Formatting Advice

How to Standardize the Punctuation in a Manuscript Before Submitting or Formatting Your Book

In a previous post, I showed you how to Remove The Extra Sections, Breaks, and Spaces Before Submitting or Formatting Your Book. This is not the only messy situation you might encounter in your manuscript. Your punctuation can be just as inconsistent, which causes major issues when formatting your book. Plus, your book looks sloppy, and sloppy books get bad reviews. Below is an example of inconsistent punctuation. Forgive my pathetic use of ellipsis and … Read more

Manuscripts Are A Dirty Business: Remove The Extra Sections, Breaks, and Spaces Before Submitting or Formatting Your Book

Let’s face facts. It’s hard enough to write a book, let alone keep the manuscript file clean. Eventually you find yourself with an edited book that you want to submit to agents or self-publish, but there’s all kinds of extra line breaks, spaces, tabs and other inconsistencies that make your manuscript look like a giant mess. Sure, you can turn it over to a book formatter, but the up front work to clean up the … Read more

Missing Fonts While Placing Text in Adobe InDesign: Resolve the Issue by Changing the Default Font

The missing fonts issue in InDesign, which I originally encountered while placing text from an external document file, is a well known problem, or possibly it works as designed, although poorly if you ask me. Regardless, and as annoying as it is, there is a quick fix. I mainly use a Window’s machine, so the instructions below are for that operating system. The Problem of Missing Fonts in InDesign Per my opening complaint, does the … Read more

Got EPUB and Paper Book Formatting Questions? ArmLin House Can Help

From the very beginning of self-publishing, formatting books has been one of my favorite things to do…like a hobby. I first learned the eBook process by writing the HTML and XML that encompass a book you can read on an eReader. After working in tech jobs for the early part of my career, it was a given that I’d delve deep into the guts of an eBook before learning any other method or tool to … Read more