Publish It Today — Part 1: The Editorial Process

This section will focus on basic word processing which is no where near the entire editorial process. Nothing about proof reading, copy editing, grammar, or getting ISBN numbers. This is about word processing and how to structure the manuscript so that the next steps of the processes work smoothly.

A book has a structure. This structure needs to be identified early and captured in the word processing document using style sheets (ideally) or at the very least identifiable consistent formatting of the word processing document(s). Since editorial is responsible for every part of a book it is necessary to outline all of the parts of the book.

Here is a rather typical list of the parts of a book.

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Forward/Intro
  • Section
    • Chapter
    • Chapter
  • Section
    • Chapter
    • Chapter
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Index
• Colophon

Any book can have additional sections (list of illustrations, bibliorgraphy, etc.) and many books leave a few of these sections out. But the first thing that you should notice about the list is that each of these parts will start on a new page. The parts up to the Dedication is called front matter, and the parts starting with Acknowledgements is called back matter.

The typical editorial work flow deals with the Sections and Chapters first and that material is used to generate some of the other parts of the book–the page numbers for the Table of Contents for instance can only be filled in after the book is paginated.

First we need to design a set of styles that captures the basic hierarchy of the book. Then we are going to concentrate on the Sections and Chapters in our word processing and then build out from there. Fortunately there are some standards that we can rely on to help us with the structure. These are hooks that we use to produce the printer ready pdf files, the web site, the Kindle version, and the ePub version.

You can name your styles as you create them, but I recommend that you use standard styles to define the structure. This is how the styles would go to give your book its structure.

• Heading 1
  • Heading 2
    • Heading 3

Most of the editorial work takes place within Heading 2 (Sections) and Heading 3 (Chapters). If your book contains Subsections those would be Heading 4.

Once the headings are set up there are a few very simple rules to follow with your word processing. It is mostly a matter of No.

• No blank lines
• No double spaces
• No tabs or spaces at the beginning of paragraphs
• No spaces in front of returns

Once you are into the paragraphs that make up the chapters you would use the “ruler” or paragraph formatting to make indents, centered paragraphs, bylines (flush right) and anything that effects an entire paragraph.

Inside many paragraphs there may be individual words of phrases that are either italic, bold, or bold italic. Use the bold and italic buttons in your word processor to make these typographic additions.

Using these simple rules will allow a completed manuscript to flow into whatever publishing platform comes next with the least amount of effort.