Self-publish a friend's novel using MS Word?
August 10, 2010 11:59 PM   Subscribe

My friend wrote a novel and is having trouble getting it published. I'd like to make a print copy of it for her on Lulu but I'm having trouble figuring out how to layout the type correctly. Also, I have never done this before. Help a type n00b do something nice for a friend.

I've scoured Ask Mefi's previously links, most notably here. I don't think Scribus or Tex software is an option for me as the learning curve is way too steep. I've done what I think is a pretty good mock up on MS Word so far.

Here's a screenshot.

So far the specs I have are:

6x9
Font - Times
Tabs - 0.25
Top - 1
Bottom - 1
Inside Margin - 0.75
Outside Margin - 1
Header - 0.5
Footer - 0.5
Mirror Margins is on
Gutter - 0.0

It's 354 pages more or less. I'm having trouble figuring out how to align the text at the end of the sentences so that blocks of text look square rather than some jumbled mess.

Is there anything that I should be doing that I'm not doing that I should be doing?

Any tips or advice for a guy who just barely gets MS Word to work without breaking the computer in half?

Thanks hivemind.
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth to Media & Arts (15 answers total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm having trouble figuring out how to align the text at the end of the sentences so that blocks of text look square rather than some jumbled mess.
You mean you want the text 'justified'?
posted by missmagenta at 12:55 AM on August 11, 2010


Best answer: I'm having trouble figuring out how to align the text at the end of the sentences so that blocks of text look square rather than some jumbled mess.

I think the key term you're looking for is "full justification". Here is a little tutorial on how to fully-justify text in Word 2007. Keep in mind that sometimes you can get weird results like rivers of whitespace so you should eyeball each page to makes sure everything looks nice.
posted by mhum at 1:00 AM on August 11, 2010


Response by poster: You mean you want the text 'justified'?

Yeppers! I had toyed with this earlier but got weird results. I found a site that recommended turning on "Do full justification like Word Perfect 6.x" and I turned that on. It lowered the page count considerably. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing but it the document does look better now. I wish I could get rid of the dangling words at the end of sentences that take up a whole line. I have several instances where "it" is the only thing on a line. Thanks so far!
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 1:15 AM on August 11, 2010


Those are called orphans; I think there is a check box for "widow and orphan control" under paragraphs, but I might be wrong.
posted by wayland at 1:21 AM on August 11, 2010


Response by poster: Nope. You're right. Just found it. Unfortunately there are still one or two orphaned "it"s that I can't seem to figure out how to deal with.
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 1:28 AM on August 11, 2010


Unfortunately there are still one or two orphaned "it"s that I can't seem to figure out how to deal with.
Rewrite. Or if that's not possible, insert a soft-return (usually shift-return) at the previous word. That'll turn the word so that the last line now has two words on it, at the expense of increasing the word spacing on the previous line.
posted by bonaldi at 3:22 AM on August 11, 2010


Another option - If you want to get into kerning for your book, you can decrease the spacing by a little bit on those dangling lines to cut down the line width.

To get to Font Control, hit CONTROL-D. (Or in the Home tab, Font section, click on the Font control button to bring up that section.) From there,you can tighten up a line or two and get rid of that dangling line by reducing the spacing between characters. When using spacing control, highlight just the area of text that you want to tighten, then adjust.
posted by lampshade at 3:26 AM on August 11, 2010


If you want to get pretty, professional-looking output for a novel, the path of least resistance is to just save everything as plain text and process it using LaTeX.

Looks like you have already heard rumors of the horribly steep learning curve of the TeX family, but the thing is your document is mostly text, right? You don't have any fancy figures, tables, equations, numbered lists or anything like that. If you use fancy new XeTeX instead of plain old LaTeX you even get TrueType fonts working mostly out of the box. In that case, 95% of what you need is covered by the following commands:
\begin{document}[book]
\usepackage[cm-default]{fontspec}
\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Times New Roman}

\title{My friend's novel}
\author{My Friend}
\date{August 2010}

\begin{document}
\maketitle

\chapter*{Preface}

This is an awesome novel, written by my friend and typeset by me using the magic of \TeX.

\chapter{The First Chapter}

[LOTS OF TEXT GOES HERE]

\end{document}

An experienced LaTeX user could probably produce a kick-ass looking PDF out of your word files in a couple of hours. It might take you a couple of days, but you won't have to worry about justification, hyphenation, orphans or anything like that.
posted by Dr Dracator at 3:51 AM on August 11, 2010


Best answer: Does your friend know you're doing this? (I can't tell from your question, sorry.)

If she hopes to have the book commercially published some day, both she and you need to be aware that publishing it on Lulu can potentially create problems. You need to make sure you set the book to private, and that you don't give it an ISBN, for starters. There may be other pitfalls, as well -- I'm not an expert, just somebody who's been following the publishing industry for a few years.

This thread at Absolute Write is a good place to start. Note that at some commentators have said that Lulu is selling their books on Amazon even without an ISBN, and books with at least one copy sold cannot be deleted from the server, only retired. Is your friend comfortable with the idea that her work, in its current form, will always be on Lulu's servers? Is she okay with risking her first publishing rights to have a copy in hand? Once your first publishing rights are gone, you cannot get them back again, and it's much harder to get a publisher interested without them.

Please research this carefully, and don't do it at all if your friend's not fully aware of the risks. I know you're trying to make a kind gesture, but if you mess up her first publishing rights, you're potentially throwing her work away.

As somebody who hopes to be published by a commercial publisher one day, I wouldn't do this with my work, for what it's worth. The risk may be low but it's not insignificant. Cheers.
posted by Georgina at 4:21 AM on August 11, 2010 [13 favorites]


For the single word on a line, you need a non-breaking space. Delete the space between the last two words, and then press Ctrl+Shift+Space to insert a non-breaking space. This is a better solution than the soft return (Ctrl+Enter) because as the text moves around from page to page while you are formatting, a soft return will always be there (and maybe it shouldn't anymore, as the text rolls), but a non-breaking space will always just keep the two words together. So, with a non-breaking space, if it turns out that the last word of the sentence is no longer by itself, it still works. With a soft return, it will always
be there.
Does that make sense?
posted by Houstonian at 5:33 AM on August 11, 2010


Just want to second Georgina's concerns, make sure your friend knows about this and is aware of the risks. Publishers are often not interested in books that have already been technically published.
posted by naju at 7:28 AM on August 11, 2010 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: Just want to second Georgina's concerns, make sure your friend knows about this and is aware of the risks. Publishers are often not interested in books that have already been technically published.

Ah crap. I'll look into this. Thanks everybody.

Any suggestions where I can just get this printed? I just want to have a copy made for her, not publish anything.
posted by PostIronyIsNotaMyth at 9:16 AM on August 11, 2010


I used to use Lulu, and have moved to Blurb because of the issues Georgina has raised.
posted by ocherdraco at 9:48 AM on August 11, 2010


a non-breaking space will always just keep the two words together
that's possibly worse than the soft return, in some situations. If the text reflows, you can end up with some hugely stretched word spacing because a long word that would fit has been forced down a line. That's worse because it's slightly more subtle than a moved soft return, which leaps out.

Basically, there is no substitute for eyeballing every single page before press. Good typesetting shows.
posted by bonaldi at 12:52 PM on August 11, 2010


Any suggestions where I can just get this printed? I just want to have a copy made for her, not publish anything.

You can get an decent results with a good laser printer, or at your local print shop, but that is not the point. What you need to do to turn a print-out into a book (and an excellent gift) is to get it bound by a good craftsman.

Find a bookbinder in your area (they probably keep busy doing graduate theses and things like that, so a university is a good starting place) and talk to them before printing anything: They will tell you what you need to do about things like margins and gutters, what paper to use and so on.
posted by Dr Dracator at 1:35 PM on August 11, 2010


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