Since I’m publishing a print version as well as an ebook of the novel, formatting became a big part of the lead-up to publish. Adobe InDesign is the industry standard, and while I’ve had some experience with the program, it was brief and ages ago. In fact, the last time I had to work in a desktop publishing program had to be sometime in the late 90s. But–I am a perfectionist, and I wanted the best for my novel. So I swore my way through re-learning InDesign and trying to figure out how to format pages, chapter headers, page numbers, chapter titles for odd and even pages, and even something as simple as a page break. I knew that there were invisible return characters in my file but I couldn’t figure out how to view them.
Oh, sure, I could have used Word formatting and achieved basically the same thing, but Word is not a publishing program. It’s not remotely as flexible as a DTP, and the words “pre-press” and “Microsoft Word” don’t work well and play with each other. There’s no grid, no layout, no way to move objects around on a page in the fashion I learned as a desktopper. Word isn’t flexible enough to allow you to see that you need to add four points to your chapter title so that the text on the facing page aligns at the baseline with the text on the first page of a chapter with a left-facing page. (Did I mention I’m a former typesetter as well as a perfectionist?) Word won’t let you check the position of a centered chapter title with moveable grid rulers to make absolutely sure it’s centered. Word won’t give you printable crop marks so you can see physical galley proofs. Galley proofs with crop marks turn my manuscript into an actual pre-press book. They are the end of a long process.
Besides, I still have the skills. Why not use them? I could probably make a nice extra income formatting other people’s novels for print. Not that I’m going to. Those days are done. I’m a writer now. The only formatting I do is mine.
Well, time to figure out the hows and whys of drop caps and the table of contents. I have a book to publish this week.