Formatting Matters

Beginning with a properly set up document will save you time and frustration later.

Today’s post brought to you by our deceptively long driveway and 5” of snow.

So, today I had a coaching client and we were looking at her manuscript, which is in MS Word. I used to be Team MS Word but have since converted to Team Google Docs because of the ability to link document together and do jump links, etc. That said, I work whatever way my author wants to work, and both active authors I have right now are Team Word.

One of the tools I lean on heavily regardless of the platform is the Table of Contents (TOC). In this case, we already had nailed down the framework and so she was in the process of filling up the different buckets (chapters) with content. That was good.

What was missing was a Table of Contents. A properly set up TOC provides you with a 30K foot view of the entire book so you can work the content back and forth.

For this to be effective, however, you have to use your headings and those headings need to be set up properly, which they never are. So we spent the bulk of our time today getting those tweaked so that she could just highlight the text and click the appropriate button on the tool bar.

I know this seems like a dumb thing but I’m telling you it makes a huge difference. It’s so much easier to look at two pages with three levels of descriptive headings and subheadings and identify where a block of content needs to move some place else or be removed all together.

The best thing you can do for yourself when writing a book is spend a few minutes getting your document set up correctly, including the “Normal” (MS Word) or “Normal Text” (Google Docs).

YouTube is full of tutorials on how to work with a TOC. Check it out. The time you invest in setting this up on the front end will save you a ton of time and frustration as you’re developing the book.

ID 99617183 © Stokkete | Dreamstime.com