Formatting a Manuscript for Interior Design
- Apr 1
- 4 min read
After editing a manuscript, the next step is the design process. There is a lot of focus at this stage on the cover, as there should be, but the interior of the book is also important. A well designed interior shows off your writing at its best and allows for a smooth, seamless read. A poorly designed interior can get in the way of reader enjoyment.
Making sure your manuscript is ready for design is an important step. Not only will it save your designer and proofreader a lot of extra work, it will also save you money and reduce the possibility of errors being introduced into the proof.
Content
The first step is to add in any text that will be included in the published book that is not part of the narrative. This includes, but is not limited to, the following:
Half title and title pages
Praise quotes
Additional books by
Copyright page
Dedication/Epigraph
Table of Contents
Glossary
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Index
Appendices
Bibliography
End notes/References
All text should be in the order it will appear in the final published book. Not everything listed above will be necessary for every book. Only include what makes sense.
Images and Tables
Images should be submitted separately from the text portion of the manuscript as a CMYK jpeg file of at least 300 dpi. Any captions should be included in their own Word file along with an explanation of where the images should be placed in the book. This can be signalled either with the manuscript page or the first sentence of the paragraph the image is connected to.
Tables created using Word's table function should be left in the manuscript for a print layout. For an ebook, the table will need to be rewritten so each cell is listed separately, grouped by row:
Column 1, Row 1
Column 2, Row 1
Column 1, Row 2
Column 2, Row 2
If formatting an ebook, it is also helpful to send the designer an image of what the table should look like.
General Formatting
The first thing is to clear the document properties. This strips the hidden formatting in the document, removing underlying code that can cause problems during the layout. It is also important to clear all track changes and comments from the document. This can be done through the Review panel in Word with options to look at each change/comment one by one or clear them all at once.
Headings (including chapter titles and part titles) can be formatted using the Styles tool in Word. Make sure everything is labelled correctly and that there are no extra styles hiding in the non-printing characters. Make sure that the designer can clearly see where each chapter starts and ends. Don't worry about making the manuscript look like the final product. The important thing is the labelling of text, not its appearance. Make sure that each distinct part (chapter/part titles, subtitles, letters, songs, poems, body text) is clearly labelled using Styles.
Paragraph indentation doesn't have to be done in the manuscript as this will be taken care of at the formatting stage. If you do indent the paragraphs, make sure it's done using Word's paragraph tools. Any other method of creating the indents will give the designer extra work.
Each chapter/part should end with a page break. Do not add extra hard returns to push the chapter on to a new page.
Specific Clean Up
Once the general formatting has been set, it's time to go through the document and clean up the text level details. Some of these things might be caught during the copy edit, but unless you specifically requested the copy editor clean up the manuscript for formatting, it's worth doing a final check before design. Many of these tasks can be performed using find and replace, but be careful of replace all as that could have unintended consequences.
Delete all of the following:
Back to back hard returns. These should only be one at the end of each paragraph.
Soft returns
Tabs/spaces at the beginning/end of paragraphs
Double spaces
Make sure the following are consistently styled using the correct unicode:
Ellipsis
Dashes (em and en)
Special characters including accents and non-English letters/characters
Apostrophes and quotation marks
Make sure the following have non-breaking spaces added:
Before ellipses if there is a space used before ellipses
Between an apostrophe and quotation mark, especially if there is a space between them
Review the text and make sure that everything that should be italicized, bolded or underlined is.
Following the above steps will help make the formatting process smoother and cut down on the work the designer needs to do. It also reduces the chances of errors being introduced at the formatting stage that will need to be fixed during the proofread.
You can also download this handy checklist to make sure you have everything covered before submitting your manuscript to your designer:
Keep in mind that every designer will have a slightly different process. Always follow the instructions that they give you as this will lead to the best end result for both author and designer.
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