ROBUST discussion

[EDIT 23 July 2013]

An app for auto-formatting a paperback of your book, similar to the e-book app at http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/1... which you should check out) follows when the e-book app has been launched.

[ORIGINAL POST:]

About book formatting, you don't need expensive additional software. You just need someone to show you the logical, fast way to do it. For instance: You can design perfectly good books in Word by just learning about Styles; Scrivener has similar facilities. Both come with readymade templates that you can choose if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Styles automate the process to where it takes me twenty minutes to format a book. It'll do it even as you write it, but, because so many people with different wordprocessors work on the manuscripts I write or edit, my preferred method is nuclear option of just putting the entire text through a plain text engine, then pasting it into Pages (the Mac wordprocessor I like for its simple, clean interface), applying a single style of indented pars to the whole thing (30 secs) and proceeding from there by exception to style chapter heads and flush left pars at chapter and section openings (20mins). Adding in italics from the master may take 40mins but the whole job is usually finished under an hour.

The WP automatically adds page numbers.

That is a basic, clean book design. Select your page size right, and it can be sent to Createspace locked up in a PDF. It's not as fancy as my prizewinning designs for, for instance, IDITAROD or LARSON, but it will be better than what most people "format" by messing around paragraph by paragraph.

What about fancy stuff? Some chapters have drop caps and things like that. Should we shoot for that?

Also, is a .5 margin too much? When I look at a Nook book, I think .25 looks better.

We're at cross-purposes here. I'm tallking about a print book, such as you will send to CreateSpace. About drop caps, perhaps you should learn to crawl before you try to run. But they're basically not very difficult if you know what you're doing. The drop caps in the IDITAROD paperback that had everyone so excited took me about a minute to automate, after which I paid them no further attention. All the same, before you get to drop caps, you should learn about Styles and Grids, because once you have those fixed for a single page, the job is done for you for the rest of the book by the computer, and you can style be exception, instead of what amateurs do, which is to style every paragraph individually, until all their hair is gone...

It isn't worth worrying about margins in electronic books because they are under the control of either the programmers or the readers, in any event largely without your control. In any event, I format those with the same process described above, as part of the grid, which is the page style.

I see - print doesn't always come directly from the e-book.

Okay. They tend to merge together in my mind.

Sure, print can come from the ebook. We do it all the time. But there is more to print that you have to consider, stuff which in ebooks the translation engine operated by Amazon, Smashwords and D2D does for you behind the curtain.

You're there already, actually, when you consider what the page should look like, for instance the margins. You can think of the template a designer's page layout program uses as a print translation engine similar to the ebook translation engines. He just has more control over it than you have over what e.g. Amazon does, whether he made it himself or whether he copies one of my templates.

Good to have, Andre. Thanks.