Preparing Your Manuscript for Publication – Part 1

By Tracy R. Atkins

We’d like to re-introduction you to Book Design Templates technology and show you how easy it can be to design the interior of your book–and save money!

For over seven years, Joel and I have been serving tens of thousands of DIY authors’ needs with our book interior templates. As technology has progressed, we have improved our templates, the design quality only gets better, and the job of laying out your own book gets easier with each advance.

Over the last two years, we have been serving all new customers our “2.0” versions of our templates. They integrate technology like “two-way” formatting, so you can layout your book once and create:

• a print-ready PDF
• an export a file for an amazing eBook

all from the same file.

 
 
We’ve introduced:

• templates for Apple Pages
• a cool custom font-pack for your existing templates
• a book planning toolkit to help you organize your entire book project with expert

Other exciting advancements include our online training videos and guides and, as of this week, we have totally revamped our technical support ticket system to make customer service much faster and far more informative, to help customers with their questions and needs.
 
 

Thank You!

We are always working to create new things, but Joel and I want to take a moment to thank all of our existing customers, update you on our most recent advancements, and to also re-introduce our groundbreaking book design templates to a whole new generation of self-publishing authors.

THANK YOU for helping make us a huge success, year after year. We appreciate you and your success as published authors who have added so very much value, entertainment, and knowledge to the world.
 
 

Easy to Use

Over the coming weeks, we will post updated how-to articles, links to our videos, and updates on our products that have helped make you a published author–without breaking the bank!

This week we’d like to start showing you how easy it is to transfer your content to one of our interior templates.

Note: If you aren’t a DIY type of person, check out our Done-for-You covers and interior services. We have had hundreds of happy, book customers.
 
 

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Preparing Your Manuscript for Publication – Transferring Your Content

In this post, we will explain how to transfer the text of your book into a template and how to insert more chapters and chapter headings.

Transferring your manuscript is as easy as using copy and paste. Our pre-formatted templates come with three sample chapters that you can overwrite with your own text and replicate as needed.

1. Open your manuscript in Word and highlight the chapter text you want to move to the template.
2. Use the “Copy” command on the highlighted text.
3. Next, open the template in Word.
4. Highlight the sample text in chapter 1 and then “paste” the copied text over it.
5. Re-highlight the new chapter text and apply “Body” Styles as need to automatically layout the chapter.

Always start by overwriting the chapter 1 sample, to ensure the page numbers and running heads replicate correctly.

Transfer Your Content

1. Open your manuscript in Word. Highlight the chapter text in your manuscript. Use Word’s Copy function to copy the text to the computer’s “clipboard”.
    
   
    
2. Highlight the chapter text in the template that you wish to overwrite or delete.

   Be careful not to highlight:

   • the chapter name
   • the chapter number
   • the hidden “Section Break” mark-up at the end of the chapter

   We recommend using “Show/Hide” to view the hidden markup during this step, as outlined in the “Layout Essentials” section of this manual.
    
   
    

3. Paste the chapter text in the template that you wish to overwrite or add. If you have the option, use Paste “Merge Formatting”, or Paste “Keep Text Only”.
    
   After pasting the text, highlight and reapply Styles for the text you entered, as well as apply the “Drop Cap” at the beginning of the paragraph.
    
   
    
4. Chapters always end with a single “Section Break (Odd Page)” after the last paragraph, to ensure that the next chapter starts on an odd (right-hand) page.
   
   You may add this from the “Page Layout” tab in Word, under the “Page Setup”, “Breaks” dropdown menu. Use “Show/Hide” to see this normally hidden markup document.
    
   

 
Note: We recommend copying over each chapter, one at a time, to ensure uniform text transfer and formatting. (Copy/Pasting the entire book at one time is recommended only for advanced/experienced users.)

Note: If your book has a preface or introduction, replace the text in the sample chapter 1 with the preface or introduction. Then paste your chapter 1 over the tem- plate’s sample chapter 2. This will preserve all page number formatting.

Inserting More Chapters and Chapter Headers

Inserting New Chapters are easy to do. Simply add a new Section Break (Odd Page) at the end of the last sample chapter and begin formatting.

1. Insert a Section Break (Odd Page) after the last paragraph of the last chapter.

   

2. Click the Breaks drop down on the Page Layout tab.
    
3. Click Odd Page from the menu to insert the break.

Tip: This will create a new, odd- numbered blank page. You my optionally use a Section Break (Next Page) if you do not want blank pages in your finished book file. You only need one section break per chapter.

4. Type the new chapter header text for the chapter number and/or name.

   

5. Highlight the new chapter header text and apply the appropriate styles.

   

   

Tip: Optionally, copy and paste the pre-formatted chapter header from the previous chapter and change it.

Tip: If your chapter name or title name exceeds the width of the page, Word will automatically hyphenate the title and break it into two lines.

To manually break the line in the middle, use the carriage return (SHIFT+ENTER). This will move the following text to the next line without hyphenation.

Tip: Templates with a Table of Contents (TOC) automatically generate the TOC using text that is formatted with specific styles. Typically, the Chapter Name/Title, Back Matter Title, & Subhead A style formatted text will appear in the TOC when updated.

Step-by-step Video

Check out our Complete Book Formatting How-To Guide for Word Templates video to see how a template is populated:

Got questions? Please leave them in the comments below.

Next time, we’ll explain how to format the drop caps, and header and footer template features for a print book, and how to format section breaks in the templates.
 
Photo: BigStockPhoto