If you are wondering how to prepare a manuscript for book layout, the short answer is simple: let the manuscript carry the words, the structure and your instructions. Let the finished book handle the beauty contest.
Dear authors, Word can do a surprising number of things. You can write in it, calculate in it, draw in it, build tables in it and, if you press enough buttons for long enough, even attempt to assemble a book in it.
Then again, people use Excel as a database and PowerPoint to draw floor plans. Humanity has tried stranger things. Humanity survived.
Still, the manuscript you send for book layout should not try to impersonate a finished book. Its job is much simpler: to carry your text, its structure and your instructions clearly enough that nobody has to decode an ancient scroll later.
Why everything will move anyway
Once the text enters the software used to lay out the book, almost everything changes: page size, margins, font, line spacing and line length.
The text flows onto new pages. The border that sat perfectly around a heading suddenly ends up somewhere unknown. The picture floats away. The thing at the bottom of the page meets the thing at the top. And the paragraph you carefully centred with twenty spaces decides to begin a new life at the far right.
This is not a story in which the author has done everything wrong and the designer gallops in on a white horse to save the book. Nobody here is higher, wiser or wearing a more important hat.
The author knows what the book needs to say. The designer builds the pages where those words will live. These are simply two different stages of the same job.
The only problem is that most decorations created in Word will have to be removed and rebuilt in the book-layout program anyway.
What to leave out
Please do not fill the main manuscript with:
- borders, shadows and ornaments;
- coloured backgrounds and boxes;
- headers and footers you have designed yourself;
- manually inserted page numbers;
- floating text boxes that can be dragged around with the mouse;
- spaces, tabs and empty lines used for positioning;
- attempts to pin text to a particular place on the page.
A layout held together by twenty spaces, three tabs and hope works perfectly until someone opens the file on another computer.
If every chapter has its own font, the headings glow in seven colours, and the quotations are already surrounded by a modest system of decorative fencing, it is not a disaster. It all simply has to come down before book layout begins.
The less time the designer spends scrubbing all of that out of the manuscript, the more time remains for the book itself.
“But the font works on my computer”
This is a close relative of the famous programmer’s phrase:
But it works on my computer.
A beautiful font installed on your computer may simply not exist on the designer’s. It may be missing some of the letters or symbols your book needs. Sometimes it cannot be used in a published book without a separate licence.
The file opens—and your wonderful font is replaced by something standard, familiar and entirely unwonderful.
If you like a particular font, please show it to us. Send its name, attach a screenshot or find a similar example. It may be exactly right for the book. If not, it will at least show us which direction to explore.
But keep the main manuscript simple. One ordinary, readable font is more than enough.
What we actually need
The list is surprisingly short:
- the final text;
- clear chapters, sections and subsections;
- proper paragraphs;
- bold, italics and underlining where they carry meaning;
- lists;
- footnotes and notes;
- simple tables;
- captions and clear instructions for anything unusual.
That is all. Authors are not expected to possess any secret design knowledge.
We need to understand where a chapter begins, where a quotation ends, which word is genuinely important and what belongs beside a particular paragraph. Everything else can be built during book layout.
What if you really want to decorate it?
Do it. Seriously.
Try the fonts. Draw the borders. Decorate the headings. Change the colours. Open a small branch of Las Vegas inside Word if that is what your imagination demands. That file may show us exactly how you see the future book.
Just send it separately.
Ideally, give the designer two files:
- A simple manuscript from which the text can be taken.
- A separate example showing how you imagine the design.
The second file may be a PDF, a copy of the Word document, a collection of images or even a layout you assembled yourself. All of it can help us understand your ideas.
But the designer will not have to pick the original text out of thirty-eight separate boxes, each with its own shadow, colour and strong opinions.
A simple file does not mean a simple or boring book. It only means that the manuscript is easy to open, understand and begin working with.
Let the book be beautiful—the manuscript has a different purpose.