Formatting: A Writer's Guide

By Roger Colins

A short guide on how to format written text from finished draft material into something more, professional. Novelist, scriptwriter, poet, biographer or historian all need to follow some of these rules and regulations to get their masterpieces ship shape. If you've finished the writing and editing of your monumental manuscript you'll be moving on to formatting next and if you're finding it a bit of a chore, have a read of a few tips, tricks and explanations about formatting. _______________________________________________________________________________________ Before you start formatting your little diamond, save it, put it somewhere safe, open a new document, copy and paste the whole thing from;      'ADogsLife.doc'      into the new document and save the new file with a new name;             'ADogsLife(FORMATTED).doc' or something similar. This is because you're about to basically, rip everything apart. Once the editors and publishers and everyone else have read the Formatted manuscript, you can open up the diamond again to show them how you want it to actually look. Layout and Fonts An Indian undergraduate recently found he could save his university a lot of money by just changing their font, as some fonts use more ink than others (if you own a printer, you'll know that ink is very expensive).  We can see that while formatting seems quite the little devil, it's rather an important step. There is a format for producing professional documents that editors appreciate the most and it goes something like this;      -12 point font size      -Courier or Courier New font      -Double spaced      -Both BOLD and italics should be underlined (Bold should be bold        and italics should be italics)      ...and don't forget to add page numbers. Centre or right justify in       footer with page '1' coming directly after the title page. Agents usually want the first page they see to have your name, document title, address and date of printing in the top right hand corner and nothing else. They'll want the second page to be the title centred in the middle with the writer's name underneath and nothing else again.  Copyrights After that, the next page usually wants some sort of disclaimer and publishing rights. Add the ISBN if you've got one and if it's your work, say so with;      'Copyright Mickey Mouse 2014©'.       (use your own name, just make sure you put the © logo after the year) Depending on what you're writing about, announce that it's all fiction or it's based on a true story. Add that you don't want anyone reproducing your work without your expressed consent and add any other authors, editors, publishers, artists that helped put it together along with any copyrights for their work as well. Contents The next page or two lists the chapters, sections or units of the book  down the centre of the page or justified to the left, both are just the same. Contents or table of contents (TOC) should come soon after any little dedication but you can add dedications after the contents if you wish. I know not of any rules that say where to put;      'For my dog Lucy. My inspiration for writing this book.'  *Synopsis Most especially, the first item you'll be sending to agents is your synopsis and the same rules apply. However, if you're unsure about how to build your synopsis I would recommend keeping it true to the pace of the original.  A synopsis functions one objective, to tell your story from beginning to end as a third person narrative. The synopsis does not include everything and should concentrate on the most important plot developments. For an 80,000 word manuscript or less, I would write a 3 or 4 page synopsis between 1500 to 3000 words. If my book is stretching over 250,000 words, I'll add a fourth or fifth page at 4000, but that would be my upper limit. It should sound as awesome as you think it is, not more, not less or else someone will get disappointed. *Ebooks  There are also things called ebook formats and reside amongt the inner circles of hell. If I were you, I'd find a friend that happens to be a programming Guru. If you don't know anyone then ask all your friends to ask theirs. I guarantee, one of them knows someone that will salivate at the chance to turn your document into a different format. There are many ebook publishers and each has their own preferred format but if you're having trouble converting that masterpiece into an Amazon ebook, go along to the short, brief guide from Amazon *here* with my best wishes. Front Matter If you really want to spend months, if not years turning your book into something epic, I'd suggest saving it for the second edition. If however this is a life's work for you then here are some bits to consider. Front matter is everything people read before they hit chapter one and back matter, is everything they'll read after 'The End'. Forewords and Prologues A foreword is all about something other than the book itself and usually goes on about how the book was written, or about how the author went about writing it. Forewords are more often than not, written by someone else. Both can be in first or third person, and irrespective of which way the core material is depicted.      'Ben had been searching for his lost puppy for ten years. Having lived      in Caracas as a rent boy, an Autumn morning post arrived. Letters,      bills, cards and an enormous package with Ben's name on it...'      Whereas a prologue is a short history to the book itself;       'My dog first ran away on the 5th of June, 2004. She was a great      retriever, hunter and guardian but above all, my best friend...'   The Prologue comes near as dammit right before the first chapter but you should think twice before including both a foreword and a prologue. As you can see, they're fairly similar. Introductions You can also have an introduction. Really? Yes, you can have an introduction but for heavens sake if you have one then make sure it's not a foreword or prologue in disguise! Introductions should be self explanatory, they're somewhat like a prologue but are more narrative. They come after your prologue (if you have one) and before the opening lines. This is all called 'front matter' and if you've got this far, then you can move right on to Chapter One. Phew! Back Matter 'Back matter' is, that's right, the stuff at comes at the back of the book and after 'The End' of the content. Normally you'll find a few blank pages included for students to add notes but, there's no rule that you have to add anything as back matter at all. You can just put, 'The End' and close the book! However! Back matter has become more unrestricted because the author usually has another book to follow; a sequel, a follow up or another edition coming out soon, anything that will either pitch the next book or add to the one you've just read. Tolkien put whole languages in his back matter for those that had a particular interest in the pronunciation and scripts used by Dwarves and Elves. Stephen King usually plugs his next sensation. Good for him, most do. Sometimes you'll have a snippet or two from other books the author has written, a list of them all if they're not all in the front, the first chapter to the sequel, a little extra history into the author, where he came from, what his motivations were for becoming a writer and all of this can be laid out in no particular order with no real formatting restrictions other than the 12pt-Courier-Double space rule. For actual formatting purposes the back matter is traditionally for; Epilogues, Appendices, References, Bibliographies and Glossaries. These, all have rather stringent rules, far more so than the rest of your content and especially if it's non fiction. Epilogues I find few books these days bother with an epilogue, which I also find rather a shame. They are as the word suggests, the opposite to the prologue and foretell the futures of your characters in the first or third person. You can say;      'Sheamus went on to found a school in New West London, Sharia died of      rabies a year later and as for Gregory and myself, the hero's grave is      to this day, remembered by all in the country town by wreathes of      flowers and a cannon shot from the port at exactly ten past eleven on      November the Fifth. The Countessa remarried and lives in Shropshire      with a host of dogs, ponies and young parrot named George and the      chief detective is still battling paperwork at Scotland Yard but looks      forward to retirement next year. ...' After your story has ended and even if every last character has died, you can carry on telling the reader what happened to each person some days, weeks, months or (usually) years later. Appendices Are for any additions to the content annotations that have referred you here. They're usually all written in the third person and are just, extra info. I find appendices to be the nuttiest bits of any book and, the most fun! Here you can put in the back story to the annotation that was just a bit too long to include in the text. Don't forget to put which page it came from and sort it into Alphabetical order. Doing it chronologically is just about allowed but appendices are easier to sort through if your reader only has to go through the first letters to find it. Entitle it 'Appendix' or 'Appendix I' if you have two or more and stick them with their own title in the header, even if the rest of your content has blank headers. If you do have three or four appendices, use Roman numerals! They're not only  traditional but useful too for the reader to identify. If you want to use another notion such as A, B, C, or 1, 2, 3 then go ahead, it's just your editor will politely ask you change it. Otherwise, an Appendix entry might look like this;      ' Halloween. (page 324) Lucy had a habit of running away on      Halloween and Jack had never realised until this point that his dog      disappeared every Halloween. Halloween is a contraction for All      Hallows Eve, 31st October and the precursor to all Hallows day, 1st      November. Halloween is known by the Druids and adopted by the       Christian religion, to be the night when the gates of hell are opened      and the Earth is swarmed by all evil spirits. All Hallows day is also      known as All Saints Day, when all the evil spirits are locked back up in      hell and the whole world is hallowed, or 'Holy'. ' You can go ahead and add a full definition with the part of speech, etymology, examples, anything you want because that's the idea of an appendix. Go nuts! If you have an appendix then it's going to come right after an epilogue, if you have one but if not, it comes after 'The End' with one or two blank pages first. References If you have referred to other writers in your content then it's just good form to have included them in a reference section. Put their last name first, then their initials, the book title (usually in italics), the year of publication, location and publisher in that order. After that you can stick in the quote or material if you want. This is especially important if you're writing non fiction as it lends weight not only to them but to you as well. If you have a reference section, once again, arrange all of their last names in alphabetical order. A reference might look something like this;      'DOYLE. D.L, M.B, C.M. Sir, A.I.C. The Hound of the Baskervilles.       1901. London, England. The Strand Magazine. ' The idea is that the reader can find the original. That is all. Bibliographies Are remarkably similar to References and are usually presented in same fashion although some publishers will differ. The only difference is bibliographies refer to entire books and not quotations thereof. You should be aware of how you're using your research. Traditionally, if you've consulted and read an entire book in order to write yours, it belongs in a bibliography. Universities tend to adopt their own unique rules for what belongs in a Reference section and what belongs in Bibliographies so if you're a student, then follow theirs. If not, then you can't go wrong by referring quotations to references and entire books to bibliographies. Where references are used for an author to assign ownership, bibliographies are there to assign attributes. Where your idea came from, who you are backing up your claims with, your research, your knowledge and anywhere you think people might be helped in researching their own works, from.      Note: Bibliographies are far more important than references. If you're borrowing ideas then people want to know who you borrowed them from, where they're borrowed from and essentially, want to know why you decided to borrow this particular person's idea over anybody else’s. A bibliography is laid out in the same format as a Reference section but are encouraged to include which section, page and line you might be referring to, if you are referring to any particular excerpt other than the book as a whole. It all sounds rather draconian and it is. I am just being thorough here, and if you want to keep your references and bibliographies nice and simple, then go right ahead. No one will think less of you. On the other hand if you really want to be taken seriously then you had better check every line of your bibliography carefully because your references won't mean a damn any more. (For university students, you might even find your professors telling you to put your references in bibliographies for this very reason.) Glossaries If you have an epilogue, an appendix, a reference and a bibliography, no one's actually going to stop you the way they did with your foreword, prologue and introduction. Crazy, no? Want to throw in a glossary as well? What the hey, go for it! Nobody cares any more. A glossary is a little dictionary dedicated to your book. Not unlike an appendix, glossaries deal with more accurate definitions of individual words but are shorter, without the plots and story telling that accompany entries into the appendices. You can include annotations but if you have a glossary, it might have an annotation on every page, so don't bother. Glossaries are fun and if you want to make up new words, go for it! Just stick the definition in a glossary. I know I love a good glossary and again, they appear to be falling out of fashion but your editor will love them. Put them in alphabetical order, there's really no need to add which page they came from or any annotation because if the word looks weird enough, the reader will automatically flip to the back to look for a glossary and if they find one, you'll have made a best friend for life. There aren't really any formatting rules either, it's your game and just stick;      'interlocutermotionarynism: The art or hobby of conjoining two wooden      blocks together in a geometrical fashion.' ...under the header 'Glossary' for each page and of course, do them in alphabetical order. Cover Blurb There's more. Neither front nor back matter, the blurb is when finally the book is closed and you can read the back of the cover, although, most people tend to do that before they've read the book these days. Underneath the five stars and the praise and awards there's usually an enticing description left for the reader or potential reader to get an idea of what's going on inside, minus any potential spoilers.       'Lucy, on the run from a top secret experiment, has gained self       awareness. Super intelligent with the primal thirst for survival, my       pet dog learns what it is to live amongst humans when befriended       by a young, female, schizophrenic.' ...and that's it! Once the blurb is done it can be as short as that, or even one line should the rest of the page get taken up with a sparkling review from someone else. Usually a word count of 40 to 70 should sufficiently detail the juiciest chunks of your finished, polished and fully formatted leaves and doesn't have to comply with the 12pt-Courier-Double space rule, just save it somewhere special. If I've missed anything, if there's anything you think I've gotten wrong or anything you could add or would change just pop it in the comment box below and I'll get on it in two shakes of a dog's tail!

Layout_and_Fonts Copyrights Contents / TOC *Synopsis *Ebooks Front Matter Forewards Prologues Introductions Back Matter  Epilogues   Appendices  References   Bibliographies  Glossaries Blurb