If you’ve spent much time around personal computing over the past 40 years, you have never stop hearing about formatting. Formatting floppies, formatting hard disks, formatting pictures, formatting documents, formatting books.
What is formatting?
Consider the cupcake. A cupcake is formatted batter. I bet you didn’t see that coming. Stick with me here. You’re consulting your favorite cookbook or recipe blog looking for something to make as a snack and you come across a recipe that sounds delicious and will only use ingredients you already have, including some fresh blueberries that need to be used up soon or, you know. The recipe is for a blueberry quick bread or a loaf pan cake. But you had your heart set on cupcakes. Solution? You re-format the recipe and just spoon the batter into cupcake molds instead of pouring it all into a loaf pan. Reformatting. Changing the way you package the goodness.
Your writing goodness starts out in a word processor. Formatted so it looks the way you think it should look so you can read it comfortably, like the way a book should look — or to print it out to read or for someone else to read. Like a book. Except on 8 1/2 x 11 paper. Except for a one-page-at-a-time screen reader rather than a 2-page spread like a book. Different from a book. This means your writing needs to be re-formatted to make it look like a book, or actually, become a book.
Formatted for a word processor, and depending on your skill level with that word processor, you may have used tabs for indents, tabs and/or spaces for centering, carriage return characters to provide spacing between paragraphs and to start a new page, etc. To re-format a document so it will be print-ready can take you hours, or many hours, of learning, trial and error, and frustration. I know.
Why You Should Care about formatting
Formatting is really important and may make the difference between getting your book published at all. And you thought it was only about the writing. Some publishers will not accept a manuscript for consideration unless it conforms to their version how a document must be formatted—their own Standard Document Format. I’m going to talk about SDFs in a separate post, but understand that there isn’t just one standard.
Most writers are self-publishing these days. Many, after fooling around with formatting themselves and failing repeatedly to get their manuscript uploads accepted by a print-on-demand vendor’s quality checks, decide that maintaining their sanity is the better part of self-publishing, will hire a professional designer/formatter to help. Professional book designers are graphic artists who’ve been to book design school. They are skilled in the art and craft of book design. They can make a beautiful book out of your document—one that will pass the quality checks that Amazon KDP or any other print-on-demand service will require. In the scheme of things, it’s not expensive to hire a pro. Search “freelance book designers” to start searching.
So, yes, you should care about formatting because it is part of making a quality book that will make you proud. Sort of like those cupcakes.
FOr More Information
- Touchwood Press Publishing Services
- Interact with and hire a book formatter at Reedsy.com, Upwork.com, Fiverr.com or wherever fine formatters are available.