Preparing Your Manuscript

How to prepare your manuscript before you upload it

Once you sign your contract, you need to:

• Lay out your manuscript in a specific way to prepare it for the Design stage.
• Make sure your style is consistent with your own preferences, and our house style.

Before you do any of this make sure your manuscript is as good as it can possibly be!

How to lay out your manuscript

In order to make the design process efficient we need you to format your manuscript in a very specific way, and send it to us as a Word file.

Your manuscript needs to be in Word’s Normal Style. Here’s how to do it.

Make sure your Normal default document style is set correctly.

For newer versions of Word click “Home” at the top left.

In the Styles section of the toolbar, right-click Normal and then Modify.

This will show you the default font, size and color. Set these as required (12pt, Times New Roman, black).

We need text without Paragraph Indents When a Word doc is fed into InDesign (the program the designer uses), InDesign looks for “returns” and puts in an indent automatically. Your paragraphs must have no indents in them! To make sure of this, click Format then Paragraph

To make sure there is no indentation on a paragraph, make sure none in the Special box is selected and Line spacing is single and there is 0pt Spacing Before and After

1. “Normalise” your text.

Now your default style in Word is correct select all your text and make sure it is in the Normal style.

• Select all of your text by pressing CTRL/(CMD on Mac) +A.
• Click Normal text from your option bar up above.

Note! This process will change the formatting on your document, formatting (what was centered may become left-justified or your italics may disappear, for example, as well as other changes) so be sure to carefully re-apply necessary elements.

1. In the rare occasion you might need to indent (like a piece of text for a long quote) then use the ruler bar at the top of the page.

Select the text you wish to indent using the mouse, then slide the bottom manual indent indicator across to where you want it (that is the bit that looks like an inverted pyramid).

1. Check the formatting in your document THOROUGHLY

After you do the above, you will need to go through and re-check the formatting.

Make sure everything is Normal text and make the font sizes, line spacing and text justification consistent. If you find you change the normal text and suddenly Word labels it something other than normal text, then it means you didn’t successfully disable Word’s nasty auto-format features.

The basic manuscript layout rules

Keep the layout simple as follows:

• Do not try to design your book in the Word file! The Designer will do this when making the proofs.
• Do not worry about page numbering.
• Do make sure your entire manuscript is in Word’s normal style (see instructions below)
• Do use Times New Roman, 12pt for text, 14pt for headings, single spacing.
• The Designer will choose an appropriate font at the Proofs stage. If you have a specific font in mind for the finished book, please send a note to your editor.
• Don’t use grey or coloured text. You can have any colour so long as it is black.
• Don’t use double spaces after full stops and after any punctuation like full stops, colons etc. In fact, don’t use double spaces anywhere.
• Do left justify your text.
• Don’t underline text. To add emphasis, use bold or italics.
• Don’t use automatic hyphenation; use hyphens only when they are part of a word.
• Do use a carriage return at the end of paragraphs.
• Do not use a carriage return at the end of lines. If you do that, then someone has to take them all out again. This is possibly the most important point of all, and the most expensive to remedy.
• Do not indent paragraphs as the design program will register the carriage return and do this automatically.
• Do not add an extra space between paragraphs; if you wish to denote a change of subject please use a line of three asterisks.
• Do use the Page Break feature when starting a new chapter etc.
• Do not use multiple returns to start a new page.
• Don’t use the space or the tab key to indent text. Use the ruler bar. The space bar makes different size spaces depending on the other letters in the line of text.
• Don’t indent or tab new lines (turnovers).
• Don’t produce tables of more than 5 columns width (do not use them at all unless absolutely essential).
• Don’t use more than five line breaks to separate text. This creates blank pages in most reading devices.
• Do not use the automated footnote feature. All footnotes must be gathered together as manual endnotes. These can cause the ebook conversion to fail! See Footnotes below.
• Do add a blank line before and after indented quotes. The design program does not pick up indented quotes automatically, they have to be done manually, and this will help show the designer where the quote is in the text.
• Do insert a blank line before subheadings.
• If you want a blank line or two) hit the “return” or “enter” key twice and add “ZZZ Insert X Blank Lines”. Be sparing in your use of white space. Too much of it can end up looking like a printing error.
• Don’t be inconsistent, especially with things like using the numeral 0 and the capital O, and the numeral 1 and the letter I. Inconsistencies like this cannot be picked up on a global “search and replace” and have to be corrected individually.
• Don’t use “macros.” This is a series of Word commands and instructions that you group together as a single command to accomplish a task automatically.
• Do not add images to the Word document. Images must be uploaded separately and their place in the manuscript marked with zzz. See APPENDICES/Illustrations, diagrams, photos for instructions.
• Do not put in double spaces between paragraphs where the subject changes (they create too many problems, particularly at the top and bottom of pages, and are too easily seen as errors.) Either change the text to avoid the need for them, or put in asterisks, or a subheading.
• Do not include links to book retail sites in your manuscript. If the front-matter or end-matter contain a link to a website that references books for sale other than through Apple, the book is rejected for sale on their platform. If you add a link to your book or Author Page on Amazon, it will be rejected. If there is a link to a webpage that appears to sell books, it will be rejected.
• Do use accents and special characters from the “Symbols” option in your word-processing program.
• Do use en rules for ranges and em rules for a dash in the text.
• Do supply the font for the typesetter if you use mathematical symbols in the text. There are so many different ones around it is better for all if we use yours.

House style

Our feeling is that it’s best to stick with your preferred style, and confine copyediting to ironing out clear grammatical mistakes and making it consistent.

However, we do have a “loose” house style, which we set out below, and which our editors will work towards unless you tell us otherwise.

Please check that you are happy with this style! We cannot change your manuscript back after editing.

Never assume that the Copyeditor or Designer will understand what you want unless you spell it out clearly.

There is an Appendix on more detailed questions of House Style.

Spelling

Because we publish in both markets, UK or US/International spelling is the single main issue in styling. On the whole, we prefer to publish with British English spelling.

Help! I don’t know whether to format my manuscript with American or British English spelling. Which one should I choose?

The answer is simple, British English.

Why Crystal Peake prefers British spelling.

Since we are located in the United Kingdom we would prefer our books to use the British English language. Books are normally printed in British English in the UK, as well as New Zealand, Australia and Canada.

Some basic tips on British English spelling

• Use “ise” rather than “ize” where possible i.e. “recognise” and “realise,” but “advertise.”
• Examples of American spelling that differs to UK:
• Acknowledgments, aging, analyze, behavior, center, defense, emphasize, fulfill, insure, neighbor, baptize, baptized, baptism, favor, judgment, leveled, no one, practice, program, recognize, rumor, savior, splendor, traveler, worshiper, worshiped etc.
• The issue, of course, is broader than just spelling. It extends to punctuation, words (“kerb” or “curb,” “bonnet” or “hood”—hundreds of them), idioms, abbreviations, etc.
• Please bear in mind that there is often no one single correct way to spell a word. For instance, “yogurt” outstrips “yoghurt” on Google by three to two, with “yogurt” being the norm in the USA, “yoghurt” more common in the UK though both are used, and both used in Canada, along with “yogourt.”
• Invest in an British dictionary, such as Collins English Dictionary.

Some basic tips on British grammar

When we use British spelling we also adopt British grammar, which most noticeably crops up in whether quotation marks come inside a full stop or outside it.

• • • UK books tend to use single inverted commas.
    • US use tend to use double inverted commas.
    • This has been changing in recent years, with the big sellers in the UK increasingly coming out with double inverted commas. To appease American readers.
    • So, we tend to use that as our house style.

House Style: Your book broken down, beginning to end, section to section.

Please find the house style here.