Putting the Spit Shine on Your Manuscript

Here are some helpful tips to making your book designer's experience with your manuscript a happy one! There are very few fatal mistakes an author can make on a manuscript. The following are simply suggestions to help move the project along!

Punctuation

We, as a general service, will always do a search and replace for common issues like the double-space. But, if you haven't ordered copyediting or proofreading, chances are your publisher won't be responsible for the cost of your revision when you get your final book and realize that it looks unkempt. It isn't your book designer's responsibility to correct your punctuation mistakes. Take the time to do the steps to polish your manuscript and save yourself the heartache later on!

1. Take out all double-spaces. Many of us learned to thwack the space bar twice after a period and it is second nature to do so. But the double-space is like, totally like, 1982. The easiest way to deal with this problem is to do a search and replace all on your document after you've finished writing.
   
2. Be consistent. If you are going to make ellipses in your paragraphs, do it the same way every time. Using space...space or space... or ...space is fine. But do it the same way every time so we can fix it with a proper glyph when we suck your book into our layout program. Same goes for the em dash. We'll happily fix your double-dashed em dashes in your manuscript when we format it into a book, but it helps if they are all the same so we don't miss any!
   
3. Did you put your period and commas outside of your quotes? This is fairly common. Sadly, it isn't correct. An easy way to fix this is to do a search a replace all. Find all your end quotations with punctuation to the outside and replace with end quotations with the punctuation to the inside. Simple!
   
4. Run spell check. I know. Your manuscript is huge and long and you are not in the mood to look through it again. But do it. How many times have you typed teh instead of the? I'm guessing at least five times just today! Hit the spell check one more time. Please.

Formatting

One of the nice things about modern life is layout programs. These amazing technological strides have allowed book designers to have huge amounts of control over the look of the book interior. We've come a long way from parchment, baby! With the click of the mouse we can designate entire paragraphs as indented quotations, create scene breaks, and even make symbols out of the letter g. It's truly amazing.

One of the things that can get in the way of this remarkable technology is helpful authors. Often we've received manuscripts from Word savvy users that have running heads, chapter titles, special fonts, etc. That's great! Please, don't do it. Let us do our jobs and design your book for you. It will save everyone a ton of time!

Here are a few specifics:

1. Don't use ALL CAPITALS unless you really mean it. Wheatmark has received lots of manuscripts where the chapter titles are uppercase. This is not actually as helpful as the authors intended. It is understandable reasoning that by making it uppercase it is going to stand out for the designer, but it can cause formatting delays. Just use your page break function and put it at the top. You don't even have to center it! That's what we do!
   
2. Basically, you don't need to format your book for us. You are paying for us to do that! Adding drop caps, headers, page numbers, and other fancy-schmancy business is our job. If you have a look you are going for, tell your book designer so they can do it for you. Many programs like Word will embed formatting that you create and when we bring your text into our design program, it can create errors that take extra time to fix.
   
3. It is also not necessary for authors to embed their images in the manuscript. Not only is it not necessary, but it can cause your book designer to have a migraine. The best way to indicate that an image should go somewhere is to write the image name in the manuscript on its own line. Make sure that the image name is the same in the manuscript and on the image file.

The File

We, on occasion, have received files from authors that have had each chapter individually written in a separate Word document. It is essential that the documents be merged into one. We cannot build a book easily from separate documents. Before submitting the files, copy and paste or merge them (using the Word function) into one main document.