The Highmoor paperback is nearly here…

Hello readers! I’m going to hold back from going on another Microsoft Word rant this week, but let it be known: I have been pushing that program to its limits, and it has been pushing back. Turns out that Word has all the flexibility of a wrought iron fence, charged with 10,000 volts. Can you find a way through it? Yes. Without pain and suffering? No.

However, in the spirit of positivity, I’ll start with the good news (ignore that last bit about pain and suffering): this week, I saw my book Highmoor in physical form for the first time!

Perhaps some of you might find this surprising. After all, most people find it far easier to sit and read paper copies, rather than electronic versions. However, I have never had the patience or the budget to get my words printed out. It always seemed like a lot of time and resources to spend on a draft that would probably end up in the recycling bin.

Still, three years after Highmoor’s initial release onto the Kindle bookstore, I am finally ready to make my work tangible. Last week, I dumped the Kindle eBook file straight into Amazon’s paperback conversion service, and they sent me a proof copy a couple of days later. And boy, was it tangible when it fell through my letterbox. It landed with an enormous crash on the hallway floor.

It’s… Actually… A book?

My first reaction was amazement. This was Highmoor, but… It was actually a book. It had a cover and pages and everything. In multiple dimensions! Crazy though it sounds, I was actually awestruck when I flicked through it for the first time, hearing that familiar rushing, rustling sound. An actual BOOK.

Needless to say, the novelty soon wore off. I’m not entirely happy with Amazon’s default formatting – I think the font size is too big, and they added some erroneous page numbers on the copyright and prologue pages, for no apparent reason. I checked to see if there is any way to remove these, and no – there isn’t. If you use Amazon’s default eBook-to-real-book algorithm, they handle all the formatting on your behalf, whether you like it or not.

So, what to do? If the book is to look professional (or as professional as possible), I need to do all the typesetting and formatting myself. And that, dear reader, is NOT my forte. I do not own Adobe InDesign, which is the industry standard. I only have Microsoft Word, and Amazon’s basic do-it-yourself paperback template.

What could possibly go wrong?

I said that this wouldn’t be another rant against Microsoft Word, so I’ll hold back. But I can tell you that I spent many, many hours this week trawling through Reddit, Quora, Microsoft and other, lesser-known old-fashioned forums searching for answers to very specific queries. How about I share three of my favourite top tips with you? They should give you some idea of what I was up against.

Top tip 1: You can place chapter headings mid-way down a page!

This is quite common in books, but there is no easy way to do this in Word, and certainly no in-built format. In most books, the chapter heading doesn’t sit right at the top of the page, but a short distance down, so that the chapter heading really stands out. The basic way to do this in Word would be to hammer the return key until the words sit where you want them – but this is HIGHLY inadvisable. Doing this for all your chapter headings? Madness.

The solution: use the “Frame” function in the Style Formatting. When you modify a style and select “Format”, you’ll see the option for “Paragraph…” where you can set the spacing that should exist before the start of the paragraph. However, the only way to get that spacing to apply to the first line of a chapter is to also select the option for “Frame…” and set text wrapping to “None”. You can muck around with the frame alignment, too, making it centralised, but the key point here is that whenever you apply this style in your document, it will appear at the same position, part way down the page. Magic.

Isn’t Word so intuitive?

(No. No it isn’t.)

Top tip 2: Check that your fonts are free to use!

This was a fun realisation. The fonts (or typefaces) that come with software on your PC, or even ones that you bought, are not necessarily licensed for use in commercial endeavours. And have fun reading the terms and conditions, because they are deliberately hard to understand. It seems that some fonts – even basic ones like Times New Roman – cannot be used in printed, published work without an appropriate license. I doubt that anyone would complain, but you never know. I don’t want to break the law by accident.

The problem is that fonts (or typefaces…) are technically works of art, making them intellectual property. Somebody probably spent hours, maybe even years, designing those letters. It takes a lot of skill. And, of course, they want to be recognised for their efforts. This means that a lot of fonts come with specific licensing agreements. So far as I can tell, you can use the fonts in Word or Adobe so long as you own the software – but given that these are subscription-based services, what happens when you decide to end your subscription? I have access to Adobe now, through my work, but what about in a few years? If I lose my Adobe subscription by changing job, I don’t think I could continue printing my books with Adobe fonts. Same goes for Microsoft Word.

Who knew that picking a font would be such a nightmare? In the end, I downloaded a new set of fonts which were open source and free for commercial use (I downloaded the license files as well, and I’m 99% sure that I can use them legally in Amazon paperbacks).

Top tip 3: There is a NON-BREAKING hyphen!

NON-BREAKING NEWS! Character code 2011 is a miracle-worker.

For those of you that have never used hyphens in Word, I’ll set out the problem: if you want to break off a sentence due to an interruption, potentially during character dialogue, you might throw in a dash to signal the sudden truncation (en dash or em dash – I’ve seen both used in this way). For example:

“I was thinking maybe we could-?”

“DON’T INTERRUPT ME!”

Unfortunately, if the “-?” occurs at the end of the line, Word shunts it onto a line of its own, so you end up with something looking like:

“I was thinking maybe we could

-?”

Which looks rather silly. But it turns out that the non-breaking hyphen, character 2011, stops this from happening! What a beautiful discovery. All I needed to do was find and replace all instances of -” (used 196 times) and -?” (used 33 times) with ‑” and ‑?”.

Can you see in difference? No. But Word can.

These were just the top three…

There were lots of other tiny annoyances that caused me undue stress this week. Who knew that typesetting would be this agonising? The straw that broke the camel’s back was probably when my partner suggested that I just learn LaTeX instead. And I genuinely considered for a minute, before remembering the compilation time required for an entire novel.

Still, I think I have managed to get something working in Word, and it looks half-decent. Highmoor won’t ever look truly professional, but at least it can look presentable. And the best bit of doing the formatting myself is that I cut down the page count, which makes it cheaper to print, and therefore cheaper for you lovely readers to buy.

In summary…

I thought I had climbed a decent way up the Microsoft Word learning curve, but this week I learnt that I have much further to go. However, the early results are promising, and I hope to have a paperback available soon!

Happy reading, and have a lovely week!