Manuscript Check
Notes on getting your doc ready for print and ebook publication
The notes below reflect some lessons I’ve learned from editing more than fifty manuscripts (and also getting many of those ready for print production), my own as well as the books of other writers. The list below should not be seen as exhaustive, and the reader is also warned that there may be tips and tricks out there that are more efficient than the ones I know about. If I’m writing as if I’m about to edit your book, that’s because I’m going to make anyone whose book I’m getting ready to edit read this, with the hope of saving myself some time, but I also figured this information would be valuable to a lot of writers. (If you want me to edit your book, you might be able to give me money to do it.) I know the moment I publish this I will think of something I forgot to include. Maybe I’ll go back and insert it. Or add it as an end note. Or maybe I’ll remember a few things and publish a followup. I can’t see the future.
If you go through these notes and use them to clean up your manuscript as you prepare for production of your print book and ebook, I promise your editors/publishers/typesetters/ebook convertists will love you and fight to the death for your honor.
Make sure nothing is formatted with either the tab key or the ruler. Using tab or the stupidass ruler will create so many problems I can’t even talk about it. All indents should be controlled with Format→Align and Indent.
Font should be Times New Roman throughout, including titles and subheads. Not Garamond. Not Arial. Not anything else. Let your typesetter pick a nice font. You worry about the writing. This makes everything easier for both layout and ebook conversion. Some fonts will trip error messages in ebook checks, and it can be difficult to track down the source of those errors. If you have specific font needs just let your editor/s know. Also I’m sorry if using bold makes me sound like an asshole; it’s just very important.
Delete all section breaks. These cause problems in ebook files. Some of these notes will conflict with advice you’ve been given on how to format your manuscript for querying; we are past the querying stage. We’re making a book now.
The punctuation, in almost all cases, goes inside the quote marks. This is a tough one to clean up.
Maybe you used Word’s handy table of contents tool. In my opinion, delete it. Or at least clear the formatting. The page numbers are irrelevant. The table of contents won’t help in the print layout, and in my experience they don’t convert to ebook well. On the TOC page (if you’re going to need one) you need only a list of chapters or short story titles (or poem titles etc.). Page numbers will get put in once the final layout is complete; as for the ebook, there are no pages. When I make an ebook, I go into Word, set a bookmark at each chapter head, then go back to the TOC and insert a hyperlink to that bookmark. So if you click chapter 12 on the TOC you go straight to chapter 12 in the text. Word’s auto-TOC thing is easier, but in my experience it creates errors in the ePub.
Use a # or a *** or something to indicate section breaks within chapters. If you desire white space section breaks, you still need to mark them in your manuscript and just let your typesetter know you prefer no marks for section breaks in the published book. You will need the # or *** to maintain section breaks in the ebook. And you need them in print book conversion so those section breaks don’t accidentally get lost.
I am a holdout on this, and while I try not to be took picky about it I still think people have cookouts in their back yards and I think people have backyard cookouts, but I don’t think people have cookouts in their backyards. Same goes for backseat vs. back seat. At any rate, whichever way you go, be consistent. Use Find and Replace to make sure you’re consistent.
Only one space after periods. Click Edit→Find and Replace. In the Find box hit the space bar two times. In the Replace With box hit the space bar one time. Then hit Replace All and any place in the file that has two spaces will be trimmed to one space.
Make sure numerals are consistent. We generally spell out one through one hundred, but it’s more important that it’s consistent, so if you like to use numerals above ten or something that’s fine as long as it’s consistent.
Smart quotes. Quote marks and apostrophes end up being a problem a lot when you copy and paste from various sources. If you write a passage in your Notes app and later paste it into your manuscript, the quote marks and apostrophes will be straight, whereas if you’re typing in Times New Roman your apostrophes and quote marks will have curls. (Another good reason to use TNR. If you write in different places, think about changing your default font in Notes and your email to TNR.) The book will be published with curly quote marks, or smart quotes, but there will also be random straight, computer-screeny quotes if we don’t catch them in edits. If you have Word it’s very easy: once your manuscript is complete, all you need to do is use Find and Replace. Make sure your whole doc is set in Times New Roman. Click Edit→Find and Replace. In the Find box type a single apostrophe. In the Replace With box, again type a single apostrophe. Then hit Replace All and any dumb straight quotes will be replaced with nice curly smart quotes. The process is the same for quote marks. Put one “ in the Find and again one “ in the Replace With Box. The quotes will align correctly, depending on whether they’re at the start of a sentence or the end. As far as I know, Word is the only program smart enough to do this. This trick does not work in google docs and that is so annoying.
Look out for wrong-way apostrophes. If you use an apostrophe to take the place of a dropped letter, e.g., ’em, the apostrophe will end up facing the wrong way. All you gotta do is type two apostrophes, like this ‘’, and then delete the original one.
Use Find and search for common misspellings, especially if you have a character named Brian.
Some places uses OK, some use O.K., and some use okay. What matters most is consistency, and a lot of manuscripts have several uses of OK mixed up with several uses of okay. One of my books actually has this problem. There’s one story where okay is OK, and then in the rest I used okay because I ran a poll on twitter and people said I should use okay. Then I forgot to change it in “Sahara’s Law.” If I ever do go change it, here’s how I’ll do it: Find→Replace. In the Find box I will hit the space bar one time, type OK, then hit the space bar again. The spaces are important because otherwise your results will include words like “okay,” “book,” “took,” and so on. It took me a while to figure that one out.
Decide on toward or towards. Pick one. Use Find to make sure you’re consistent. Same for forward, backward, and words of that sort.
TV or T.V. is fine, as long as—you guessed it!—you’re consistent. I’d suggest if you write O.K. then you also write T.V. But mostly I think you can leave out periods in stuff like that.
Use Find to search you’re/you’re and it’s/its and to/too/two and other lookalike/soundalike words.
An em dash is a solid line that’s supposed to be the width of the letter M. People have different ways of using them, but here is my preferred (because it’s the right way) way to do it: you butt your text right up to the em dash—just like I just did—on both sides of the em dash. No spaces. Elegant. Clean. Consistent.
Consistency has been a consistent theme in this list because it’s important. If you’re doing something that’s a little out of the norm, or that doesn’t conform to Chicago or some other publishing style, it will seem normal, and legitimate, if you do it the same way every time.
This item is not a manuscript check, just something you need to do, whether you’re publishing a book with us or someone else or on your own. Once all this stuff is done, the manuscript is clean, and been through all the edits and copy edits and is ready for publication, make sure you have a copy of the final master Word doc, as well as the final, print-ready PDF, and the ePub that will be used for the ebook. I try to send them to each author; I also try to upload them to a google drive folder that all our authors have access to. I also forget sometimes, so please bug me about it. If you’re publishing with someone else, bug your editor about it because you need those files. If anything should ever happen—the publisher fails, you get an offer from Penguin—you need those files.
This section is particular to Malarkey/Death of Print authors:
You have done a nice job formatting your manuscript for querying. Now please undo all that nice work. Delete the page numbers. Delete the running header. Delete the title page and your contact info. This doc is headed for print production. We only want stuff that’s going to be in the final book. The exception is if you have specific notes about layout you can drop a signal or note in the text, but that still should be accompanied by a central document where you describe what you want me to do in layout.
Please insert front and back matter more or less where you want it to go. Epigraph. Dedication. Acknowledgments. Author Bio.
There’s probably more to do. There’s definitely stuff I forgot. Still, there’s a lot in here and I genuinely hope it helps. Indie writers don’t have the luxury of not being good self-editors, or not knowing how to use Word; as with so much else in twenty-first century publishing, a lot of things that in the past may have been the domain of people paid to do that shit now fall on you. If you’re a Malarkey writer, I will do my best to edit your book with attention and love and care, but for the most part it’s just you and me getting this thing ready for publication, and I will fight to the death for your honor if you send me a clean manuscript with pretty quote marks and no fucked-up tabs.
Love,
Alan