How to Typeset a Novel in Microsoft Word

2. I also have a file where I keep all my self-published typeset documents, so you might want to create one of those too.

3. Track Changes. Check to make sure track changes is off and that any lingering changes have been accepted. You may want to do a quick glance to see if any editor comments remain in the manuscript.

4. Font colors. “Select All” in the document (CTRL A) and remove highlighting and make all the text black. 

5. Trim size. Change the page size to the trim size of your final book. Keep in mind that you can choose anything here. You are the designer. But be sure to choose one of the industry standard trim sizes. Most trade paperback books are 5.5 inches x 8.5 inches, so that’s what I’ve used in my example.      

6. Style. Adjust the style to make get rid of any special style formatting and chance everything to your normal Word style settings.

7. Font. Change the font to whatever you want. Do keep in mind that you want something legible for the text. Most books are typeset in two fonts: one for the body and one for chapter titles. Don’t worry about your chapter headings for now. Simply make everything in the font you want to use for the body of the book.

8. Front matter pages. You have to add pages to the front of the book for the copyright page and title pages. Here is what I recommend, but if you want more or less, it’s up to you. Do keep in mind that the first page of chapter one should start on an odd numbered page.

9. Formatting the body. If you haven’t already, select the paragraph mark in the “Home” toolbar (Show/Hide ¶) so that you can see all the behind-the-scenes formatting like paragraphs (where you hit enter), tabs, line breaks, extra spaces, and so on.

          a. Place your cursor at the beginning of the first page of the manuscript (chapter one or prologue). Be sure you’re at the beginning of the first line even if it is blank.
          b. Hold down “CTRL” and the “Shift” key and the “End” key to select all of the manuscript body text.
          c. While the text is selected, double check your chosen body font and size.
          d. On the “Home” toolbar, bring up the “Paragraph” menu. On the “Indents and Spacing” tab…
                i. Justify selection
                ii. Special Indent First Line = .3
                iii. Line Spacing, Exactly 14 points
                iv. Do not set a left or right indention or before after spacing—delete any settings that exist.
          e. On the “Line and Page Breaks” tab …
                i. Deselect all of the checked boxes except for “Suppress Line Numbers.” Leave that one checked.
          f. Click OK

10. Find and Replace. You can use the “Find and Replace” function to seek out things that need changed in your document.

NOTE: While the “Find and Replace” box is open, click on “More” to bring up more options. You can use the “Special” button to show a list of things you can search for in the document. If for some reason the “Find and Replace” search isn’t bringing up things that you know exist, you might check here to make sure the “Match case” option is off.

          a. Deselect your text and hold down “CTRL” and the “Home” key to place your cursor at the beginning of the document.
          b. On the “Home” toolbar, click on “Replace.”
                i. Tabs. Type ^t (shift 6, lowercase letter t) in the “Find” box. Leave the “Replace” box empty. Do not put anything in there, not even a space.  Click on “Replace All” to remove the tabs throughout your document.
                ii. Spaces. Delete the ^t from the “Find” box and type in two spaces. In the “Replace” box, type in one space. Click on “Replace All” to remove the double spaces in your document.  Do this again and again until the window tells you it has made 0 replacements.
                iii. Spaces and Paragraphs. Delete the two spaces in the “Find” box and type in ^p and a space. Type ^p with no space in the “Replace” box. Click “Replace All.” This will remove any extra spaces (false indents) that appear at the beginning of a new line. Click “Replace All” until the window tells you it has made 0 replacements.
                iv. Manual Line Breaks. Delete the ^p space and type in ^l. Click “Find Next” to search for any line breaks in your document. (These happen when you hold down “Shift” and hit “Enter.”) These forced returns will keep the following paragraph from indenting. Replace these manually throughout your document by deleting the manual line break and hitting Enter to get a new paragraph. Watch the ¶ marks so you can see how things change. Check the following paragraph to make sure it is properly indented properly without any leading spaces. (Spaces are noted with a dot in the show ¶.) Delete any leading spaces.
                v. Column Breaks. Do a search for any column breaks (^n) and remove them manually by clicking “Find Next” and making sure you don’t want them.
                vi. Hyphens. Type two hyphens (–) into the “Find” box and type an em dash (—) into the “Replace” box. You can either paste a proper em dash in the “Replace” box by finding one in your document and copying it. Or you can select it from the “Special” list when you click on “More.” Click “Replace All.”  Then do a search for spaces around your em dashes. In the “Find” box, replace the double hyphens with a proper em dash, then add a space before it. Put only an em dash in the “Replace box.” Replace all of them. Do the same for a space trailing the em dash. Do this until there are 0 replacements.
                vii. Find and replace the misuse of en dashes (–) with em dashes (—). Check the leading and trailing spaces as well.
                viii. Ellipses. Decide how you want to format them in your manuscript. You can either use the auto format ellipses (…) or you can use the period space period space period one (. . .). If you use the period space one, you’ll need to do a search for (. . .) once your manuscript is formatted to make sure that none of them ended up at the end of a line and got cut in half. These you will have to fix manually by rewording the sentence so that the ellipses falls together on the same line. If you want to use the auto format ellipses, this won’t be a problem. So, if you do choose the auto format ellipses, do a “Find” for any that might not be picking up the format. Type three periods into the “Find” box without any spaces between (…) and paste an auto formatted ellipses (…) into the “Replace” box. Replace them all. Then do a search for the auto ellipse with leading and trailing spaces and make them the way you want them. You will also want to do a “Find” for two periods (..) and period space period (. .). This should help you make all your ellipses consistent.
                 ix. Quotes and Double Quotes. Do a “Find and Replace” of all the quotes to turn the straight quotes into curly quotes. You’ll do this four times. One for “, one for ”, one for ‘, and one for ’. Paste the same thing into both boxes and click “Replace all.” Sometimes this will cause a quote to turn the wrong way when there is an em dash or ellipses there, but hopefully you or your proofreader will find those before you upload for printing.
                 x. Underlines and Bold. Search for underlining by clicking in “Find” box and type “CTRL” “U” at the same time. Then click “Find Next” to see where you’ve used underlining. If you used underlining for italicized thoughts, you’ll need to replace the underlining with italics. You can click in the “Replace” box and type “CTRL” “I” to do this faster, but I recommend taking your time to check each one before you replace so that you’re sure you want to italicize. Once you’re done, do a search for “CTRL” “B” for bold to see where you’ve bolded things in your document and remove any you don’t want. 

11. Asterisks. Do a “Find” for a single asterisk. This is where you will format your scene breaks. Make sure you format them the way you want them to look in the print book. If you want to use a fun image or dots like ●instead of plain asterisk, replace them manually. I like to get one scene break formatted the way I want it, then copy it. Then I use the “Find” function to go from asterisk to asterisk and paste in my formatted scene breaks. If you want to insert an image, go to “Insert” “Picture” and find the image you want to use. Resize it, center it, then you can copy it and paste it in all the right places.

12. Page Breaks and Chapter Headings. Additional page breaks should only occur between chapters and maybe at the end for your acknowledgements and about the author pages.
          a. Do a “Find” for manual page breaks (^m) and section breaks (^b) and remove any that don’t belong.
          b. You can format your chapter headings anyway you want to. Do a “Find” for the word “chapter” or if you didn’t use the word chapter, you’ll have to search for each number “1,” “2,” “45,” etc. or manually scroll through the document to find them all. Make sure they’re all the same font, size, and start in the same place (count the ¶ marks to be sure). I like to format one and copy and paste it, then go in and change the number or chapter title. You can keep chapter headings plain or get fancy. Below are some examples of chapter headings I’ve done.

13. To add pages to the end of the book. One of the best things about typesetting your own book is that you are in control of what you put in the back. You can cross promote yourself however you want. And you should. Someone finished your book and loves it wants to see what else you’ve written. So put in a list of the other books you’ve written, create JPG ads for your other series and put a few in the back. Maybe even put an ad for your author website, inviting the reader to come connect with you online.

          a. Press “CTRL” “End” to get to the end of your document.
          b. Click “Insert,” “Page Break” to insert a page. Insert as many extra pages as you’d like and make sure you end on an even page number.

14. Headers and Footers. Go back to the very beginning of your document and double click on the page somewhere in the header or footer area. This will bring up the Header & Footer Tools menu.
Here’s how it works. Headers and Footers are connected unless you unconnect them. You can only unconnect them where you’ve placed a section break. So, if you want no page numbers in the beginning, lowercase Roman numerals for the table of contents, numbers for the book, then no page numbers at the end where the acknowledgements and ads are, you will need to insert three section breaks. If you want to change the chapter heading in each chapter, you will need a section break between each chapter.

This can get very complicated. Unless you’re publishing a nonfiction book, I recommend leaving your headers the same throughout the body of the book and even letting the page numbers go through the acknowledgements and ads in the back. But it’s up to you.

Here’s an image of the Header & Footer Tools menu.

I put a yellow box around the buttons that will take you from one section’s header or footer to the next. The button at the bottom, “Link to Previous” is the button that controls whether your headers and footers stay the same of change. If you want them the same, link your headers and footers. If you want them to change, unlink them. You link or unlink on the first page of each new section.

To make things easy, simply center your page numbers and headings and put the same heading on each page, for example: Chokepoint by Jill Williamson. If you’d like to have the title on the right-hand page or above the odd numbers and your author name on the left-hand side or above the even numbers, check the box in the Header & Footer Tools that says “Different Odd & Even Pages.” If you want to have no page number on the very first page, check the box that says “Different First Page.”

If you get stuck on page numbers, I have a video tutorial on the subject at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UOuihsC7SyY

And there are many others video tutorials out there too.

Insert a page number by double clicking in the footer area and selecting your choice from the “Page Number” menu. Choose whether you want your page numbers on the left, center, or right. Once the number appears, you can highlight it and change the font or size.

For the headers, simply double click in that area of the document, type what you want, and format it.

Here are some sample instructions for how it could be done. If you try it this way as a method of training, you will learn the basic concept. Then you can make changes however you’d like.

          a. Header. Go to the very first page of your document and double click in the header. The header in section one will have nothing in it as these are your front matter pages.  Click the show next button to look at the header in section two.
                 i. Deselect “Link To Previous.”
                 ii. Check the boxes in the Header & Footer Tools menu that say “Different First Page” and “Different Odd & Even Pages.”
                 iii. Deselect “Link to Previous” again as it may have reselected itself. If you accidentally leave this on, it will mess up your numbering.
                 iv. Click on “Show Next” in the Header & Footer Tools menu. This will take you to the even page header.
                 v. Deselect “Link To Previous.”
                 vi. Enter your author name, font Garamond size 10, centered, with one return after the name. Adding a return will give a little space between the name and the body of the page and is easier than adjusting the header and footer margins.
                 vii. Click on “Show Next” and do the same for the title of the book on the odd page header. Don’t forget to deselect “Link to Previous” before making any changes.
                 viii. Click on “Show Next” to see section three. The acknowledgements and author bio page has no header or footer. You will probably need to deselect “Link to Previous” to keep the headers from showing up.
          b. Footer. Go back to the first page of your document and click in the footer. The footer in section one will have nothing in it as these are your front matter pages.  Click the show next button to look at the footer in section two.
                 i. In section two, deselect “Link to Previous.” Click on the “Page Number” dropdown menu and select “Format Page Numbers,” which will bring up the Page Number Format box. Here you can click the button “Start at” and enter a “1” so that your first page will start at one. Click “OK.”

                 ii. Click on the “Page Number” dropdown menu and select “Bottom of Page,” and then select the page number that is centered. The number should appear in your footer. Highlight it and change the font to Garamond, size 10.

                 iii. Click on “Show Next,” deselect “Link to Previous,” and insert a page number for the even page footer. Format it as you did before.

                 iv. Click on “Show Next” and do the same for the odd page footer.
                 v. Click on “Show Next” to deselect the “Link to Previous” for the acknowledgements and author pages in the back. Delete any page numbers if they exist.

15. Embed your fonts. Once your document looks just how you want it to, you need to embed your fonts. This allows you to use fonts that the printer might not have. Embedding the fonts with your file saves that font information in the file so that it’s available to the computer that opens your file. If you don’t embed your fonts, the computer that opens your document to print it or read it will choose a substitution font, and that might mess up your formatting. Simply printing or saving to PDF will not embed fonts.

          a. Click “File,” “Options.”
          b. In the “Options” window, click “Save.”
          c. Under “Preserve fidelity when sharing this document,” check the box “Embed fonts in the file.” Make sure that the “Do not embed common system fonts” box is also checked.
          d. Click “OK.”

16. Save to PDF. Now you’re ready to save your document.

          a. Click “Save as.” Enter the name for the file. And under the “Save as type” dropdown menu, select PDF.
          b. Click the “Options” button. Ensure that the “Document structure tags for accessibility” box is checked. Click “OK.”
          c. Click “Save.”