BookBaby's team of professional book designers can format your manuscript document into a great-looking, distraction-free, highly readable book interior. We know what it takes to make a book, and we guarantee you'll be happy with your results.
However, there are some things you'll want to keep in mind in order to have a smooth design process and ensure your designer has everything they need to properly format your book. Please review the below instructions so you can provide us with a clean, consistent manuscript document.
Setting Up Your Manuscript
- We'll need one single document that contains your entire manuscript. Please combine all sections/chapters and frontmatter into one document in the order you would like for them to appear.
- Please place your images and captions in your text document.
- Only use hard returns at the end of paragraphs. Using the return (enter) key in the middle of a paragraph or sentence will cause errors when formatting. Sometimes authors put a return in the middle of a sentence because they want the line to break in a certain place in their document. But your book will likely be a different page size with different fonts and spacing, so you shouldn't worry about that sort of thing until after your initial formatting is complete.
- Please use basic fonts in your document, such as Times New Roman and Arial. And please keep font use consistent. For example, all of your chapter titles should be in the same font and font size. If you have specific fonts you would like us to use, you can let us know in the design guide in your project center. But your BookBaby designer has the experience and expertise to select the right fonts for your book.
- Interior Text Formatting is not an editorial service. Please be sure that your document is the absolute, fully edited, final draft. We will be happy to make any necessary editorial changes after you receive your initial design proof. However, any text, punctuation or grammar edits will incur additional fees.
Correcting Issues in Your Manuscript
After you've placed your order, but before moving onto the design phase, your project will reviewed by one of our design preflight specialists. During this process, your design survey, manuscript and image files go through a rigorous and detailed inspection to ensure they are ready to be passed on to our design team.
The following is a list of the most common reasons why a project is delayed and how to address them. (Note: for many of these fixes, you will need to turn on Invisible Characters in Word. You can find instructions for that here.)
Removing Unintentional Hard Returns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POi4MRaKf-U
Converting Tabbed Columns into a Table
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzpwvhYn_qY
How to Address Call Out Text in Your Manuscript
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjRrTandKbU
How to Reposition your Photo Captions in Word
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPILCqVTdwk
How to Remove Live Page Numbers and Running Headers from Your Manuscript
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgmHdJxpOLg
Resolving Editor Comments From Your Manuscript
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ye6Y4Lszpc
Compressing a Multi-Image File in Word