The Appearance of Your Work

I've always been very picky about what my books looked like. That's inside; covers were a learning curve - I certainly made my mistakes with the first one. To date, the biggest issue I've had was keeping the fonts I like. I'll frequently use some sort of handwriting font in notes shown in the books.

My biggest hurdle in preserving my fonts is the Kindle edition, but I've come to accept that there's never going to be anything fancy there. That doesn't mean I don't try for the best appearance I can.

For my latest book - my ninth book - a number that still amazes me - I had an additional problem. I used star symbols to clue the gaps, and in a couple other spots. I really, really liked them. My story, after all, was a science fiction story. By the time kindle made the translation, they looked like some kind of Chinese writing. It was really quite bewildering.

My first effort was to try loading a pdf, though Kindle doesn't really like that. When that didn't work, my next option was to turn these symbols into small pictures. What a pain. Well, not really but still... I only have Paint, and Paint for MAC isn't as good as what I had on my PC, but it works well enough. It has a habit of quitting if I get to complicated with it, but with patience I can usually get it to do what I need it to do.

So - I was working my way through my manuscript, pasting in my little pictures, when I discovered another spot that needed like attention. Using Futhark font - font that looks like elven writing in Lord of the Rings - I used that font to identify the monsters in my book. It is a very angular, harsh, font - fitting, I thought, for how my monsters would see themselves. The point of needing to keep that font was that the subsequent name of my monsters evolved from how it looked translated into equivalent letters in our language. There was no way around it and keep that thread in tact. Of course, Kindle translated that font to Times which killed the whole thread entirely. I had to turn that into pictures too. Fortunately there was only three places where that was needed. The tricky part was cropping my image down tight enough to not cut off any part of a letter, and still not have the image take up too much space in the line of typing. That was a toughie. It's not perfect, but I don't think I can do any better.

My biggest problem with all this was that Word didn't always put my star symbols pictures where I wanted them. Most times they allowed a space under them (which I wanted), but sometimes they didn't - every time I tried to add that space, the picture would jump to the middle of the paragraph - I couldn't figure out why, and there was simply nothing I could do to change it. And of course Kindle picked up on that. So upon occasion, you'll see those stars sitting close to the next paragraph, whereas most of the time there's a space above and below them. Inconsistency annoys me no end, but not so much so when I can't fix it.

How much do you pay attention to the appearance of your books? Sometimes I wonder when I see all manner of formatting inconsistencies in the books I buy.

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Kindle Fire

Here I am, a week later, and I've already read a book and a half. In case you haven't guessed by that, I'm doing a lot more reading than I am working on new stuff. The internet and Facebook are such an irresistible attraction.

Way back in May, I talked about document appearance, and frankly I like even my eBooks to look good. I won't go buy my Fortunes of Magic eBook just so I can see how it looks, but I hope it looks just as good as it did during the proofing. I went through and looked at every single page. I looked for paragraph indents being lined up, for chapters beginning on the top of a page, and for them to be centered. I even went back and redid it once because of that and also ended up dimming the heading and making it smaller. Between the two, being full color black, it was hard to tell the difference between the header and the chapter title.

The first time I was checking through it, there was this one little line that snuck in out of place. All it was, was "__" where it didn't belong; in fact it didn't belong at all, but it was over on the side, not in anyone's way. I don't even know how it got there. I was going to let it slide, though you know it would nag at me, but then I saw that apparently the chapter headings were indented, putting them five points off center. It would have been completely unnoticeable if it weren't for the header text having no indent so they weren't lined up. That's when I noticed how hard it was to tell the difference between those two elements. Sigh - time to start over - completely. These issues, though found while going through my eReader proof, were in the hard copy book too.

I fixed all that and reloaded the document. It didn't take very long, a chunk of an afternoon is all. Now I have a book and an eBook up on Amazon, and I did it all myself.

During my online writing research to this end, I've had the pleasure of seeing several different formatting strategies different publishers take to make a document eBook friendly. I do believe it's SmashWords where you go through an entire process to remove all the things Word does automatically, and then you put them all back in manually. I've done it. It's a pain but it's possible. Maybe one day I'll go that route too, because they do hit a different market. I'll have to think about it.

Because of all these different formatting issues a writer puts their document through, of the now two books I've seen on my Kindle Fire, the formatting is all messed up. Paragraph indents are all over the place, anywhere from no indent to up to three. A Kindle viewer window is pretty narrow; tab over three times and suddenly your first line indent is half way across the page. It would bug me no end if my books were like that, sadly I was only able to proof one of my books, so if my formatting is all messed up in my other two, please tell me so I can yell at someone.

For me, the appearance of my work is very important. You spend good money to read my work, I want nothing there to take away from your enjoying the story. Paragraphs that don't line up, or chapters that start on the last line of the previous page are a distraction.

If you ask me, if you want sales, don't let your work go before it LOOKS as good as it reads. No one's perfect. The occasional typo or homonym, might slip by the best of us, but if that's all they manage to find, it's not going to piss your reader off much, if they even notice it. Unfortunately, we all judge by appearances, and I want my reader to love my story, not shake their head at how messy the page looks.

How much attention do you pay to your document's appearance?

The Appearance of your Document

Okay, so you've proofed your work. What more is there to do? Aside from doing every bit of research you can find to do in order to make your content the best that it can be, there is one thing I do. I look at the appearance of the text. Yes, I said appearance. I reduce the magnification of the document down to 10%. This size is helpful mostly with the placement of pictures; it allows you to see at a glance if your pictures are aligned properly and not breaking across a page. Any red or green lines are also visible, just in case you missed something.

Another thing to do with appearance is to begin a new chapter on a new page. This may not be such a big deal. I don't own an eReader, and I've heard that some of them don't have 'pages' so much as a constant scroll down. Pardon me if this is incorrect; I've seen only one up close and it did have 'pages'. At any rate, starting each chapter on a new page makes your document cleaner.

Now, back to appearance. Here is where 25% magnification can help you see how your document looks. I aim for approximately ten pages per chapter. This is not a hard and fast rule, just something I aim for. If my chapter is way more than that, I try to find a place where it can be broken; if it is too short, I look to add content, or maybe it can be melded in with another chapter. At 25% magnification, there are eight pages across a full screen. This allows me to spot the chapter headings, and I should have one on almost every line.

Most writers who work with Word know how to insert a page break before a chapter heading, but this is something I had to learn on my own. Before I learned that little trick, I used the 25% magnification quite often to make sure I had my chapter headings where I wanted them. For those of you who don't know how to do that, go to 'insert'; in the drop-down window you will see 'break' and from there you can choose several kinds of breaks. A page break will start whatever is after it on the next page, and even if you add content before it, enough to fill the page, your break will move along, pushing your next chapter heading to the beginning of the next page. There is also the section break. This is very helpful in numbering your pages. Using section break allows page 1 to be on the beginning of your story, not on your title page, which makes your table of contents work properly too.

In my latest and longest work in progress (it keeps getting shelved as other projects come up), I have two levels of chapters. As per the plan, there will be 16 main chapters spanning ten years of my character's life as a druid. Each main chapter has approximately 10 secondary chapters covering incidents and events along the way. Yeah, this one is a long one, and it has me worried. It's almost in a format to be a television series. At this point, I'm near the end of the second season of four, possibly five seasons, and if we cover each season as one year within the book, it'll be ten seasons - now wouldn't that be fun?

One thing that makes navigating this, and all of my documents, is the 'document map'. To make it work, your chapter heading need to be actual style headings, and you can modify your heading so they appear the way you want, and are consistent. These headings are another thing that makes your table of contents work. Another little thing a document map is good for is if you happen to number your chapters, you can easily see if you've skipped a number or repeated a number. Of course this will show up in your table of contents too.

In my opinion, appearance is every bit as important as good spelling and grammar. Inconsistent formatting, font and size is something a reader will notice.

Do you check your document's appearance, or do you leave that up to your publisher?