By Colin Dunbar
Footnotes are common in many non-fiction books, and are notes or references found at the bottom of the page. You can add these as you write your book, or you can add them afterwards. Endnotes are found at the end of the book, listed consecutively.
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By Colin Dunbar
Text boxes can be added to a non-fiction book to add aesthetics, they can be used to help with the layout of your information on the page. You can also use the text wrapping option to have your body text flow around your text box.
Text boxes are useful for adding sidebar information in a non-fiction book. One word of caution though – don’t overdo it – too many text boxes can make it confusing for your reader.
Filed under Paper Book
By Colin Dunbar
Although graphic images will mainly be used in non-fiction books, you may want to add a graphic in a fictional book, e.g. a line illustration at the start of a chapter.
You can use graphics with many formats in your book. These include JPG, PNG, GIF, etc.
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By Colin Dunbar
In a non-fiction book, tables are an aid to making information and data easier to read. Columns can also be used to help with readability, although it’s not common to have columns in a book.
If you do have tables in your book, the use of color will make a table more appealing for your reader, and help with readability. But color printing can be expensive, and could make your book unviable. Instead, you can use shades of grey in your table; this will still make a plain table more appealing, but won’t raise the cost of your book.
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By Colin Dunbar
With your basic global settings done, we’ll now look at headings, headers and footers.
Headings are used to help your readers find their way around your book. They also help in letting your reader know what the paragraphs following the heading are about. They are especially useful in non-fiction books.
Headers and footers are used to show your reader where they are in your book, and also what page they are on (or where the page is they want to go to).
Filed under Paper Book
By Colin Dunbar
From here we start getting to the good stuff. You will now really begin to see your book taking shape as you format your book in Word.
If you have a fictional book, it’s not necessary to make the pagination changes. The Widow/Orphan control is selected by default, and that is suitable for fiction. If you have a non-fiction book, I recommend making the other changes as detailed below.
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By Colin Dunbar
Naturally, the quality of the content of your book is the number 1 priority. But when you format your book, the layout of your content, structure and readability is just as important as the content itself.
Readability is an interesting topic, and there are a number of readability formulas that can be used to test the readability of text. You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Readability.
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By Colin Dunbar
With our page size set, we continue with the global settings, and in this post we cover page layout and margins.
Open your saved Word document. If you didn’t save it, create a new document. I suggest you save your Word document as we’ll be adding formatting features, and it’ll be useful to do them all in the one document.
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Everything You Need to Format Your Book in Word
Everything You Need to Format Your Book in Word
