template that fits the size you want (probably 6×9 inches)
3. There’s lots of fun stuff you can do to change
   the way things look in your template.
   1. Use Word Styles to change the font size and font
      choice to something suitable for your book (or just use the defaults)
   2. Use Word Styles to change how headings look. Do
      you want boxes around them, lines underneath them…?
   3. Etc. Word Styles are fun. But the main thing is
      to have the template.
4. If you want to “know what you’re doing,” try
   clicking on layout>margins>custom margins and see what the template has
   given you. This is where the margins (left right top and bottom) gutters (that
   extra space in the center that lets you read the book even though it doesn’t
   open flat), and header and footer space are set. Once you understand all this
   you can create your own templates, but I’d just stick with what Amazon gives
   you.

Front Matter

1. Use cut and paste to insert the correct title
   (subtitle) and author(s) on the front page
2. The second page should have the ISBN, copyright
   text, publisher name, and any other stuff like that. Amazon will give you an
   ISBN once you start creating the book on kdp, so you can type that in then, or
   you can purchase your own (expensive!). The publisher (imprint)( name can be
   whatever you want, but if the ISBN belongs to Amazon it will appear as
   published by you. And the copyright text can be copied from other books. You
   don’t have to register the copyright.

Sections, Headers and Footers

1. Click on the backward P on the Word ribbon (in
   the paragraph section) to see all the good things like “section breaks.” These
   allow you to start numbering pages with the first piece of writing, instead of
   with the front page – looks much more professional. You’ll want to use these:
   1. layout>breaks>section break odd page will start
      the next section on a left-facing page – best practice as it’s easy for the
      reader to find.
   2. Insert>header lets you work on the headers
      and footers for the section
   3. I recommend page numbers centered at the bottom
      of the page (make sure there’s no paragraph indent), starting at 1 with the
      first piece of writing, and linked through all sections.
   4. I recommend the book title for the left hand
      header, all pages.
   5. I recommend you use the section title for the
      right hand header (right-justified on left-facing – odd-numbered –  pages). To do this:
      1. Click
         on “link to previous” to remove the link to the previous right hand header
      2. Then
         type your new header
2. If you accidentally set a “section break
   continuous” or “section break even” I recommend screaming. Getting rid of them
   is a real pain, so I try to insert them all, save to a new document, check it
   worked, then try again from the original document if something went wrong.

Page and Line Breaks

Word does its best to break pages and paragraphs in sensible ways. Pages will all appear even at the top of the page. At the bottom, Word will leave bigger or smaller gaps depending on the text. You can utilize this by creating bigger or smaller gaps yourself, but only at the bottom of the page.

1. If there’s a single line of a paragraph at the
   end of a page, just his “enter” before the paragraph to move it to the next
   page.
2. Likewise for a poem.

What about when a page only contains two lines (worse yet, two words), or just one line of a poem? You might wish you could squeeze those words onto the previous page.

1. You can change the font size or line spacing.
   Use the small arrow at the bottom left of the paragraph block (on the Home tab
   of Word). Small changes probably won’t be noticed by the reader, so try
   decreasing the spacing (say from 1.3 to 1.2), the paragraph spacing (say from
   6pt to 4 pt), the font size (say from 12 to 11.5) and see if any of this helps.
2. If squeezing them onto the previous page doesn’t
   work, maybe slightly expand the font size to push more lines onto the next
   page.
3. You can use shift-enter to create a new line
   without creating a new paragraph.

What if the last line of a paragraph contains only one very short word? The white space on the page will look strange so…

1. Use shift>enter to force an earlier line
   break. Usually you’ll just do this to push one word down from the previous
   line. But you might get a nicer effect if you use it earlier in the paragraph.
   Just experiment.
2. The most important thing is… Don’t do this on
   the version of the document that you’re going to change to epub, or those “forced
   line breaks” will look awful in the ebook!

Images

Word lets you position your image wherever you want, letting words flow around it, or making them stay above and below, or… and… it looks great till it doesn’t. Remember, Word isn’t a layout program. The fact that it lets you do all this stuff is brilliant. The fact that the images sometimes move around unexpectedly is just a side-effect of trying to do too much with too little. So what can you do?

1. Simplest solution. Always add images “inline.”
   (It’s on the “image format” tab).
2. I recommend have your images centered, so hit
   enter, set the line to be centered with no paragraph indent, then insert the
   image.
3. Drag the bottom corner to shrink the image till
   it fits the page where you want it to appear.

Alternatively, if you’re brave, use other options instead of inline and position the image exactly how you want. But make sure you start adding images at the beginning of the document and work through to the end. If you try to add another earlier in the document, the one you just added might move.

Also, if you’re planning to use the images in the epub as well, make sure they’re inline in the word doc you’ll use for the conversion.

You might want to put a citation with the image. Be careful. Word will let you put the citation in a conveniently sized text box, and the box won’t necessarily move with the image. I recommend just adding text below the image, perhaps in a different font or in italics.

Contents and other good stuff

Did your document have footnotes, endnotes, etc? You might want to add a section break before end-notes and stop page numbering.

If you need to add footnotes or endnotes (say to thank whoever gave you an image) use references>insert footnote or insert endnote. (Endnotes appear at the end of the book.)

Do you want a contents list? Use References>table of contents and just pick one. As long as you used Word Styles to create your titles and sections headings, they should appear nicely. Don’t forget to update the contents list when anything changes.

Using Headers

I recommend Heading 1 for sections, heading 2 for entries within the section, Heading 3 if the entry has separate parts, etc. Then use Word Styles to make them look the way you want. Then…

1. If you’re still trying to organize your document
   and want to move a title from one section to another, use the navigation pane
   (view>navigation) and drag the title to the place you want it to be. But be
   careful – if you’ve already adding section breaks, they may move unexpectedly.
2. If you want to move a whole section, just click
   and drag the section in the navigation pane. It will pull all its entries with
   it.