✍️ From manuscript to pages

Preparing a manuscript that typesets cleanly

A manuscript should carry structure, not formatting. Everything you styled by hand gets thrown away and re-made by the typesetter — so mark what a thing is, not what it should look like, and the import comes through clean.

Chapter openings and scene breaks

Why chapters start on the right, what a sink is, why the first paragraph is not indented, and why a blank line is not a scene break in print — the conventions that make a book look like a book.

Widows, orphans and rivers: the faults readers feel

Three faults that never stop anyone reading and that no reader can name. What each one actually is, why justified text produces them, and which levers fix them and at what cost.

Putting images inside a book

An image inside a book is ink on paper at a fixed size, not a picture on a screen. Resolution, plates, bleed, the black-and-white problem, captions and alt text — and why images finish before the cover.

Bringing a book out of Google Docs, Pages or Scrivener

Every writing tool has its own idea of what a document is, and the way you leave it decides how much work the typesetter has to undo. The export that works, tool by tool, and the cleanup that matters more than any of them.

Punctuation that typesets badly

Some marks look correct in a word processor and wrong the moment the page is set. Quotes, dashes, ellipses and dialogue conventions decide whether a printed page reads as professional or as a document someone printed out.

Accents, symbols and characters that go missing

A character exists on the page only if the typeface contains it. A book that looks correct on screen can lose accented letters, symbols and dashes in print, and the failures are quiet enough to reach a printed proof.

The editing passes that have to happen before typesetting

A book is edited four times by four different kinds of attention, and the order is not a matter of taste. Three passes have to finish before anyone sets a page, and one can only happen after.

Beta readers: what to ask, and when

Most authors use beta readers badly — too early, too vaguely, and too few of them. The fix is timing, numbers, and questions about what the reader experienced rather than what they would change.

How long should a book be?

Word count is two things at once — a genre expectation readers and retailers carry into the store, and a production fact that sets your page count, your spine, your print cost and your margins. Both deserve a number.

The style sheet: how a series stays consistent

A style sheet is a running record of every decision that could have been made two ways. It is the least glamorous document in book production and the one that keeps book three agreeing with book one.

Tracked changes, comments, and what they do to a typesetter

A file with revisions still live contains both versions of every edited sentence, and what a converter reads is not what your screen shows. How to clear a manuscript properly, and how to check that you did.

The series bible, and what it saves you

The working file that keeps book four agreeing with book one — names, timeline, the rules of your world, and the half authors leave out: trim size, body face, cover typefaces, imprint, series numbering.

Co-authors and anthologies: one file out of many

Several writers send you several files, and Word will merge every inconsistency in them into one document without complaint. How to impose a house style before the text arrives, and the book-level decisions an anthology needs.

AI in the writing process, and what stores ask you to declare

Two questions get tangled together here: what you actually used, and what a store asks you to say about it. Separating them makes the subject manageable, and keeping a record makes the answer easy.

Backing up a manuscript, properly

Losing a draft is the only disaster in book production with no remedy. Every other mistake can be fixed with time or money. This is the twenty minutes of setup that makes the unfixable one impossible.

Proofreading your own work, and when to stop

You cannot see your own typos because you read what you meant rather than what is on the page. These are the techniques that defeat it, the faults no spell checker catches, and the signal that tells you to stop.

The nonfiction proposal, and why self-publishers should write one

A proposal is the document a publisher buys a nonfiction book from, and writing one forces every decision you would otherwise discover halfway through the draft. Here is what goes in it, and what each part is worth to you.

The kinds of editing, and which one you need

Authors ask for "an edit" and get quotes that do not resemble each other, because the word covers four separate jobs. Here is what each changes, in what order, and how to tell which one you need.

Working with an editor without wasting the money

An edit is usually the largest single cost in a self-published book, and the money is rarely lost on the edit itself. It goes on the wrong hire, undefined scope, and a report nobody acts on.

Outlining a nonfiction book so it holds together

Nonfiction fails structurally far more often than it fails at the sentence level, and structure is the one thing you can fix cheaply in advance. The promise, the shape, and a one-sentence test for every chapter.

Fact-checking your own book

Nonfiction, memoir and historical fiction all make factual claims, and a self-published author has no fact-checking department. What to check first, how to keep your sources as you write, and what to do when a claim will not verify.

Writing about real people

Memoir, family history and personal essay all involve people who did not choose to be in a book. This is the craft and ethics of it — composites, changed names, score-settling, and where the line into a lawyer's territory is.

Writing by dictation

Speaking a draft is a real working method — faster for some writers, the only comfortable one for others. What it does to your sentences, which mode to work in, and the cleanup pass that is not an edit.

Keeping track of your research

The record that makes fact-checking, citation and permissions possible later. What to capture at the moment you use a fact, why reconstructing sources afterward costs many times more, and the smallest system you will still be using in month six.

Planning a series that holds together

A series runs two stories at once — the one that finishes in this book and the one that finishes in the last. How much to plan before book two, what the expanding trilogy is a symptom of, and how readers who start in the middle get oriented.

Having your book translated

Commissioning a translation is a full production cost paid up front, in a market whose reviews you cannot read. How to decide whether to do it, how to find a translator, and how to judge work in a language you do not speak.

Turning an idea into a book you can write

An idea is a situation; a book is a sequence of events with consequences. The distance between them is where most first novels stall. The minimum plan that gets you writing, and the test that catches a dead middle.

Writing a book from interviews

Oral history, biography, family history and most business books are built from what other people said out loud. This is the preparation, the ground rules, the room itself, the transcript, and the ethics of tidying a quote.

Knowing when a draft is finished

Two failure modes — revising a book forever, and sending it out because you are sick of it. What "finished" means at each stage, the tests that tell them apart, and why the words going final is a production boundary.