Tech Tips for Clean Manuscripts

I’m a  soft touch when a friend or relative asks for help getting a manuscript ready for uploading to a Print-On-Demand service like CreateSpace. More than half a dozen times these requests have ended me saying, “Just send me the file and I’ll fix it, but before you start another one, you have to promise to learn a few basic skills.” Then I spend hours cleaning up formatting garbage before applying the simple tweaks that convert it to a lean, clean, beautiful piece of work.

For those who grew up in the typewriter age, it’s natural to position text with spaces, both horizontally and vertically. It’s hard to unlearn some of those old habits, but if you want to take advantage of recent developments in affordable and accessible printing technology, you’ll do yourself and your pocketbook a favor by overwriting those mental typewriter files.

The tips below will ultimately save you time and maybe money. If you pay someone to do your layout, they will charge for the time it takes to find all the places you used spaces to center a title or pressed “Enter” 23 times to make a new page. Ebooks absolutely require a  squeaky clean manuscript.

Things to avoid and why

Using spaces to center anything. This locks you into a specific font and size, and your approximated efforts will lack crispness.

Center lines by using the Center Align icon on the toolbar.

Using spaces (or tabs) to position anything. As above, this will produce variable results.

Options include using tabs (only if you are sure you won’t convert to an eBook format), altering paragraph indentation (right-click and select the paragraph option), using tables or text boxes.

Using tabs at beginning of paragraphs. This advice may sound odd indeed. It has not been an easy habit for me to break. However, as page sizes, line lengths and font settings change, you may want to change the tab setting. Although you can control the tab setting in your paragraph style, using tabs is not advised for eBook conversion, so you’ll retain flexibility if you stay away from them as much as possible.

Set the first line indentation on the Normal or Default style. More about styles below.

Double-spacing between paragraphs. This is okay in a simple, short letter or story, but controlling paragraph spacing with styles is far preferable.

Bone up on Styles.

Entering two spaces at end of sentences. This is a hold-over from typewriter days, and it’s a really hard habit to break. Problems arise when you justify text to make even margins on both sides. Software distributes the extra spacing in spaces, so a double-space can become glaringly obvious.

Routinely use Find and Replace on completed manuscripts to replace all double-spaces with single ones. Obviously this will also kill any spacing you did with multiple spaces – another reason to avoid that technique.

Things to Do and Why

Learn to use Styles. Using Styles seems cumbersome at first, but once you get the hang of it, you’ll have a level of control you never imagined and save way more time in final layout than you invested in setting up your styles. With Styles you can

• change things like font size, line-spacing, or paragraph. alignment in your entire document with a single edit.
• change chapter or section headings without affecting paragraph text and vice-versa.
• automatically create a Table of Contents.
• save time and money on preparation for publishing.
• ensure consistency.

If you haven’t used Styles, do a YouTube search for your version of Word (or whatever software you use), and create your own class.

Download the Smashwords Style Book. Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords, the leading free eBook conversion service, has written a book that details everything you need to know to get your manuscript squeaky clean and prepare it for eBook conversion. His tips work equally well to prepare for printing. He has generously made the book available at no cost.  You can download it as a pdf or any eBook format except Kindle from this link.

Write now: If you’ve never used Styles, open an old document, then watch a couple of YouTube videos, and play around with Styles in your document.

Why I Self-Published

This week I’m pleased to feature an invited guest post from Linda Austin, author of Cherry Blossoms in Twilight, and a colleague from the Life Writers Forum and Story Circle Network.

My mother has a lot of interesting stories of growing up in Japan during and around WWII. I wanted to write her memoir. Although it started out as a family project, this memoir became something I thought would interest a lot of people, particularly educators as Japanese civilian stories from WWII are rare. This project took so long that I began noticing signs of Alzheimer’s in my mother, and then the newspapers began writing about the 65^th anniversary of the end of WWII and I knew I had to get busy.

After three months of drop-everything-to-write, I was able to hand a softcover print memoir to my mother in early September 2005, in time for her 80^th birthday, barely in time to publicize it in conjunction with the anniversary of the end of WWII. Cherry Blossoms in Twilight was self-published through a local printer featured in the newspaper along with an article about the St. Louis Publishers Association. This article led me to self-publish – I had no time to bother with finding a publisher because I wanted this book for my mother before she lost her ability to read or understand what I had done.

My mother, our family, friends and strangers raved about the book, but I wasn’t satisfied with it, especially after I joined the St. Louis Publishers Association (SLPA) and learned so much about publishing. I produced a second edition using everything the SLPA taught me. I tweaked the story to better suit what readers might want, had a new cover by a professional cover designer, and uploaded the book to Lightning Source for print-on-demand and an excellent distribution system. Schools, libraries and bookstores could easily buy it, and I’m proud to say Princeton University carries a copy. Amazon’s CreateSpace was not in existence then, only Amazon Advantage (Take-Advantage, I called it).

I’ve been a board member of SLPA for over six years now, with my nose in everything to do with publishing. Yes, I’d self publish again. I’m working on a book of poems inspired by my mother’s dementia and my visits to the nursing home, and I’ll use CreateSpace because I won’t need distribution (poetry books don’t sell well). I’m also formatting Cherry Blossoms to upload to Kindle Direct Publishing. I’ve used Lulu.com to publish hardcover and softcover short memoirs for elder folks – just for the families, though. Lulu was very easy to use and perfect for producing a couple dozen copies, but using it to publish for the public is expensive, as it is with most publishing services companies.

With the advent of e-books and affordable, good quality print-on-demand technology, there’s never been a better time to take charge and self publish. But, you’d better know what you’re getting in to and what you’re doing or you could spend a lot of money unnecessarily or end up with a book that won’t sell (or both). Self-publishing is the shorter route, not the easy route, and many authors balk at marketing.

I advise new authors to read everything they can about publishing – and marketing. (Marketing actually starts with writing.) Every author these days must market his or her own work. Traditional publishers are struggling with Amazon, the bad economy, the advent of easy self-publishing, and the popularity of e-books. They can’t afford to market much and are more careful than ever about taking on the risk of unknown authors. You can wait ten years or more for a traditional press to accept your work, which may never happen, try for a small press (easier to be accepted, but buyer beware), or take the reins, study the road map, and make your own way into the realm of publishing.

Linda uses her website, Moonbridge Publications, to encourage others to capture life stories. She has collected and created some resources to help get started on the journey of memoir writing and publishing. Self-publishing is an intricate topic way too big for one post, but articles listed under the resources tab of the Moonbridge Publications website will help new authors navigate the field of publishing choices and make smart decisions that result in a professional-looking book without breaking the bank.

The Easter Bunny Discovered

For better or worse, holidays are gold mines of memory material deserving a place in your life story. They are uniquely personal, with no two years quite the same, and universal, with  family, community and national traditions. Some people look forward to them, others dread them. Still others ignore them.

Easter is a good example. When I was young, it meant a new dress for church, dying and hiding eggs, and eating lots of candy. Since we didn’t live within easy reach of any relatives, we seldom spent it with extended family. It was primarily a Sunday morning event marked by sermons filled with impassioned reminders of suffering and transcendence.

Best of all, even now, it signals the time when the world is waking from winter’s slumber. Weather is warming, spring flowers blooming, and trees becoming green. It’s a season of hope, joy and rebirth, whatever one’s spiritual tradition.

Any of these aspects makes good story content. One of the first stories I wrote after discovering the joys of lifestory writing is The Easter Bunny Discovered. That Easter was a watershed moment in my young life, and the story offered a chance to add deft background strokes about my life in general at that point.

I’ll admit that I did not recognize the full import of that story when I wrote it. At that point I simply thought of it as a fun memory. Soon after writing it, I discovered the free member sites available on ThirdAge.com and posted eight of my favorite stories there. ThirdAge long since discontinued that service, but the stories live on in a new home on my own site. You can read my Easter Bunny story and others there. I hope they’ll inspire you to story your own holiday memories and significant discoveries for posterity, then share them with others.

Write now: write a holiday story of your own. Write a series of holiday stories, perhaps one for each holiday you observe.

End of the Line for Lulu

For several years I’ve been an enthusiastic supporter of Lulu.com for those wishing to self-publish a small number of volumes of their lifestory or memoir. I’ve posted several times about my experience publishing my preschool memoir, The Albuquerque Years on Lulu. 

Over the past five years, many friends and students have followed my advice and lead, using Lulu to publish their projects. I’m now recommending Amazon-owned CreateSpace, the no-fee Print-On-Demand provider of choice. Let me explain why I’ve removed The Albuquerque Years from Lulu’s website.

Without asking for my permission or notifying me, Lulu converted my document to ePub format and uploaded it to the Apple iStore and the Barnes & Noble digital catalog, setting the price at $2.99.

That was not okay with me! If that isn’t illegal, it’s certainly unethical. I immediately removed it from those catalogs.

I was never given the opportunity to review the conversion for formatting errors. The Albuquerque Years includes over two dozen embedded photos, which are notoriously difficult to position in ePubs. When I finally discovered how to download the ePub file, I noticed that the pictures do display between paragraphs, but not always between the ones they are relevant to. It needs some work before I re-release it, probably via Smashwords.com, as a free download.

I never added a “royalty” markup to the book, intending for any interested readers to purchase it at my wholesale cost, which has risen from about $2.79 five years ago to $3.99 today.

To my surprise, tens of unrelated people opted to purchase a paper copy. Today, if the book were still listed on Lulu, the “retail” price would be $7.99. I’m relieved that nobody (including me!) has ordered a copy since this outrageous inflation began. I certainly don’t want anyone thinking I caught the greed bug.

A LiveChat customer service agent (Lulu does not offer the option of phoning them directly, toll-free or otherwise) fed me some corporate line about “the stated current manufacturing price”, but was unable to explain why my wholesale price was lower. I can’t blame him. He’s just doing his job. I refuse to support the executive attitudes behind his explanation.

The free eBook (pdf) dowload link disappeared.

I intended for the pdf version to be free, as it was for over four years. Just before I “retired” the project (I discovered you cannot delete published projects), I discovered that the link to download the free pdf ebook was missing. I have fixed that. The link to The Albuquerque Years in the right sidebar now connects with my personal server for free digital downloads. (Click here now to get your own copy if you don’t already have it.)

Lulu’s pricing has become unpredictable.

Over the past year or two they have begun sending out a steady stream of “special offers” like 10% off, free shipping, 20% off, third book free, etc. Although I’m a die-hard bargain shopper, when I’m ready to buy a book, I don’t want to feel like if I waited another week, the price would drop, and I especially resent having retail prices inflated to cover this system.

By contrast, CreateSpace offers consistent pricing far lower than Lulu’s, free phone support, and they scan your uploaded document for typos and punctuation/grammar errors. Wow! The volumes I’ve seen coming off their presses are first rate in quality. Forums are full of great recommendations. Jonna Ivin is delighted with her experience using them to publish Will Love For Crumbs (see her guest post on this topic). I plan to upload a project myself to give them a whirl in the near future.

Write now: if you haven’t already done so, visualize a completed volume of your life story. It may take the form of a collection of individual stories or a memoir integrating those stories into a unified account. You may be writing more about family history. Perhaps your book will include lots of photographs. Let your vision grow and pull you forward. Set up an account at CreateSpace to add magnetism to that goal. 

Dreamy Inspiration

Sleep is restful and restorative, and dreams a source of inspiration. Or so it’s supposed to be. The past few nights my dreams have been so full of inspiration that I awoke feeling as if I’d worked all night, but refreshed and energetic in spite of having done so.

The first night I wrote an important email about nineteen times, so often that I began realizing I was really asleep and became concerned that my unperfected drafts may have inadvertently crossed the boundary into waking reality and premature delivery. At that point, I concentrated extra hard on remembering the precise wording as the only viable way of harvesting the results of my nocturnal efforts.

I admit that as soon as I got up, I checked the Sent folder on my computer to be sure nothing had permeated the membrane between parallel universes, and though I felt a little silly, I also felt relieved. Right away I dashed off a draft of that email. It slid easily through my fingers in near perfect form on the first try.

Then next night was equally busy. I began editing a story I had written several weeks ago. After a short period of fiddling with words, I turned my attention to basic structure and discovered that the story had significantly stronger impact if I rearranged the order of several scenes. Once again, I was aware that I was dreaming and made extra effort to store it in a folder on my “awake” drive.

In actual fact, I had not written the story I “edited” in the second dream, but it is one I’ve given considerable thought to – a process I refer to as “pre-writing.” I didn’t have time to write the entire story the next morning, but I did jot down notes about the structural insights I had and will take them into account when I do commit the story to paper in the near future.

I often have such dreams, and I’m not sure what to make of them. Some may see them as indications of obsession or stress, but they were not anxious dreams. I was fully absorbed in the writing process, finding it rewarding and satisfying.

Who knows? Perhaps when I’m writing in real time, for example this blog post, I’m actually living a dream. Now if I can just dream the perfect structure for that memoir I’m working on … maybe … just maybe … I can write that dream into print.

In the final analysis, this brings into question the whole matter of reality and truth. Which is real? Which is True? The dream story or the waking one? Memoirists and philosophers have wondered this since mankind first stood on two feet.

Write now: think about overlaps you’ve noticed between your dreams and waking situations. Have you solved problems in your dreams? Write about this. Write about situations you’d like to dream answers to or problems you’d like to solve. Some say it’s possible to program dreams this way. Give it a try, then write the story.

 

Rejection Was Not an Option

Guest Post by Jonna Ivin

Jonna Ivin used Amazon’s CreateSpace service to self-publish her  memoir, Will Love For Crumbs. In this invited guest post you will read the inside story behind her decision and her experience carrying it out.

When I was first asked to write about my experience in self-publishing, the thing that kept running through my mind was, “I have nothing to add on this topic that hasn’t already been written about. Knowing this going in I decided to do what I always do when faced with a new challenge, write from my own experience and write the truth.

The truth is, when I finished writing my memoir Will Love For Crumbs, I didn’t have the first clue what to do with it. I knew one thing for sure, I had no desire to write letters to publishers, wait to be told I could submit a few chapters then wait some more, maybe be told I had been accepted and then spend more and more time waiting for my book to finally be released. Of course I knew all along this process that the possibility of rejection would hang over my head. But rejection was not an option for me. That was the second thing I knew for sure.

I figured the best way to avoid being rejected was to not ask to be accepted because If I didn’t ask permission then no one could tell me no. It was the first time I was completely prepared to call the shots in my own life, well, maybe not prepared, but determined. Being firmly set on knowing what I didn’t want, I then focused on going after what I did want. What I wanted was to see my project through to the end. I wanted to hold a printed copy of my book in my hand and know that I had finished what I said I was going to do. For me the decision was simple, I would self-publish. But where to begin? I knew nothing about self-publishing, but what I did know was as long as someone out there had done it before me, then all I had to do was follow their path. And so I began to Google it.

I read everything I could on self-publishing and most of what I read kept leading me to Amazon. From there I learned that there were two options, Kindle and paperback. I went for both. Why not? I had nothing to lose. I won’t go into the actual step by step process because Amazon and CreateSpace have already laid it out much better than I could ever explain it. I simply took each step one at a time and did what the instructions told me to do.

I was alone at the office late one night when the moment came for me to hit the publish button. I was nervous, excited and I’ll admit, a little scared. Okay, a lot scared. I’d written about the most personal parts of my life and now all of it was floating around cyberspace for anyone to read. I was terrified people would actually read it, but even more, I was terrified that they wouldn’t. I posted a little blurb on Facebook announcing to my friends and family that my book was available, then drove home, crawled into bed and went to sleep, once again having no idea what the next step would be.

Will Love For Crumbs began selling a few copies a day, and I was slowly building up my social networks, adding friends, joining groups and participating in conversations. I think it’s really important to be strategic when participating on social media sites. Most importantly you must be “social”. Going in and flooding a site with links to your book is not only boring, but most often annoys people. I put my focus on memoirs and relationships and when I found interesting articles or books on these topics I reposted them. I’m always looking for new ways to reach a wider audience and supporting other writers is a great way to start.

I also took advantage of the KDP Select Program to offer my book for free. Valentine’s Day was approaching and I thought since my memoir is called Will Love For Crumbs it would be a funny tie-in to the holiday. I offered free downloads for three days, using the tag line of, “Don’t worry about your crappy love life – read about mine instead.” During the promotion there were over 21,000 downloads of my book. I was beyond thrilled with the results.

I’ve been asked by some people, “Why would you give away your book for free? Aren’t you afraid of all the money you’ll lose?” My answer is always the same, “I didn’t lose anything. Those 21,000 people would have never even heard of my book if it hadn’t been available for free. I would gladly give 100,000 copies of my book away. The whole point for me is to reach the widest audience possible and in order to do that I have to reach beyond family and friends.” And it worked. After that weekend I began to get more and more reviews on Amazon and Goodreads which continued to lead to more sales. I began to receive numerous friend requests on Facebook, opportunities for interviews and guest blogs but more importantly readers started to reach out to me to say that I had written a book that described how they had felt and what they had experienced in their lives. That alone is worth any number of free books.

My best advice to anyone who is thinking of self publishing is to just go for it. Write the best book you can and then throw it out into the Universe and see what comes back. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain, the playing field is even. No one can tell you no and rejection is not an option.

Write now: Read  a guest post on Memoir Writer’s Journey about Jonna’s experience with writing her memoir, read my review of Will Love For Crumbs, and visit Jonna’s  website and Facebook page..

Does Practice Make Perfect?

This question came to mind when I read Jody Hedlund’s blog post, Do Writers Get Better the Longer They Write?” I like her conclusion, and want to add to it.

Her question reminded me of the old adage,

Practice makes perfect.

Added to this adage is a truism some noted author of the stature of Steven King (maybe it was him … I’ve forgotten) stated: “You can’t call yourself a master of the art of writing until you’ve put in 10,000 hours.” Or was it 10,000,000 words? The point was, it takes a lot of practice to become a masterful writer.

What’s the truth of the matter? Practice does not make perfect. The practice of perfection makes perfect. This evolution of the concept came about when sports gurus discovered that basketball players who visualize sinking 100 perfect shots each day improve significantly more and faster than those who physically shoot 100 baskets a day for the same length of time. Shooters make plenty of bad shots. Visualizers never miss.

Obviously if you want to improve your writing, you’ll need to do more than keep your fingers moving. Jody Hedlund has an important suggestion regarding finger movement. Here are three for the “more than” angle:

Read the work of great writers of memoir and fiction

Rather than repeating tips in a previous post, I’ll add to them:

• Pay attention to how the writer uses description and dialog.
• Notice the structure of the story. How is it unique?
• How does the writer manage the pace of the story and the flow of tension?

Look for ways to incorporate what you learn into your stories.

Practice awareness

Make it a practice to monitor your internal state and notice how you feel in different situations. What body cues do you experience? How do you physically respond? How might your behavior or speech change? Incorporate this awareness into your story for a sense of authenticity and develop connection with readers.

Pay attention to the world around you and use idle moments to explore fresh ways of describing what you notice. Look for unexpected links and connections. You many not have thought of it this way, but this is a form writing practice.

Play with words

Go back over your drafts sentence by sentence and think of the words as building blocks. Question each one. Does it add value to the sentence? Is it as precise as it can be? Would rearranging the words make the sentence flow more smoothly?

Bottom line

The key element in each of these tips is attention, which is another way of thinking about visualization. Basketball players visualize that ball sliding directly through the center of the rim and their muscles record the sensation of putting it there. When you read, you are developing a sense of what good writing looks and sounds like. That’s the writers equivalent of knowing what the ball looks and feels like going into the basket.

Paying attention to your surroundings and visualizing great descriptions is the same as shooting mental baskets. Mental writing can be as valuable as moving your fingers.

Playing with words draws upon the insights you derive from reading. Slowing down and paying attention to what you have written allows you to exercise your new insights.

Jody Hedlund urges you to challenge yourself. So do I. Add to her challenge the challenge of becoming ever more aware and attentive.

Write now:  Read a great book, write a review of it, think of descriptions of your surroundings as you move through your day, and/or play with the words in a favorite story.

Photo credit: Max Barñers